Marcel Neutel is the Managing Partner and Chief Investment Officer at Capital 4 Development (C4D) Partners. C4D has been a partner of IIX for over five years and recipient of the 2016 IIX Trailblazer Award. To date, C4D has made four investments in high-impact enterprises via Impact Partners.
We sat down with Marcel Neutel for an interview on his experience as an impact investor. See what he had to say:
The following speech was delivered by IIX Founder and CEO Professor Durreen Shahnaz on October 24th at Wharton San Francisco, for IIX and Knowledge@Wharton’s event “Women, Peace and Parity: Using Finance as a Tool For Progress.”
Ladies and Gentlemen, Welcome to Knowledge@Wharton and IIX’s joint event, ‘Women, Peace and Parity’. Thank you all for joining us today to celebrate the United Nations – so Happy United Nations Day. Today is a celebration of women — the Sustainable Development Goals #5 – Gender Equality, a celebration of Peace – SDG goal # 16, and a celebration of partnerships – SDG #17, because as we know, to undertake the mammoth task of creating a peaceful and equitable society – it takes women and it takes a village.
Coming from a corporate fortune 500 setting, I will be the first to admit that I typically fall into the trap of looking at the same standard criteria when assessing the feasibility of a new social impact investment program [i]: market need, market size, business model, financial model and strategic fit. Don’t get me wrong, a lot of effort and intelligence goes into developing each of the above.
However, after attending the IIX Impact Institute Executive Certificate Program: Financing the SDGs, I came to realize one large blind spot: Risk.
The following speech was delivered at the 72nd United Nations General Assembly by IIX founder Durreen Shahnaz to launch the Innovative Finance for Sustainable Peace Initiative. The 5-year initiative leverages the power of financial markets to unlock $1 billion to drive forward sustainable peacebuilding efforts across the globe by creating systemic social-economic resilience.
Innovative finance is emerging as a powerful tool for harnessing private sector capital to advance gender equality and women’s empowerment but remains limited in its scale to date due to challenges inherent in innovation. Philanthropic actors can help overcome these barriers and play a catalytic role in enabling innovative finance to reach its true potential in creating gendered impact. Using three case studies of innovative financial mechanisms that are applying a gender lens across Asia, Impact Investment Exchange (IIX) illustrates how innovative finance can create gendered impact and how philanthropic actors can use their resources to support the development of such funding mechanisms.
Highlights from the October Impact Snapshot:
The recent McKinsey & Company report ‘Impact Investing Finds its Place in India’ is an interesting read with some valid insights on impact investing in India. However, having been in the impact investing space in India for more than a decade, I have witnessed the pendulum of impact investing swinging away from India towards other high-potential countries of South and South East Asia and believe it is time to zoom into the new frontier markets which have proven strong economic growth with high impact potential.
