Jocelyn Cheng
Jocelyn Cheng is an Investment Director at GIF with over a decade of experience in international investing. Her experience spans early stage, growth equity, buyout and infrastructure investing across multiple continents. Before joining GIF, she was part of the infrastructure investing team at the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board where she completed $1 billion worth of investments in Latin America. She was previously part of the Private Equity team at Bain Capital, and started her career in investment banking in New York and Buenos Aires at Goldman Sachs. She co-founded the property rights social enterprise Suyo in Colombia, and has also worked extensively with other social enterprises through Endeavor and the Clinton Health Access Initiative in Tanzania. Jocelyn holds an MBA from Harvard Business School, an MPP from Harvard Kennedy School, and a B.Sc.Econ (Wharton School) and a B.A. (Honors) from the University of Pennsylvania.
Madeleine Evans
Madeleine is an entrepreneur and investor by background, passionate about integrating positive values into the financial system and creating products and services that provide social good.
Most recently she was Director of Business Development at Tes.com, a digital media and education company. Prior to Tes, she split her time across private equity (TPG Capital) and social entrepreneurship. In 2015 she was named one of Financial News’ Extra Mile 40 for founding Finance Matters, a network that has supported over 1,300 finance professionals transitioning into impact-focused careers.
She enjoys speaking and writing on impact investment, education, business, gender and sustainability. She holds an MPA from LSE and a dual BS/BA from the University of Pennsylvania and the Wharton School.
Mark Cheng
Mark is a Managing Director at Ashoka, the global network of the world’s leading social entrepreneurs. Since 1980, Ashoka has identified and supported more than 3,500 leading social entrepreneurs (‘Ashoka Fellows’) in more than 80 countries. Mark is also the founder and CEO of Chelwood Capital, a social investment firm. Over the past decade, he has helped raise more than $150mn in investment for social entrepreneurs, in causes ranging from micro-finance to off-grid solar energy and marine habitat conservation. Mark is a frequent writer and speaker on social innovation and finance, and has written for the Guardian, Stanford Social Innovation Review and Fast Company. He is the author of ‘The Social Investment Toolkit’, a free online guide for social entrepreneurs looking to raise finance (www.ubs.com/sit). He can be found on twitter @chelcap.
Suzanne Biegel
Suzanne Biegel is founder of Catalyst at Large, and Senior Gender Lens Investing Adviser at Wharton Social Impact Initiative, Wharton Business School. She recently created a pilot initiative to bring together investors with a gender lens, called Women Effect, which is now at Wharton. She is an active impact investor and philanthropist. Her work focuses on investing with a women and girls / gender lens, and her own portfolio is directed with a broader set of impact and gender lenses. She is also the Investment Director for SPRING, a project of DFID, Nike Foundation, USAID, and DFAT for ventures with a positive effect on adolescent girls in 8 countries.
She is the founder of Clearly Social Angels in the UK, part of ClearlySo, and was a founding board member of Confluence Philanthropy in the US. She holds several advisory board roles. She founded Women in Social Finance in London and co-founded the Values Based Investment group of Women Donors Network. She is a Catto fellow at The Aspen Institute. She is also a member of the Toniic/100% Impact Network. And a fellow for SDG 5 for Tribe Impact Capital.
She received the Beacon award for philanthropy and impact investing in the UK in 2015. She is a graduate of Wharton Business School at the University of Pennsylvania. A native New Yorker, Suzanne has been based in London for the past 7 years.
Rosalind Copisarow
After graduating in 1979 from Oxford University in Human Sciences, Rosalind worked for 15 years in the banking sector at Citicorp, HSBC an JP Morgan, the majority in pioneering new business development roles in emerging markets, particularly Latin America and Eastern Europe.
Since 2007, with the blueprints for sustainable access to finance in place across the world, Rosalind has focused her work on designing commercially viable wealth-creating opportunities for >$2/ day households within the Impact Sectors of water and sanitation, affordable housing, renewable energy and agriculture. As CEO of International Development Enterprises (IDE), which supports subsistence farmers with micro-irrigation technologies, she re-orientated its grant-dependent business model into a self-financing social enterprise. As founding CEO of Constellation Communities, she helped slum-dwelling tenants onto the first rung of the home ownership ladder through innovative, self-build housing modules with income-generating uses. As board chair of Global Village Energy Partnership, she launched commercial bank funded supplier credit facilities for micro-solar, biogas, biomass and hydro technologies. And as MD of Oikocredit, a leading Netherlands-based investor in micro-finance organizations, social enterprises, agricultural cooperatives and small & medium sized enterprises, Rosalind applied her retail experience with client companies to the structuring of impact-maximising wholesale financial services.
Over the past 18 years, Rosalind’s pioneering work developing transformational products and business models for the 4 billion >$2/ day population at the Base of the Pyramid (BoP) in the financial services, renewable energy, housing and agriculture sectors, has not only increased the income, wealth and financial security of over 30 million people, but also provided profitable new business opportunities to their trading partners. Through her current consultancy practice, it is the lessons learned from these experiences that she now offers to organisations seeking to attract and serve the rising middle classes, as one of the fastest growing customer markets in the world.
Moderator: Fabienne Serfaty, Social Impact Investor