 Well, I am thrilled to be in discussion this morning with Santiago and Anditi. We humbly will be offering some thoughts on the global state of impact investing. We each represent a different geography, the United States, Latin America, and Africa. And our colleague Doreen in a minute will talk a bit from the Asia perspective. So we hope to give you a quick tour around the globe and the state of play. Thank you to SOCAP and the Sorenson Impact Institute for hosting us. Really excited for the next three days. I come to this work as an impact investor, an impact entrepreneur, and a field builder. And I think we all, what's centered in all of our work is a commitment to equity, like a lifelong commitment to equity, economic equity, gender equity, racial equity, and many other types of equity. And I think that you will see this as our collective route. And we hope that you, that will animate your journey at SOCAP. So just a little bit about the state of play in the United States. We have had some amazing tailwinds, I would say over the last 10 years, but certainly over the last handful of years, we have moved from a relatively niche practice to more squarely in the mainstream. The Chin, which does a biennial study, suggests that there's over a trillion dollars globally in impact investing. If you add public markets in, it's many trillions of dollars. And in the United States in particular, we have some tailwinds in the form of a trio of three enormous government bills. The bipartisan infrastructure bill, the Chips and Science Act and the Inflation Reduction Act, which is poised to flow hundreds of billions. And then if you partner it with private sector investment, trillions of dollars over the next handful of years. And one of the things we are working on at the US Impact Investing Alliance and the Tipping Point Fund on Impact Investing in coalition with many of you is making sure that communities, particularly historically underserved communities have a say in how that money flows. That is how we are going to move the dial on economic equity and other types of equity. Just a moment on tailwinds and then I'll pass it over to Santiago to speak about Latin America. I think it is a testament to the success we have had as a field that our work is drawing attacks, political attacks on the pairing of financial considerations and impact considerations from impact investing to ESG. The work that we do and the right to do our work is under attack at the state level, at the federal level and the public square. You couple that with the striking down of affirmative action at the Supreme Court means that DEI practices in all sectors, including of course not limited to the private sector is under attack. So we as a field need to come together to defend our right to invest in the ways that we feel will be most impactful. So Santiago, I'd love to pass it to you to share a little bit about the state of play at Latin America. Thank you Fran and that is such an interesting question. As mentioned, I've been in the field of impact investing for over 10 years, specifically focused on the Latin America supporting different organizations at different stages of that journey from Mexico down to Colombia nowadays. And initially it was very difficult to find local organizations operating across Latin America in the field of impact investing, social entrepreneurship, you name it. It was mostly a field where international players mostly coming from the North started sort of to open operations in the region to get sort of this movement. Having said that over the last five to seven years, the ecosystem has really exploded. We've seen flourishing of organizations in terms of actors across the ecosystem, accelerators, entrepreneurs, fund managers, foundations, even the government sort of starting to enter into the field and trying to understand what can be done to really catalyze impact across the spectrum. Initially, Latin America just to share an anecdote. Over the last eight years, I've been building Alive Ventures which is an impactful manager focused on the Indian region. Trying to address inequality across Latin America which unfortunately is where inequality is the greatest globally. And initially the conversation with local players was very binary. It was really about business as usual or traditional philanthropy. There was nothing in between, nothing in the spectrum. When we started Alive Ventures, started fundraising, the discussion was either profit or philanthropy. Nowadays, we're raising our second fund and the conversation is entirely different. The conversation is not about pipeline. That was usually also the first question we would be asked in terms of would you be able to find organizations that truly blend impact with profit? Now that's no longer the question. Now the question is really about scale. It's about how we can transcend. It's about how we can make this the mainstream. So there is hope when the region is looked at from the outside. Clearly there are challenges but also there are opportunities and the call to action I think to all of us that are gathered here today is really how we can achieve scale. Thank you Santiago. And Titi joins us from Lagos which means I don't know what time it is for you but it is not the bright and shiny morning. So thank you for joining us. Could you share a little bit about the state of play of impact investing and impact entrepreneurship in Africa? Thank you so much. It's really an honor and privilege to be here and building on Santiago's comment. The first thing I'll say about the African continent is that we have 54 very diverse countries. So there's not one state of play and the complexity and the diversity across those countries really varies but we have seen also an explosion in not only local giving where we're starting to see African investors saying Africa's future belongs to us and we will invest in social innovators through the Africa Philanthropy Forum through World for Impact and a range of other initiatives we're pushing for bridging the gap and connecting social innovators to local investors. And we're seeing angel networks popping up all over the place we're starting to see pension funds investing and impact funds and in countries like Kenya, South Africa and Nigeria we're seeing a lot of growth. However, we're also seeing three C's that are creating and over the last two years some turmoil, climate obviously, economic crisis and then some level of emerging conflicts and what that does oftentimes is especially for international investors that are coming into partner with local investors we're seeing a shift to their comfort zone and a shrinking of space for local organizations and that's very worrisome especially because of how important it is to partner in a time when you have climate affecting all of us and a continent like the African continent most affected by climate change with seven out of 10 countries on the continent most affected. We also see how local entrepreneurs innovating who need the support. So my call to action is really around localization and how as impact investors, many of you sitting in this room we can prioritize investing in local organizations that are closest to the ground that stayed through the good and bad times that can deliver impact at scale at a fraction of the cost. And as we invest, we must prioritize and track how much funding is actually going to those local organizations. I'm excited about what I've seen in many of our contexts and I work in food and agriculture. I've seen how we are leapfrogging, leveraging innovation technology and data but we see that happening in health, in education, in tech and I think this is a time to strengthen local organizations for scaling. Thank you. So you bring up the topic of scaling and would love for each of us to speak a little bit about what it will take to get to scale with the understanding that sometimes it's complicated when you're thinking about impact entrepreneurship you're thinking about local impacts that sometimes you can grow through scale and sometimes you grow through replication and indeed sometimes the most innovative practices like participatory investing are small by design hyper-local by design and are not meant to scale. So Santiago, oh, I like the spontaneous clapping. Very energizing. Santiago, can you talk about how to get to scale impact in Latin America? I think that's the familiar dollar question as they say and I don't think I have the answer but I do have some thoughts and I couldn't agree more with it indeed in terms that one of the main things sort of to really reach scale is that we need to continue bringing local players into the space. There's been players coming in over the last years as I mentioned, but we need to bring more and we need to bring the mainstream players as well. Therefore not the foundations, the typical or the usual suspects that we sometimes joke around so that we see each other in meeting after meeting in conference after conference. We actually need to bring to the equation and to the discussion more mainstream players. In our case, for example, there's been a heated debate in terms of how we can bring local capital, institutional, local capital, pension, funds, insurance companies to really be able to fund the change and the opportunity sort of that the region has to offer. So that's really front and center. The other thing that I would highlight is that, I mean, clearly the last 18 months have been tough globally but in emerging markets and in Latin America particularly, the impact has felt that is exponential. The volatility of our economies, just when there is global crisis, it just accentuates. But I think within the impact ecosystem, we need to see sort of this crisis as a silver lining as an opportunity because when we see what we're trying to change, sort of when we see what the entrepreneurs are trying to address which means market gaps are trying sort of to come up with products and services that they can offer to population that have been traditionally underserved. That means that they're trying sort of to create markets, that they're trying sort of to reach to segments of the economy that traditionally have not been served and that usually means opportunity. Therefore, what we're seeing is that this segment of the economy is actually much more resilient as well to crisis and we need to make that an opportunity to show that there is potential and therefore bring the capital, the local capital for the international capital, also then to follow suit to really scale opportunities. Thank you. One thing that drives us at the US Impact Investing Alliance and the tipping point fund on impact investing is scaling but doing so with impact integrity. We believe that all investing has an impact but it has either been largely or wholly opaque to stakeholders. And one thing that we're very excited about is that there is a global regulatory movement of foot to make impact more transparent in the United States through the SEC. Hopefully we're kind of limping to the finish line on climate disclosure and we hope that human capital management follows soon after. Governor Newsom in California recently signed into law corporate disclosures of you're doing business if you're a public or private business in California or doing business with California which is many, many businesses you will need to disclose in order to be able to have those companies disclose on scope three emissions and then as many of you will know in the UK and Japan, in the EU there are also these are open regulatory windows simultaneously open. This is impact transparency is something our field has been working on for decades and it is a huge moment whether it's at the IFRS Foundation with the International Sustainability Standards Board or the concept of double materiality in the EU. One of the things that we are keeping an eye on is the unintended consequences of some of this global disclosure. For example, we're starting to hear stories from as a result of the CSRD the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Director from the EU that they're by law very soon there's a faith in these companies will be required to disclose on climate. That means that their suppliers, small businesses, and the global south will need to disclose and we're worried that there will be unintended development consequences a kind of stratification of developing economies as an unintended consequence. So we're very excited about impact transparency. We can't get to impact accountability or impact equity until we have transparency. So it's incredibly important but it's also important to keep an eye on the unintended consequences. And so indeed, I was wondering how you think about scaling the field and practice of impact investing but doing so without further perpetuating systemic inequities. You know, a friend once said instead of trying to scale our work we should scale what works. And that's the challenge we all face here. We all want to scale our individual organizations work instead of focusing on really being humble enough to know to scale what works. And one of the things that work around equity is investing in women. So gender lens investing is critical, right? It works. And sadly, yeah, I'm glad we have a lot of supporters in the audience so I'm preaching to the converted. But when you look at fund managers on the continent of Africa, only 4% in some countries it's up to 10% goes to women fund managers. We're not seeing the funds flowing to these women who know how to invest in other women we're not seeing deliberate efforts to hold fund managers all fund managers accountable for how much of their funding goes to women led organizations and we're not tracking that data. So in addition to tracking some of the data that we think we should track on impact and ESG I would like to advocate that we actively track about how much funding goes to gender and hold fund managers accountable to do better and to go deeper. It works. Absolutely and I know that your fund is committed throughout to gender lens investing. So thank you for bringing up the importance of gender. So to wrap, I'd like to do just a rapid fire round. What are a couple of like one or two words that you'd like to leave the audience with? A, around the importance of the growth of this movement and B, as they start on their so kept journey some things to keep in mind, but just little tidbits. Two words on my end. I would say, and part of the discussion, scale and second one, opportunity. I mean, there is urgency sort of to scale but there is also an opportunity out there to really connect, act as an ecosystem to build the field and hopefully in Latin America take it sort of to the next level and nice stream. Fantastic. Thank you. And Didi. So in my language, the word love translates to ahurum genaya. I see you in my eye. I see you. I would like us to see each other through so cap but I also would like us to see each other beyond so cap and that takes courage and it takes humility but that's what the impact investing space needs today. Courage and humility, courage to ask tough questions to challenge the status quo, to ensure that we create spaces for each other and humility to learn and unlearn and humility to scale, not our work, but what works. Thank you. Thank you. So my challenge to the audience builds on these comments. One is to be bold, the magnitude of the challenges at hand will require creativity, innovation and radical partnership and indeed cross sectoral partner partnership and cross jurisdictional partnership. And the other is to be intentional because if we're not intentional, if we move around expediency say around climate investing but we don't consider the communities that are most impacted and the constituencies that are most impacted we will not be manifesting a more equitable, sustainable future. So thank you so much to my partners in discussion. Thank you Santiago and And Didi and thanks to you for being such a spunky audience. Wishing you a wonderful SoCAP and yeah, have a great rest of your day.