Bancroft Global Development

Bancroft Global Development is a Washington, D.C.-based private military company. It was founded as a land-mine clearing company by Michael Stock, an heir to the Kuhn, Loeb & Co. banking fortune, in 1999. It built rental properties for the World Bank and the International Development Law Organization in Afghanistan. It operates a military camp with a hotel in Mogadishu, Somalia, and it trains service members of the African Union Mission to Somalia in their fight against Al-Shabaab.

Overview
The company is headquartered in Washington, D.C. It also maintains a military camp in Mogadishu, with a hotel for foreign diplomats, journalists and charity workers known as International Campus. Its founder is Michael Stock and its executive director is Marc Frey.

The company receives payment from the African nations whose troops it trains, which in turn receive funding from the United States Department of State. As a result, The New York Times suggests that "the company’s real income has come from the United States government, albeit circuitously." By 2015, half of its funding in Somalia came from the United Nations Department of Peacekeeping Operations.

The company has a "sister company", Bancroft Global Investments, which invests in the "newly pacified countries and regions".

According to a Summer 2012 report by the United Nation's Monitoring Group on Somalia and Eritrea, the company is "very transparent" compared to other military contractors.

History
Bancroft Global Development was founded by Michael Stock, a graduate of Princeton University, a direct descendant of Lewis Strauss and the heir to the Kuhn, Loeb & Co. banking fortune, as a land-mine clearing company in 1999. From 2002 to 2004, it carried out mine-detecting operations in Afghanistan. It subsequently built military compounds in Kabul and Herat, with tenants like the World Bank and the International Development Law Organization. It also rented cars. From 2005 to 2013, the company made a profit of $32 million.

The company hired around 40 former service members from South Africa, France and Scandinavia as military trainers in 2011, around 100 in 2013, and 75-80 from 20 countries in 2015.

Bancroft established its sister company, Bancroft Global Investments, in 2011. It sold 18% to Michael Darby, a real estate developer.

By 2011, Bancroft had begun training members of the African Union Mission to Somalia, especially Burundi's National Defense Force and Uganda's People's Defence Force, in their fight against Al-Shabaab.

By 2016, the company trained Danab, a military unit within the National Intelligence and Security Agency, until those fighters were trained by United States Marine Corps at the Baledogle Airfield. Bancroft trainers and the Danab then went on missions together.