Lendahand.com: New partners after defaults – updated review for 2025
Lendahand at a glance
The star rating reflects my personal impression of the provider after investing with them since 2019.
| Category | Crowdfunded Loans, fixed return | |
| Country of origin | The Netherlands (offers are denominated in Euros or Dollars) | |
| Geographical focus | Sub-saharan Africa and Asia | |
| Minimum investment | €50 per project | |
| Terms | Interest: 5-8% Loan duration: 1-3 years | |
| Cost | None for investors. Lendahand takes a cut of the interest payments received by the investees or local partners, depending on the project. | |
| Internal Rate of Return (in EUR) | IRR of my own portfolio with the provider over the last 5 years: -2.70% | |
| Default rate | 1.56% (overall since founding, according to own disclosure) | |
| Referral programme | Both the inviter and the invited receive a €25 credit. If you don’t have a friend already investing with Lendahand, you can use my code when signing up to support this blog: TED9-PWGE-D2AH | |
| Investor Accessibility | Available to investors who are citizens of the European Union (residency is not enough) | |
| Similar offers | Trine (see Review) Abundance Investment (see Review) OnePlanetCrowd (Review coming soon) Energise Africa (operated by the same parent company as Lendahand.com) |
*including interest, fees and losses from defaults, as of Sept 2025. Please note that the IRR is merely intended to give you a real-life view of how an actual user’s portfolio (mine) developed over time. Yours could look better or worse, depending on the projects you choose.
How investing through Lendahand creates Impact
Lendahand.com is a Dutch platform for crowdfunded impact investing and not to be confused with lendahand.co.uk, also known as “Energise Africa”, although they are connected. Lendahand state their mission as “creating new jobs for companies in emerging countries and enabling people there to improve their access to basic needs. This way we want to alleviate poverty.”
Perhaps more even than other providers of products for impact investing, Lendahand appears to be a thoroughly social enterprise. They are also a certified B-Corp. Their primary goal is to create jobs in developing countries, ecological impact is often a nice plus. If you scroll through their list of active or upcoming projects, you will notice that this gives you the opportunity to invest in the tiniest of enterprises or local cooperatives. Projects also cover an impressive geographical range, with regular new projects from Central Asia or Latin America.
The social focus means you will find investments on offer that perhaps don’t tick all the boxes of sustainability. Greener-than-grass investors will probably hesitate to provide a Mongolian entrepreneur with the money to buy a new lorry for his rental business. But if development is your focus, why not go for this kind of loan – the lorry of the loan in question was to be used in constructing infrastructure.
Transparency creates trust
What I see as a big plus favouring Lendahand as your impact investing partner of choice is their transparency. The loan portfolio page provides you with a direct glance into their books – including the amount of “bad debt” they have. Bad debt are loans which will probably not be repaid for whatever reason. At the time of my last review, Lendahand had also still disclosed their own profit margin (3.28%), which I had rated very positively in terms of transparency. This time around, I couldn’t find this information anymore, so I assume they now follow common practice and don’t disclose their margin anymore. On the plus side, they now publish a short Impact Report with interesting figures and project videos.
Terms
Depending on loan type, interest rates are around 5-8%, with most projects at the lower end of this range. That’s a little low in comparison with other providers, but still considerably higher than at the time of my last review.
Loan durations (i.e. the time until your investment is paid back) are very short, ranging from 1-3 years. In the past, I have even seen investments as short as 6 months, which then fund a borrower’s inventory, e.g. a tailor’s purchase of fabric, rather than a big, long-term investment. This may be an advantage for you if you’re new to impact investing and don’t feel comfortable placing a long-term bet. It’s also a useful feature if you plan on using your money in the not too distant future and are just looking for a few percent of return in the meantime. However, it also means that you need to actively reinvest the money rather often, requiring extra effort.
Usability
Lendahand’s dashboard provides you with good insight into your portfolio. Pie charts show your exposure to both individual countries and counterparties, i.e. Local Partners and direct investees. That’s useful if you want to spread your loans over several counterparties or countries.
You also get an idea about the impact your investments generate under “My Investments”. Each project will list its impact on job creation, CO2 reduction or the lives you improved.
Despite some improvements, the user interface is still far from perfect. For instance, they have not figured out a good way to show both your outstanding EUR and USD loans in a single figure, which makes knowing how much you have now invested in total a bit cumbersome.
Another quirk I noticed is that Lendahand offers its website in 25 languages and automatically matches your device’s system language. But I recommend using the site in English or Dutch, because the translations are terrible.
My experience with Lendahand
I have been invested with Lendahand since 2018 and my experience has been positive for the first several years. Returns were modest, but there were also no defaults. Between 2022 and 2024, however, defaults suddenly skyrocketed to over 10% for a variety of reasons, but especially with direct investments that skipped local partners. Several of my investments were written down (i.e., Lendahand expected only partial repayment) or compeletely written off, which dragged my overall returns into the red. According to their communications, they have changed the strategy successfully: In a significant change from my last post about them, Lendahand now exclusively sources projects through “Local Partners”. These are local banks which acquire and evaluate potential borrowers. Lendahand does no longer directly invest in projects, since the risks of doing so turned out to be too great. With no defaults since Q2 2024, this seems to be working out, see screenshot below.
While my confidence in Lendahand is shaken, the strategy change and social impact would be enough for me to continue to invest, albeit at a lower scale. Unfortunately, Lendahand.com does not anymore accept investors with non-EU passports for regulatory reasons and as it turns out, EU residency is not enough. As such, I’m now waiting for the final repayments of my investments in 2026 and have already turned to trying out other platforms, such as Enerfip and Lita.co (reviews to follow soon!).
Conclusion: Pros and Cons of Lendahand.com
Assuming that their new risk strategy works out as intended, Lendahand.com can be a great way to invest in social impact around the world. Considering my own recent experience, I however advise against investing too much at once. Keep your investment low for a year or two and start with short-term projects before you ramp it up.
- 💚 High transparency about their portfolio’s performance and structure creates trust
- 💚 Impact investing in the truest sense of the word. Most borrowers would probably struggle to receive funds through other channels, or at much higher cost
- 💚 Very broad investment opportunities. Their ability to source projects from all parts of the world helps to diversify against country-specific risks
- 💚/🚫 Limited risk through their system of local partners, although the track record of defaults is very shaky.
- 🚫 Slightly lower than usual returns for most investments. Some projects offer higher returns, but at the cost of higher risk.
- 🚫 Somewhat dated interface. The platform is mostly intuitive, but lacks polishing. It’s not as fluid to use as most of its competitors and the translations other than English and Dutch are terrible.
If you’re now motivated to invest in projects with a social impact through Lendahand, ensure to enter the referral code when signing up to get a €25 sign-up credit: TED9-PWGE-D2AH
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