NextBillion - An Initiative of the William Davidson Institute at the University of Michigan

Monday, January 20, 2014

A new investment fund structured by JPMorgan Chase & Co. and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation will, for the first time, allow individual and institutional investors the opportunity to finance late-stage global health technologies that have the potential to save millions of lives in low-income countries. At the launch event last fall, I jointly interviewed Dr. Rajiv Shah, Administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development, and Tony Blair, former British Prime Minister. We discussed the state and future of impact investing as it relates to global health, governance and social progress more broadly.

Rahim Kanani: When you think about impact investing, where are we today, and where are we going?

Raj Shah: I think for a decade now that the field of development has been changing, and if we’re going to achieve the big goals we’ve set for ourselves – ending extreme poverty, ending preventable child death, and massive reductions in child hunger – are only going to be achieved with real private investment working alongside public resources.