ANDE South Asia’s Post

Transcript

Well, this time who was going to talk about those small businesses who are facing these climate impacts in day in and day out businesses. So for businesses to be future proof in terms of their operations, business needs to be agile and adaptive to and become climate resilient. We call this the year of this decade that it will be South Asia stone where a stronger will see a strong rise in the middle class of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. Also talking about the purchasing power and the capacity that the region holds and I think if we work together. Share our lessons and dare to. Experiment a lot. I think we could really accelerate the growth of the number of entrepreneurs that are working on social and interactive entrepreneurship. When we get into investment, we generally have 5 lenses, which we call our star lens. We focus on gender equality, climate change, digit innovation, inclusivity and intergenerational wealth. We believe that founders are leader. Designers and when I say designers, the essential role, I would also say much less talked about role of a founder is that they basically redesign industries. And, and you know, they, they are kind of forced to redesign industry. Because when you bring in innovation in a particular node of a, of an industry, you find out that, you know, the forward and the backward linkages, you know, to support that, that that new way of doing things. Missing. South Asia is not only ready for the venture building studio model, I believe it needs it. I mean the challenges of the region demand a systematic, tailored and impact driven approach that I believe a venture building studio can provide. Yes, there are so many people leaving the country, but at the same time you have a good chunk of people coming back and that is where I feel the wind just studio model kind of comes into play because that's where they can. Value So that's why I started a venture studio because the necessity of providing tailored and specific Rd. maps and guidance and work support to startups was the thing that was actually burning inside of me. I think the government needs to look at how might they encourage more, How might they make it easier by maybe looking at not just only tax breaks, but also, you know, incentivizing. In general, the idea of working with innovators, working with universities, working with founders and ideas for the future. Digital infrastructure holds immense potential to enable inclusion. They also help us to facilitate seamless transactions, opening even new markets for businesses across borders while also fostering collaboration and innovation. So so far we've been able to reach to more than 200,000 farmers all across Nepal and happy to know that more than half of them are on 54 percentage of them are women farmers. We made sure that our language are foolproof and their gender sensitive we do not use. Any gentle aggressive nor languages or terms that would that would that would influence any sort of negative environments within the community approach. And the next thing would be to deploy gender sensitive to deploy woman LED facilitators for MSN, MSNBC or a small medium small holder farmer who is working out in the region now. He gets the same equity, the same benefit, the democratization of the market so that he can actually go according to what he wants. Uh, through according to what the market is actually requesting, we realize that for digital public infrastructure, one of the biggest issue we are seeing is a lack of imagination of how it can be deployed, right? And what are the use cases it can really enable in solving for small and social enterprises in India. We all know when we invest in women, they reinvest back into their families and their communities. Despite that, there is currently about $1.7 trillion worth gender financing gap, she said. Like business is my like dream, business is my power and business will be coming in my future. We also. Make sure the community that we work with are stewardship with the environment that they live in. Where we include community values, social norms, behavior, attitude like that there is a training that we have designed which is helping. The each individual in the community, especially human farmer building her capacity from the situation that she's not able to tell her man in front of the group or community to proudly saying her achievement. Over the years we have been known for organizing women for the banking space but also when we give women access to finance. We have been doing it through self help groups which are called bachat guts in our part of the. Country Vanita Thai is known for having access loans from a budget guts and she herself now wants to give back to the community and she sets up Bachat Gats itself. And if we, if we develop a population weighted measures, other outcomes such As for corporate sectors as well when they disperse their CSR initiatives, if they use a population weighted system, all of the development and other impact systems will reach a we will reach a broader, broader potential impact investing receivers. I think the uniqueness of population weighted approaches though is that. You know it it takes context into account more greatly than typical impact assessment. And as a psychologist, I always despair at how hard it is to change the real world. But impact assessed impact investing does because it sets up new factories and it provides new products. It employs more people. It it does physical things that really do change the world. So while population weighted S and the management actually shows where the investment would should go. Sri actually will measure the value created, so the jobs, the health, education and the economic gains. So together I think they would add a lot more value, especially in looking at scale and the outcomes. It provides better context by showing how impact investments align with the size of the population, making it easier to gauge the actual reach and significance of these investments in the different regions and offering a clearer picture of their scale and effectiveness. We know the definition of impact. Investment It is an investment which has got a social impact, environmental impact and at the same time as financial return and it can be monitored through measurable set of measurable indicators within a governance. One good thing that I've been seeing that uh, Sucharita, you are unfolding your wings from the from someone from India to other countries. We are very happy to see your roping in countries like Nepal, Sri Lanka, Pakistan. That's how the spirit should be in Bangladesh. Switzerland has been working on the impact investing scene since 2020 and we have been partnering with enterprises, with service providers. We have also team up with the investors and regulators and what we are, what we have been trying to do is to promote an impact readiness and impact. Featuring her and they said the three things like making the entrepreneurs commercially viable, scalable, and sustainable. Those three things are important to create impact investor interest. We have a mismatch between large Dfis, right who want to invest hundreds of millions of dollars. And startups who need like half $1,000,000 or $2,000,000 and large investors globally are just not equipped to do those ticket sizes directly, which basically means that we need more local structures, be it funds, be it debt, providing entities who are able to accept that capital. And then onward invested into the local startup ecosystem. And then again, this is where I think this room is for learning across the region what would work, what is working. And then we can all add up and maybe also do the advocacy of it together because what would possibly get in Nepal that would be needed in other parts of South Asia as well. So this is what we are working now with every international and other Ingos basically developing some case studies, especially in agriculture, water, sanitation, youth employability and so forth. So basically working with this. No businesses for organization making sure that their investment ready over a period of a year, 18 months and all that and then going back to the global impact, but just saying you know some of our institutions are ready for impact investment. Impact transparency is going to be the key. Probably it is going to be the new valuation method to understand who will receive investment and who will not. In this context, again, I'd like to define the impact. Impact is the effect of organizations actions on people and the natural environment. It can be positive or negative. Also, sometimes it is intended or unintended, so therefore. Water and sanitation. Humanitarian assistance. Vocational training has. The woman. Powerment podem Exchange of. Of the sectors that we see in the Sustainable Development Goals. Tika cannot ignore, so therefore is that the matter of an organization. I cannot restrict myself and my agency, but is our priority. When I was a business teacher in the education ministry, I realized there is a need for training institute that can actually and here's the efficiency of the people in Maldives. We started School of agriculture with the with the help of Bangladeshi retiree agriculture experts, I developed a course. So five students, women, some of them. Out there in the job in the UM at all council plus some of them are housewives, said They completed with us and we provided them seed money in this year. In many ways, India as a country is possibly over regulated or over legislated as well. But you know in also in it has turned out to be a blessing in disguise in many other ways because today we have an impact investing ecosystem which comprises of both for profit and not-for-profit players, many of whom in fact most of whom are. Very, very well regulated by the by, you know, by the underlying, you know, financial architecture, financial regulatory architecture as well another regulator in the market, which is the Securities Commission of Malaysia C for short, where they regulate our capital markets. And for SC, they introduce frameworks such as the sustainable and responsible investment Sri Taxonomy. And apart from that, they also have an extra for the Suku framework as well, which what these framework do for both is to enable fundraising from green and social impact projects. A lot of startups are also very careful to not brand themselves as impact enterprises, even if they have significant impact, right? Because once they get labeled as such, they kind of they feel that I mean, this is a perception issue where they feel the perception. Knocks them out of a lot of venture capital or or say future capital that they could they could access.