Throughout her life, Professor Durreen Shahnaz experienced the unbearable gap between the worlds of finance and development. Durreen grew up in Bangladesh and the Philippines, and started her career as the first Bangladeshi woman investment banker on Wall Street. She knew the power of businesses and finance. With a desire to use finance for a better world, Durreen made a dive into working with the most underserved of micro-businesses with Grameen Bank. There, she witnessed the struggles of borrowers due to lack of access to markets, which motivated her to create OneNest, a global e-commerce company for local artisanal products, to empower micro-entrepreneurs with access to the global market.
During this time, Durreen experienced the difficulty of raising capital for a mission-driven business to scale. This experience would later inspire her.
While teaching Social Innovation and Entrepreneurship at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy in Singapore, Durreen wrote about the need for investment to fuel businesses that were uplifting communities and leading to sustainable development. Her writings led her to meeting with the Rockefeller Foundation – a key influencer in the impact investing space, and the inspiration and foundational support for Durreen to take on a leadership role for impact investing in Asia.