Impact Investing Musings

In the following episodes, we bring you insights from this year’s AVPN Global Conference (“GC2025”), held September 9-11 in Hong Kong. There will be episodes highlighting thought leadership from prominent speakers. This includes snippets from speeches and special features of our speakers on Impact Investing Day (September 10).

In this episode, we feature Elizabeth Boggs Davidsen, CEO of GSG Impact, a global network of national partners advancing the infrastructure, incentives, and policy frameworks needed to build impact economies. With 43 national partners across 48 countries and more than half located in emerging markets, GSG Impact is helping countries embed impact into policy, business practice, and investment decision-making.

Elizabeth’s past experience in development finance spans the Inter-American Development Bank, where she led impact investing portfolios, in the United Nations Development Programme, leading the SDG Impact initiative, and the US International Development Finance Corporation, leading policy. She joined GSG Impact as CEO in 2024, bringing deep expertise in blended finance and creating policy frameworks to unlock institutional capital for impact investments.

From her sharing, she emphasises how key policy wins can unlock vast amounts of impact capital.

Elizabeth reflects on:

• How can policy and regulatory reforms unlock domestic capital - including pensions, insurers, and sovereign wealth - for impact?
• What incentive structures, disclosure standards, and enabling conditions are needed to direct more of Asia’s domestic assets toward impact?
• How can strong local leadership, backed by global-to-local learning, help countries build stronger impact economies and more effective national impact investing organisations?

In the following episodes, we bring you insights from this year’s AVPN Global Conference (“GC2025”), held September 9-11 in Hong Kong. There will be episodes highlighting thought leadership from prominent speakers. This includes snippets from speeches and special features of our speakers on Impact Investing Day (September 10).

In this episode, Dato’ Sri Abdul Rasheed Ghaffour, Governor of Bank Negara Malaysia, shares his keynote on “Catalysing Asia’s Finance for People and Planet”. He reflects on where Asia stands in the Asian Century and what it will take for the region to build prosperity “without regret” - growth that is inclusive, resilient, and sustainable. Drawing on ASEAN’s momentum, the region’s deep pools of long-term and Islamic capital, and the need for stronger ecosystems and enabling platforms, he outlines how Asia can mobilise finance to meet today’s development and climate challenges.

Listeners will gain insights into:

• How Asia’s economic gravity is shifting east, and why ASEAN is becoming a resilient and strategic growth engine
• Why Asia’s long-term capital - pension systems, sovereign wealth, and Islamic finance - offers a strong foundation for financing sustainable development
• How inclusive productivity platforms and ecosystem-based approaches can help scale impact across the region

The Ford Foundation is one of the world’s largest private philanthropic institutions, with more than 80 years of experience advancing social justice and reducing inequality globally. Through its pioneering Mission-Related Investments (MRI) strategy, the Foundation has committed a substantial portion of its endowment - starting with $1 billion - to investments that align financial discipline with its core impact mission - signaling to peers that endowments can harness the power beyond traditional grants to maximise impact.

In this episode, the people who have been driving this very work from the inside, Roy Swan, Head of Mission Investments, and Christine Looney, Deputy Director of Mission Investments, share insights from their front row seats through the decades.

Listeners will gain insights into:

• Roy and Christine’s personal journey applying their years in traditional finance to shift market fundamentals in the endowment world.
• The process inside Ford: how they challenged industry norms by redefining traditional capital in its use for impact investing, paving the way for others to explore similar paths.
• How asset owners can measure success without “analysis paralysis,” by simplifying impact reporting.

In the following episodes, we bring you insights from this year’s AVPN Global Conference (“GC2025”), held September 9-11 in Hong Kong. There will be episodes highlighting thought leadership from prominent speakers. This includes snippets from speeches, and special features of our speakers on Impact Investing Day (September 10).

Impact investing is entering a new era - one where Asia is no longer following global trends but actively shaping them.

In this episode, we hear from Vineet Rai, Founder & Vice Chairman of the Aavishkaar Group. Founded in 2001, Aavishkaar Group has grown to $1.2 billion in assets under management as an all-rounded impact investing platform today. They continue their influence as a global pioneer in impact investing, with a focus on microfinance, MSMEs, early/growth stage equity, credit, alongside ecosystem building and advisory across Asia and Africa. From his sharing, we have the opportunity to hear insights from a two-decade journey building one of the most comprehensive impact ecosystems in the Global South.

Vineet reflects on:

• How impact investing has evolved over two decades, and why intent and context - beyond outcomes - differentiate it from mainstream capital?
• Why is Asia becoming a major source of impact capital, with local resources from India, China, Singapore, Japan, and the Middle East reshaping the ecosystem?
• What it takes to scale impact in emerging markets - from ecosystem building to accepting unpredictable returns - and Aavishkaar's vision to reach $7 billion AUM by 2035?

In the following episodes, we bring you insights from this year’s AVPN Global Conference (“GC2025”), held September 9-11 in Hong Kong. There will be episodes highlighting thought leadership from prominent speakers. This includes snippets from speeches, and special features of our speakers on Impact Investing Day (September 10).

Impact investing is entering a new era - one where Asia is no longer following global trends but actively shaping them.

In this episode, Dr. Ma Jun, M.H., Chairman and President of Hong Kong Green Finance Association (HKGFA) and Chairman of the Capacity-building Alliance of Sustainable Investment (CASI), provides a systems perspective of what can shape Asia’s impact investing landscape. Particularly, he draws on his decades of leadership in sustainable finance for application in the impact investing context.

He draws from his experiences across the International Monetary Fund, World Bank, Deutsche Bank, and later, as Chief Economist of the People's Bank of China (PBC). He contributed through his work developing China’s green finance guidelines, and later assumed international roles in developing G20 transitional finance frameworks.

From his sharing, it is clear that a strong market infrastructure is key to the acceleration of sustainable development.

Listeners will gain insights into:

• How sustainable finance in Asia has evolved from early experimentation to a more advanced and structured ecosystem, and how the same can and ought to happen for impact investing.
• Why clear taxonomies and disclosure standards are essential to avoid impact-washing and enable credible impact investing.
• How incentives and stronger coordination - from governments, philanthropists, and financial institutions - can crowd in private capital and build impact-investing frameworks.

Whether you're an investor, policymaker, corporate leader, or ecosystem builder, this episode offers a practical and structured overview of what it will take to develop Asia’s next-generation impact investing ecosystem.

In the following episodes, we bring you insights from this year’s AVPN Global Conference (“GC2025”), held September 9-11 in Hong Kong. There will be episodes highlighting thought leadership from prominent speakers. This includes snippets from speeches and special features of our speakers on Impact Investing Day (September 10).

Impact investing is entering a new era - one where Asia is no longer following global trends but actively shaping them.

In this episode, Vikas Arora, Chief of Impact Investing and Blended Finance at AVPN, unpacks the forces transforming Asia’s impact landscape through his opening speech at this year’s AVPN Global Conference. Drawing on his decades of leadership in global finance and his work supporting AVPN’s 700+ members, Vikas explains how key shifts in the Asian ecosystem are accelerating sustainable development across the region.

Listeners will gain insights into:

• How Asia is moving from niche experimentation to global leadership in impact investing
• What innovative models - from transition bonds to green sukuk to pay-for-success instruments - teach us about scaling capital for impact
• How AVPN is enabling capital owners, family offices, governments, and philanthropists to collaborate more effectively

Whether you’re an investor, policymaker, corporate leader, or ecosystem builder, this episode offers a practical overview for engaging with Asia’s rapidly growing impact ecosystem.

Entrepreneurial Households (EHs)—resilient, resourceful families generating multiple income streams—are rapidly transforming from recipients of development aid into independent economic agents shaping the future of emerging markets. Yet, despite their growing significance, the unique needs of EHs remain largely underserved by traditional markets.

In this episode, we speak with Jyotsna from EPIC World, a platform launched by the team behind Elevar Equity, to understand how they are scaling businesses that serve EHs through insights, custom solutions, and aligned capital strategies. We explore the rise of EHs from the bottom of the pyramid, the need for specialist companies that can serve them with intent and precision, and the evolving investment models that support long-term value creation in these communities.

Due diligence is one of the most significant cost and time barriers in scaling impact investments, particularly for small and growing businesses (SGBs) and high-impact SMEs. The economics of conducting thorough due diligence on these enterprises often discourages investors from deploying capital at the scale needed to drive meaningful change.

In this episode, Audrey Selian, Director of the Artha Initiative at Rianta Capital Zurich, will unpack the challenges of due diligence in impact investing and explore innovative solutions, including technology-driven platforms, which aim to make due diligence more efficient, collaborative, and cost-effective.

Investing with a focus on children’s well-being is not only a moral imperative but also a strategic approach to achieving sustainable development goals. UNICEF’s Innovative Finance Hub is pioneering this space with the groundbreaking 'Child-Lens Investing Framework,' guiding global capital markets and investors to integrate child-related considerations into investment decisions.

In this episode, Radha Kulkarni, Lead of Innovative Financing at UNICEF and Francisco Biber, Child Rights Specialist at UNICEF, shares insights into the development and impact of the Child-Lens Investing Framework. We will explore how innovative finance can address the financing gap for children's needs across 190 countries and the potential for private sector engagement in this mission.

Many impactful ventures, particularly those addressing complex social or environmental challenges, require time to develop, scale, and demonstrate their full impact. This makes them unsuited to traditional investment timeframes. 

This episode explores the crucial role of catalytic capital and the advantages of aligning financial objectives with timeframes required to achieve impact. Alankrita Khera of ACT shares insights on how catalytic capital empowers high-impact initiatives, the strategies used for deploying this capital effectively, and how ACT’s approach differs from traditional investments.