 Welcome to this, I believe, first ever session at SoCAP on Childlands Investing. It is a conversation and a presentation on our newly published Childlands Investing framework. Please check it out if you haven't. As Chris said, my name is Alexander Rostami. I lead the Innovative Financing Hub in Helsinki. It was a long trip to get here and it's also a good moment to enjoy the sun because in Helsinki we're going to wait until April until we see the sun again almost. With me I have our fantastic youth ambassador, Kripa Kanan, and we're going to talk about Childlands Investing and we also have our esteemed panel which is, they're going to come up on the stage a little bit later. But before we proceed, I want everyone to take a deep breath and imagine, picture a world in peace, a world with no poverty, with zero hunger, a world without pollution and climate change. Picture that. I think it's not a difficult task for you to do that because you're here. All of us want that. That's why we're here. But if you had one choice, one option to realize that, to make it happen, one little tweak you can do so that in one or two generations we have a world like that, what would that choice be? What would that little tweak be? For me the answer is clear. That's why I joined UNICEF. I believe that in a world where children from the day they are born, if they receive and they are raised with love and care, they have all their basic needs met, they have all the opportunity to reach their highest potential. In a world like that, there will be humans which respect each other and they respect the environment they live in. I think that's the only way we can realize that dream which we all share. Children are our most precious resources or assets. Children from the plenary yesterday was a lot of good discussion and a lot of good presentation but children were not mentioned at all. Still children are our most important assets but we don't talk about them and we don't think about them as precious assets which we need to invest in and care about. But when we think about children it's quite limited. We think education, yeah we can invest in education and that's it. But children are more than just few sectors or industries. Children are part of an ecosystem. It takes a whole community to raise a child and investing in that same child of lips the community itself. So children are part of everything. So child lens investing is not only about education but it's about all the ecosystem where children are part of. And it's also interoperable with all other impact themes. So child lens investing if you do climate, if you do health, if you do education the child lens investing framework can be added to that and it's complementary to it. Uplifting children is not only the smart thing to do it's the ultimate way of impact investing. We truly believe that and we want you to join us and we need to do it because we are failing children everywhere. One out of six live in extreme poverty, one out of six children and one billion children on this planet lack access to life's necessities. That's a huge number and we need to join forces. So when it comes to children and what they need, over to you Kripa. Hi, thank you Alexander. My name is Kripa. I'm a UNICEF USA National Youth Council member and advocate for climate change and I just want to thank you all so much for coming to this session today and taking time out of your day to come listen to what we have to say. Today October 24th 2023 is a day filled with great concern. I'm concerned about the future. With our polluted atmosphere dependence on fossil fuels and lack of equitable solutions the climate crisis is only worsening. When I visited India I saw the large proportion of the population that was affected by climate change from displaced housing and forced migration to immediate health effects like lung cancer, heat related illnesses, respiratory problems and waterborne diseases. And who is most affected by all of this? Children. Seeing first hand the effect of environmental pollutants on well-being I became a passionate climate justice advocate but climate is only one piece of the puzzle. There are many other humanitarian issues that go hand in hand like health, education, the effective armed conflict on climate change and water sanitation hygiene. I have organized city wide trash pickups and community wide volunteering and awareness events making blankets out of plastic bags to donate to homeless shelters for example. I've been a club leader for numerous environmentally focused organizations, spoke at conferences like these and done things just as small as planting trees and taking care of gardens at school events. However, while these events are impactful it's not enough. It's simply not big enough to make the change that we are looking for. We need to be big and we need to be bold and that starts today. Now I have a question for you all. All of you are currently driving investments and are actively contributing at the decision making table. Do you know how many children you reach with your work? Do you know how these specific issues I mentioned before affect children directly? Do you have a well established child or youth committee? Young people have the most at stake and their voices need to be heard. Despite being the most affected demographic our voices and interests are underrepresented in decision making especially in the investment world. But imagine what we could accomplish if we tapped into the 12 trillion dollar private capital market. This could encourage green investments, establish public-private partnerships that support infrastructure development, promote research and development of green technologies and create climate finance literacy. It is critical to prioritize children and our needs ensuring a better future for us all. Why is it that large companies are often a cause for climate change? Let's change that narrative. Instead of utilizing fossil fuels and transportation emissions expanding production that directly causes deforestation, partaking in plastic pollution and adopting high energy technology, let's make the private sector a partner in this fight for climate justice. Philanthropy alone isn't enough to ensure that every child is healthy, educated, protected and respected. Investors have the unique power to shift capital and support the issues that matter to them and their actions whether it directly or indirectly affects the lives of children. I hope you'll listen deeply in today's conversation. We must consider the next generation in investing. It's our only hope for a better future. Today, October 24th, 2023 is now a day filled with change and hope because of you all. We need your help. Thank you. Thank you, Kripa. Children are not consumers, they are not voters, they are not a workforce. And that's why. They're not part of the equation. But we want to change that. We want all of you to embrace our call to action. Come and do research with us, advocacy, come and test and come with us to build the field of childless investing. Because that is the next big thing which is going to happen within this space. Thank you. That, the panel, please. Welcome, everybody. You all in the back. That means you, Joy. Come on up. Dimitri, you too. Come on. It's going to be more cozy if you move forward. I'm David Bank. I'm the editor and CEO of Impact Alpha. We cover everything around the impact investing field. How many of you are readers of Impact Alpha? Nice. How many of you are subscribers to Impact Alpha? Thank you. So let's just hold off on the introductions of the panel. Just a little bit of the room here. Oh, no, let's do the panel first. Because then they'll know who they're talking to. So Christina Shapiro from UNICEF USA. Just tell us briefly who you are. Hi, everyone. Hi, everyone. I'm Christina Shapiro. UNICEF USA. I'm the president of the Impact Fund for Children, the Impact Investing Affiliate of UNICEF USA and a core partner in launching Child Lens Investing. Thank you. And Prith Godar from Save the Children Global Ventures. Yup. Save the Children Global Ventures is a new organization within Save the Children. You all might know that Save the Children is a humanitarian and international development organization. The Global Ventures was set up to mobilize capital for children through impact investing and innovative finance. And we are looking to be kind of very intensive doctors of Child Lens Investing. Terrific. And Caitlin Rosser from Calvert Impact. Yeah. Hi, everyone. It's great to be here today. Caitlin Rosser, a lead impact measurement and management at Calvert Impact. Calvert Impact is a non-profit impact investing firm based here in the US. We raise capital from individual and institutional investors, pull it into a loan fund through the community investment note, and then lend it out to funds and financial intermediaries operating all around the world across nine different sectors and 100 different countries. So really excited for the conversation here today. Great. And now, who are you all? First of all, how many of you once were children? How many of you have children in your life in some way, your own, your friends, family, your community? And how many of you actively consider children in your investment or other decisions? How many of you would like to learn how to actively consider women in your investment decision? Right? Children in your investment decisions. All right. So that's the setup here. And Caitlin, you have spearheaded an effort to sort of formalize and provide a framework for thinking about this. And just tell us how you've come to think about child lens investing. Sure. So thanks. Can everyone hear us? It's a little bit cavernous in here. So if you can't just let us know and we'll speak louder. So we all, I think a lot of you, because a lot of you raised your hands, know that childhood is a uniquely formative age. And any investment in children, particularly in early childhood, have a disproportionate impact in the life of that child for the rest of their lives. So what we have been doing over the past year with our partners at the Office of Innovation at UNICEF, with Tideline, who's in the audience and Criterion, who's also been a partner in this work, is to bring to life what it means to incorporate children into investment decisions. And that is simply because investors don't consider children as stakeholders. Children are ubiquitous, but they're invisible from investment decisions. And what the child lens does is it invites investors to put really their glasses on and look through the lens of a child, incorporate child-related factors into their investment strategies and processes. And with the goal of avoiding harm, but that's really a low bar. It's more than avoiding harm. It's driving improved well-being for children and improved childhood outcomes. And the approach that we took was to really pursue a principled approach to the development of a lens. And so that means bringing in key principles to this investing strategy. And so one of those core principles, which I think will resonate with a lot of you, is the principle of the whole child. And the reason that's really important is because children are not economic agents, they're often not considered as part of an investment strategy. But if you're an investor, you could be impacting a child by investing directly in the education, health, or nutrition of that child. If you're an investor that is investing in the families, it could be through small business lending for heads of households or loans and mortgages, you are impacting that child. If you're investing at the society level on the systems that children need to succeed, the education, the health care systems, you are impacting children. So by taking a whole child view, we invite investors to understand that they are having impacts on children. Every investor action, I think Kripa said it, impacts children directly or indirectly, intentionally or intentionally. So that is one of the core elements. We're inviting investors to be intentional. So to be a child lens investor, because we don't want to delude this, it's not everything is a child lens investor, so we're all child lens investors. There has to be intentionality, including specific elements of how you're pursuing better business practices or specific investments for outcomes in children as part of your ESG or your impact strategy. There has to be intentionality of incorporating children in your investment process and also in outlining what contribution you're having as an investor. And in doing so, what we've done is we've really created a broad tent. We learned from the gender lens investment movement, which is we wanted to create a broad tent and allow many different kinds of investors with different strategies to see themselves reflected. So this particular lens invites investors in the public equity space to be child screening investors, which means they're screening in particular opportunities or actively managing investments to ensure that the companies that they're investing in have business practices that elevate child wellbeing and avoid harm. If you're an investor in the private capital impact space, but again, you're investing in affordable housing, children are not necessarily the direct beneficiary, but you are impacting children. So you can be a child inclusive investor by pursuing those same strategies, thematic or lens-wide, but certainly understanding how you're impacting children, assessing that impact. Or you might be a child inclusive investor that has children as one of many discrete impact objectives. And of course, there's entities like Save the Children, whose North Star is impact for children. So the lens is meant to be very broad. And maybe just to end where Krippa left off is, you know, why is this important? And if you think about climate, I heard Doreen from Impact Investors Exchange talk about how women disproportionately bear the brunt of climate change. But children do, more so than anyone else in the world. 80% of children are impacted in some way or form by climate change. I heard the statistic that 20,000 children have been displaced by climate-related activities every day over the last six years. Children are also disproportionately bearing the burden of energy insecurity. So imagine a world where a climate investor who's focused on renewable energy is not only focused on renewable energy, but is focused on that renewable energy in a way that impacts households, clinics, and schools, not only driving lower carbon emissions, but better health and education outcomes. That's the vision we want everyone in this room to walk away with. Terrific. And so, Prith, let's dig in a little bit because you'd imagine that Save the Children would have already had a child lens investment, a child lens in some fashion. So what actually is new or helpful or useful about this framework? It's exactly what Christina said. It is introducing a new level of intentionality to what we do. It is very easy to be Save the Children and deploy capital and just claim impact for children, but we are looking to build the field a little bit and show that it's much more, impacting children is much more than just about saying you're doing it. It's about kind of intentionally demonstrating it and having a thought process around it. We have a variety of investment tools that we're deploying in the marketplace. We have an early stage venture fund. We have a philanthropic fund. We have another, a larger wholesale debt fund that we're trying to launch. And so we have a number of investment strategies and we have actually a number of themes across which we can deploy capital for children. So education, health, agribusiness, just a number of different ways to touch children. And the problem with our space has been that children can be touched in so many ways. That's generally a good thing. Children's impact can come through many different channels, but at the same time, because so many dots connect to children and they connect in so many different ways, there's so much kind of breadth, so much different varieties of impact for children. It's almost as if children have been overlooked as an impact theme. And that is sad because children kind of have no voice to kind of tackle that problem. If you look at gender lens investing and what's happened there, you have a lot of women champions in financial services. So kind of from the inside out, they were able to champion more capital for women, but that does not exist for children. And so taking a more intentional approach to demonstrating that intentional approach, having other people demonstrate that intentionality almost gives that voice that's missing back to children. And so we're trying to almost emulate what gender lens investing did for moving money into women. People here know about the 2x challenge. I used to work for an advisory firm before this and we used to help impact investors raise capital. And we would always tell them sign up for 2x because a lot of investors like to see a gender focus. And so we would actually see impact investors who wouldn't otherwise do it, start thinking about deploying capital for women. And so these sort of demonstrations of intentionality, these kind of field building efforts, they do actually move money. And through Save the Children's work, I think we're trying to demonstrate that this is a new thing kind of in conjunction with UNICEF, in conjunction with people like Calvert. And to make sure children kind of get that voice that they deserve in the impact investing world and beyond. Let's just stay with it for a second because actually in my trick question at the outset, I was gonna say, how many children are here? And if you notice, there's actually not very many if any. So to your point that unlike gender lens or some other lenses, you're sort of acting a little bit as a proxy for something that's not here. And so that's an interesting aspect. So just dig in a little bit on maybe on your own portfolio of how you think about this in a way that goes deeper than just the obvious, as you said, about investments that might affect children. Yeah, so we've been working with UNICEF over the past UNICEF and Tideline. Our colleagues are here over the past few months on what exactly it means to take kind of a child, like an intensive child lens investing approach to making investments. Our version of that is to start with, do no harm. It's to say, make sure that if we're making an agri-business investment, there's no children in the child labor in the supply chain. That would be kind of a, we have kind of a baseline look at do no harm. But then we quickly start looking at things like scale and things like depth as well. So in terms of scale, we look at kind of, in absolute numbers or proportional numbers, how many children are impacted. But then we also look at our vulnerable children being kind of touched, either especially low income, children with disabilities, marginalized races, refugees, et cetera, et cetera. Is there any systemic impact in something? Is the urgency of the impact very important? Is the duration of the impact going to be large? So we look at a lot of those things and then we look at that in conjunction with scale. If scale is not huge, but depth is great, we like that, or vice versa. But then we quickly move to actual intentionality. When it comes to intentionality, there's quite a bit we can process there, but we're actually, we're looking at companies that very specifically think about children as a customer segment, and that would be kind of a baseline version of intentionality. But then we're also hoping every now and then we come across companies that actually collect data from children, that actually process that in the design of their products and services and that take intentionality to the next level. And so that's broadly how we think about every single investment we make across education, healthcare, agribusiness, and even out climate as well. The last thing we look at is whether save the children can kind of amplify some of that impact through the resources we have around the world, but that kind of layout is broadly how we think about kind of translating the intentionality that Cristina was talking about into our investment processes. Terrific. And Caitlin, you're kind of at the other end of the spectrum, and I think if I understand from our earlier conversations, did not have a specifically child lens on Calvert's investments, I think you probably do have a gender lens and other things, so then take the same question. How does having a child lens affect your actual work? Yeah, David, it's a great question. It's a question that I have gotten all day yesterday. Whenever I mentioned this panel, right after, what does a child lens mean? What does that mean? I get, okay, so how is that relevant to Calvert impact for folks who know our work and our portfolio? And it was not at all obvious when we were first approached to consider the child lens framework. We lend through funds and intermediaries. The largest portions of our portfolio go to affordable housing, microfinance, SME lending, renewable energy and sustainable ag. The more obvious sectors like health and education are very, very small in our portfolio. For example, as of the last quarter, education, pure play education, was 0.2% of our portfolio. So when we considered something like looking at the child lens, it was not at all obvious at first. The connection came when our CEO, Jen Price, learned about the framework, because she's on the UNICEF USA Impact Fund for Children Board and investing in children and for children is really close to her heart. She brought the framework to our impact team and in a very non-pushy, respectful way, said, could we consider something like this? And because of the analogies, and Pranpreetha, the analogy to gender lens investing is really, really apt here. A lens and joy, you were really wonderful. At a webinar, we held with Tide Line and everyone a few weeks ago, defined lenses as centering a voice that has not been considered in the past. And that was what was so important to us when we became champions of gender lens investing at this point in 10, 11 years ago. And that's what really resonated when we really started to dig into the child lens framework, centering voices that we had never considered before. Children, we never really considered what is the impact on children. And we started to look at the impact on children in our portfolio is everywhere. Children really are ubiquitous. They are the beneficiaries of affordable housing when families are the beneficiaries of affordable housing. If you bring residential stability, you get educational and health outcomes. If you're thinking about microfinance and small business, entrepreneurs are often entrepreneurs to support their families. If you think about renewable energy, why are we investing in renewable energy? Well, for cleaner air and a more healthy environment, all for our future generations to continue to exist on this planet. So for us, it was a really, really eye-opening exercise to understand that impact on children is everywhere in our portfolio. We just needed to start being more intentional about asking about it. Let's just stick with it, Caitlin. So at some level, and Christina said this, it risks being everything and therefore not focused. So just take it either in the nine different issue areas or focus areas that Calvert has or even just in the investment process itself from sourcing and due diligence through reporting and management and whatnot. How does, what changes by looking at it this way? Yeah, absolutely. I think we're still figuring out exactly if you think about the investment management process, we're still figuring out how the child lens is going to be implemented across each of those stages. But because I'm the director of impact measurement and management, we started with impact measurement and impact reporting. So earlier this summer, we alongside Prith participated in a cohort of investors piloting this framework led by Tideline and UNICEF-USA and the other UNICEF teams. And we started, it coincidentally, was right at the time we were preparing for our annual impact data collection process. So we collect impact data on an annual basis from our 100 portfolio partners, so 100 funds in the portfolio. We usually kick off in June. It's what we say, remember, it's impact reporting season and we could go into, afterwards, I can walk through that whole process with folks, but it was a really appropriate time for us to say, okay, well, we think that this could be relevant. We've got a touch point with all of our portfolio partners coming up in a month. Let's just ask them, what are they already doing? And the results were so surprising. There were some sectors where the impact should have been more obvious to us before we asked and kind of in hindsight, it is really obvious, affordable housing. So for example, we had a portfolio partner respond back to us, self-help enterprises, they are an affordable housing developer based in the San Joaquin Valley, actually of California, and they came back to us and said, wow, we have so many additional programs that we do for children, for the families, when we're developing affordable housing, we are thinking about eco-friendly playgrounds, play spaces, appliances, we're thinking about the materials that we're using in the building development, making sure that they are non-toxic, that they're not harmful for children. They're so intentional about their housing design. As another example, a microfinance network group, Vision Fund International responded to us and said something similar. Children are centered in our work, and in fact, they actually do a survey of all of their, or of a sample of their clients across all of their networks, trying to understand a set of what they call child wellbeing outcomes and how that changes over time. The longer a clients are, clients of Vision Fund, of the particular country group. So that was surprising, but it shouldn't have been. And I think that there's a couple of sectors that we're now going forward continuing to test the relevance of this. Both in, I think, product design as well as in outcomes measurements, you know, on an annual basis, and that's renewable energy. I mean, we often say like solar home systems allow students, allow children to study, like longer they get to study after school, they get to do their homework, there's health outcomes there, there's educational outcomes there, and yet we don't actually ask about those to many of our portfolio partners. So that's an area we have to start exploring more. And so, you know, really the sky is the limit in terms of how well we can understand our impact on children across all of our different sectors. It's just gonna be about where do we start to focus going forward. Right. Prith, let's go back to you and just imagine if folks wanted to start building a child lens portfolio, one place they might look is save the children's own portfolio. So give us just a couple examples and sort of pin down on how you sort of centered children in the investments. Yeah, I'll provide a quick set of three or four different examples to just give you kind of, you know, a variation of the different, the wide variety of flavors of impact for children. And again, kind of why, you know, child lens is actually very useful. You know, we're doing something as explicit as trying to finance early childhood development centers, you know, in kind of career terms preschools in Rwanda and South Africa, for example. We know that equipping preschools better will, first of all, will increase access to preschools, but it'll also kind of, you know, retain children in preschools more, which leads to just kind of better learning outcomes. And we know that, you know, learning outcome changes in early childhood have kind of longer trajectories on things. And we had to think about that. We had to apply a child lens piece of thinking to make sure that we are making the connections in a way that are meaningful. But that's very, I mean, that's kind of a very obvious example. You know, we've also done a lot of work in health investing. And for example, we made an investment in a diagnostics company, a machine learning-based diagnostics company. They're actually here. They're called ThinkMD. And we, you know, we had to be thoughtful about what the connection was between a general healthcare company, a healthcare kind of tech company, and children. And we saw that this company had the ability to work throughout save the children's programs around the world and equip healthcare workers to be more accurate in their diagnoses of illnesses for children. And so there is an example where, you know, we're not talking about schools, preschools, where, you know, the impact is relatively obvious. We had to kind of define kind of what the connections were to children and how strong they were and what the intentionality of this company was. In this particular case, it was strong because they had a very explicit kind of pediatric component to it. And so the connections were clear. But now, you know, we're also doing other things. We're talking to a corporate partner about trying to do outcomes-based financing for their supply chains, kind of providing more affordable financing for supply chains that don't use child labor. So now you're getting into a different flavor of thinking about children. And, you know, there we had to think about, you know, is the do-no-harm piece enough for us? And that's still a question that we're trying to process through. And so again, I think we saw the use of why a structured approach to child-lens investing is important because we're also trying to prevent a little bit of children's impact washing. You know, the fact that we're maybe saying that hopefully, you know, means that child-lens investing is on the map. But yes, I mean, it just shows the needs for the tool. And then, you know, finally, we're thinking about climate investments. And this is where I think we have to be the most thoughtful because it's very easy to say that any investment we make in climate benefits children. And so therefore, you know, it's a child-lens investment. But we're trying to, again, be a little bit more thoughtful about whether there is intentionality. Instead of just saying, you know, future generations are going to inherit the future climate, we're trying to put a little bit more kind of focused specificity and intentionality behind that. But as you can see, kind of across, it's, you know, we have to apply this across venture-style investments, across philanthropic investments, across wholesale debt financing. We have thought about doing things like ETFs in public markets with a child-lens. And so all, you know, all that just shows how kind of badly something like this is needed. And, you know, just the fact that it doesn't exist at all now and it's important to build. Great, great. Christina, just take it up a level then. Like you think of UNICEF actually saved the children as well, more in services, advocacy. You don't necessarily think of UNICEF as an impact investor. I know you have a fund and Prith has a fund, but why, but take it to the level of what can investors, how can investors actually have an impact on children? So I mean, I think you've heard a lot of examples, but just why UNICEF, I mean, UNICEF operates in 190 countries, it has 16,000 staff. It's already making sure that every child is healthy, educated, protected, and respected. To add to that, UNICEF has a long trajectory of working with corporations to improve business practices through the child rights and business teams. So to us, it was a very natural extension as we're thinking about how do we address the significant gap in funding and financing available to achieve the SDGs, to really fulfill our mission. I mean, to do what Crip is asking us to do, what our other youth ambassadors and youth council members are asking us to do, we can't just think about philanthropy and government. We need to think about the full capital spectrum in the financial markets. And so our job right now is not so much as an investor. Doesn't mean that we can't in some point think about partnerships, but it's really to challenge the field to bring the youth voice, the youth lens, thank you, Caitlin, for that very effective definition of a lens. And to really ensure that investors are incorporating children. So that's the why UNICEF. As we thought about it, we wanted to make sure that whatever we were creating was highly interoperable. So we know everybody is, if you're focused on a thematic or you're already focused on a lens, the question we're getting is, are you asking us to do one other thing? And the answer is yes, but it works with what you're doing, where we built the intentionality that Tideline approached this was to make sure that this particular framework is elevating the best practices that already exist within the ESG and the impact space, operating principles of impact management, the principles of responsible investment, the SDG impact standards. It is really built on top of those. We even, part of the toolkit that was designed to accompany the framework is leveraging tools that are probably being used by a lot of investors already in this room. The difference is we're asking you to consider the impact on children, but the tools are similar. And we even went as far starting a metrics bank of metrics that exist in the impact measurement systems that you're all using. So we looked at Iris Plus and what metrics are there that reflect impact on children that you could start to report on. So I think that's the UNICEF role. But to priest point into yours, I mean, it's not about blue washing, it's really about the intentionality. And for us, it's about investors beginning to make those connections and reflections on how are we impacting children directly or indirectly to try and understand and measure it because in order to better manage it and to be intentional, you have to be able to measure it. And you might be doing harm and not know it, but you might also be accomplishing significant impact that you're not elevating. And as I met with a lot of fund managers recently, I got asked, which is a fair point, like is this gonna help me raise money? You know, my concern is I need to raise money. I already have an impact objective. The answer is yes, I think over time, absolutely, but you need to elevate the data. If you're able to show that in addition to achieving a certain climate or energy objective, you're improving the outcome for children and families. I think that is incredibly appealing not only to investors that are focused on children, but investors that are focused on impact. So let me pause there and see if you have another question. The follow on that is yes, you can elevate the impact and the question that some folks will ask and they'll make it pushback about that is there. Are you also elevating return? So the business case question, which I know raises hackles sometimes, but it can be additive to the argument and maybe there's some indication, at least conceptually if not in the data, that there's a business advantage here. So I will say there's in the public equity space, there is emerging information. So I don't know if he's here, but Matt Goodwin from the Global Child Forum, which is a nonprofit funded by the Swedish royal family. They've created a benchmark. They've been tracking publicly traded companies and they have been showing a correlation between performance on the index as it relates to a company's performance on child rights and financial performance. So it is initial data that exists. I would say, you have evidence every day, a healthier child is a better student, is a better worker, is a better leader. So there are evidence that if you're investing in children, it results in better economic growth over time. I mean, again, that is a macroeconomic argument. So maybe not what you're looking for, but part of the challenge is because children are not economic agents, that data's not being reported, David. So that is part of when you think, what is UNICEF looking to do? Is we need to field build and all of you in the room need to help us do that. So that is elevating cases where you're seeing financial results improved because of a focus on children. I would argue that, and again, I don't have the data yet to prove it, but maybe some affordable housing investor does, is that if you are an affordable housing investor that is considering children and you're focused on better proximity to childcare, green foods, educational facilities, that you're gonna have less turnover amongst your tenant base, which improves the financial performance of the project, while also achieving better outcomes for children. Great. You seem like you were wanting to weigh in on this. I mean, I can just quickly say a couple of things. There are three levels of the case. One is, as Christina was describing, kind of reflecting almost the fact that, I think there is data around the fact that ESG investments do outperform non-ESG investments over time. And when you take a child lens to things like no kind of child labor in supply chains, I think that very much is kind of reflected. Those are practices that I think are known to generally bolster financial performance. There is also the economic case, like you said, and I think the economic cases tends to be quite clear in that there are things like data saying that if children are stunted and wasted in certain economies, there's a trend to see, that shows those economies just generally tend to have lower economic output. So that exists. And then there's the more direct case for some of the markets we operate in. Education financing is actually, there's a huge demand for it. There is a business case to go and do more lending as to schools and early childhood development centers and small businesses. So the cases exist on various different levels. I think Christina's right, like more data needs to come through to show that, but there's a lot of data that kind of already does exist as well. So maybe just to jump into your point. I mean, by not considering children, you're ignoring market segments that are growing. I'm not gonna speak to the profitability of those, but if you look at maternal child health market growing, renewable energy growing, ed tech growing, all child relevant. So I think the investors would be ignoring opportunities. I would imagine that on the other side too, that investments that hurt children could become increasingly less even available. So for example, the court case that was recently decided in Montana, where some youths assumed that the approval process for oil and gas and other energy projects and the development projects in general had to take into account children's right to a healthy environment. I think there's a federal court case moving through on the same track. There might be drivers like that or even regulatory drivers that said you must take into account children and if you couldn't, then you'd be disadvantaged. We'd love to see even more of that. We were very encouraged by that case. I know that there's other states that are going the other direction, but we're not gonna focus on those. But I definitely think that case in particular elevated the fact that a child's rights to clean air supersedes somebody's rights to pollute. And I think that was very affirmative for our vision and the mission that we're pursuing. I think we're gonna take questions from the audience. I don't know how are we doing that? Are we taking, people have notepads to write down or are we gonna just take them live? I guess people wanna do it live. And we're at, Chris, how do you wanna do it? You wanna collect them? All right. Oh, with a microphone. There you go. All right, so Chris will run around. Put your hands up again. You can choose, Chris. Thank you. Why do you think of the childcare cliff in the US? I don't understand how that happened. The childcare cliff where 3.2 million children are losing access to daycare because federal funding is expiring. It'll make a lot of working women have to quit their jobs in the US. The childcare industry also disproportionately employs working women, sorry, disproportionately employs women. So both in terms of the job loss from the women will be impacted by the childcare, daycare centers being losing funding, losing federal funding. So the childcare cliff deadline was September 30th. I've been following the mom's first and the Marshall plan, the mom's first posts, and I'd love to know your thoughts on the childcare cliff and what you guys are, like what your organizations are planning on doing to support children and mothers who will probably have to step back from the workforce to be able to take care of their children, but will lose their jobs. I can take, it doesn't answer your question directly. We're not directly working in the US at this moment, but the strategy that we talked about, we're actually trying to scale up in a bigger way in different countries. So I mentioned kind of this one transaction around financing early childhood development centers in South Africa and Rwanda. We're actually now trying to commercialize that and make a large fund, a sizable fund, something in the range of $50 to $100 million to do that around the world, starting primarily in Africa, but in other places as well. And the importance of this actually relates to something else that we didn't cover before, which is the cross section of child lens investing with other types of lenses. With this particular example that you're talking about, I think child lens investing is super interesting because making a child lens investment also contributes to gender lens investing because it actually supports the care economy as well. I mean, it allows women to participate in the workforce. Of course, it affects girls in schools and kind of girls' education as well, while generally being very intentional about investing in children. So we think, and with all of this, going back to the last question David asked, we think there's actually a strong business case to do this. We can actually deliver financial returns if we go to certain market segments, certain regions, certain places, while still hitting underserved populations. So the business case exists, and not only do you kind of get a good child lens investment, but you actually are touching other lenses as well. So we think this exact space is ripe for greater investment. We're gonna make a big play on it soon. Keep it coming. Hello, and thank you for giving me the opportunity. I am Shan, I'm from Trinidad and Tobago, so I'm in the Caribbean region, and also a SOCAP entrepreneur whose business model actively incorporates children, specifically in the wash space. So I work in waste management and getting the children to, one, understand the importance of managing their work and how it affects them and how they live, and also doing that through really creative storytelling. I'm also a children's book author and created stories for them to understand the importance. So my question is, the Caribbean region has often been ignored for a long time as it pertains to investing. However, because we're all island communities and significantly impacted by the events of climate change, one of our islands was completely wiped out, which hasn't happened in over 150 years. It is important that we show that investment can come to the Caribbean region. So my question for you is, one, have you ever considered the Caribbean region as a possible area of choice for child lens investing? And two, how can entrepreneurs like myself, social entrepreneurs like myself, be able to access the funds that you have to increase or reach an impact with our work with children? Thank you. So there's a sort of interesting question embedded in that, which is people who have child lens, entrepreneurs who have child lens ventures, how can they get into kind of a pipeline for investors who are looking for child lens investing? And then the specific question about the Caribbean. Yeah, happy to take, touch on this a little bit. You know, as a, essentially we're a debt fund to fund, so we're not lending directly to operating companies or anything like that, although I really appreciate the analogy because we had a recycling company in our portfolio that we recently released a case study on and we did not at all focus on their impact on children in that success story. And I wish we could kind of go back in and re-interview the bar where I'm looking at my colleague, Catherine who heads our portfolio. And we've worked on that case study for quite a long time. And I know that Eureka recycling is the company based in the Twin Cities here in the States. I know that they incorporate children into their thesis as well. So our, I can't speak to necessarily how you can get capital from impact investors who are investing in the Caribbean, but I can certainly speak to the investments that we're making that do touch the Caribbean. And so, we have some investments through mostly kind of geographically diverse funds. So we're not kind of investing in one particular country or one particular country fund. However, there are a couple, at least one fund that's coming to mind and I'm not entirely sure if this would kind of, if you would fit in their investment strategy or anything like that. But we have a loan to Crescent. They are an SME financier in, based in Puerto Rico, but they are now part of a group called Cygnus Capital. And Cygnus Capital wants to become the premier Caribbean investment, impact investment fund. They're based out of Jamaica, but they do investments all across the Caribbean. And this was just a really helpful push for me to start asking a little bit more about how their investments impact children. So I just, a little bit of gratitude from me. And you can just come and talk to us and talk about your business and let's hear it. We do have one pool of money that can potentially look at this. As further advice, there's a group called Incofin. They launched a wash fund, a global wash fund. I think the Caribbean might be part of that. The president reached out after the Global Impact Investing Network and said, hey, I heard you guys are doing something around child lens investing. What is that? We'd like to learn more. This is the president of Incofin, kind of a relatively large fund manager in impact investing. So he's interested in this. If you have something for him, I can help connect you. We can talk afterwards. Yeah. Hands in front here. Well, first, thank you for making space for this conversation and for your inspiration and the two of you too. My name is Ana Maria Ristis-Aval. I'm launching the first ed tech fund in Latam. So I'm already early adopter and I hope we can keep the conversation going. But one of the things I am doing a lot is with entrepreneurs like you. So I'm actually educating them on framework, something that they need to be following and I suggest that they do. So one is for them, like what are tools are available for them to embrace some of the frameworks that you are promoting. And the second is I'm connecting with a lot of LPs, like family offices and like endowments and others who are like learning about some of these practices. So like, maybe what's the strategy for you all to communications and advocacy and how we can all who are in this room and care about the support, the effort. So maybe the question is how LPs can help drive the conversation forward? So I'm gonna broaden a little bit and then dive back in. So I think part of our vision right now to ensure that there's awareness is doing things like this. I mean, we were at the gym, we're at SoCAP, we're just recently publishing this framework and we're trying to get it out. Tomorrow there's a delegate let's session. I see Joy here that all of us are participating and we invite you to come there because part of what we're trying to do is understand what people are doing in the child lens investing space already where there's a gap in knowledge and what we need to address. So I would say that right now we're trying to get the word out. We're inviting people to do one-on-one meetings with us and to give us feedback to understand where are the gaps. So if you're interested in adopting this framework but there are certain things that are getting in your way what are those things? What do you need from us or from other people in the field to be able to pursue this? So I would just say we're in the reflection mode and we invite everyone in this room to think about their impact and reach out but we're gonna continue to do this work and to case make, to elevate the case studies of the fund managers that participated in the cohort with Tideline to elevate how a variety of different fund managers are already thinking about child lens in different ways even when they're not exclusively focused on children. So that's something that we're committing to do in this space. I think as LPs again you can bring in the perspective of is this something I care about? This is something I wanna begin to track. You can begin to share that awareness with other LPs but I do understand if you're the sole LP in a fund sometimes it can be hard to gain traction. So it's really about also educating the GPs too as a way to drive the change in the creation of new funds or the incorporation of child lens into existing funds. Caitlin, you're essentially a fund of funds so you're an LP to those funds and so what's your experience sort of introducing this to the funds in Calvert's portfolio? Yeah, absolutely. So we are an LP in some funds, a limited portion of our portfolio and the rest are loans, balance sheet debt, that sort of thing. But still, I mean the analogy is still there and I would just say just start asking questions like we did. Really understand that you are not the expert, you are not the ones deploying capital on the ground, you're not working with the entrepreneurs but you are the ones who are going to these sorts of events and you're hearing, oh wow, this is something that investors are really starting to care about and oftentimes we might be the first person to ask a GP or a fund manager or a borrower the question but we are never the only one. We might be a little bit early but then we prepare some of our GPs, some of our fund managers, some of our borrowers to get those questions kind of on the longer term and frankly I mean I was very surprised at the positive responses that we got from let's say 20 funds when we asked our entire 100 fund portfolio over the summer who was already considering children. If we had never thought to ask the question we'd be missing out on a huge piece of the impact that our capital is helping to effect. So just come to it with humility and just start asking questions. Can I add, I'll say one more thing. We have been trying to promote Child Lens Investing by just through our fundraising work. So now when we are going to LPs and pitching we're saying yay in addition to this great investment strategy and this track record and all of those sort of things we have this thing called Child Lens Investing and everyone, well not everyone but a large majority of people are very very curious about what this is. We've gone to DFIs, they really like it, they're like tell us more, sometimes they ignore a lot of the other stuff that we have in the deck and they're like tell us more about this Child Lens Investing thing. Foundations really like it and even some family offices where kind of children's impact very much resonates with them, they like it a lot. So use it as a marketing tool. It is not high cost to do this. It is not extremely expensive. It's not difficult in any way. As long, I mean you're working an ed tech fund. It should actually be quite straight forward and easy for you and I think you will get a very good response in the market. Like I was saying earlier when I was working to advise funds on fundraising we told them always sign up for 2X. I think hopefully one day Child Lens Investing will start reaching that kind of place where you need 2X and you need Child Lens Investing to really kind of attract investors. So let's see if we get, how fast we get there. That's a good jumping off point because I was gonna do a cold call and this is why people don't sit in the front row Joy but the analogy of Gender Lens Investing has come up several times. Joy was one of the pioneers of that lens and I wonder whether you have some thoughts on just how lenses develop and what the stages of sort of market formation are as people start thinking in a new way. Chris, you got a mic here? Okay, I'm here. Okay, let's, okay, Joy you got a minute to think about it? Yes, I can think. Think, okay, back here. All right, so thank you so much for creating this space for us to discuss Child Lens Investing. My name is Claire Ugoike and I work with the American Heart Association and part of what we do is we have a social impact funds as in addition to the public health programs that we actually implement. For the social impact funds, we work with over a hundred community-based organizations where we invest in them to address social determinants of health. And so part of their solutions are basically focusing on children. We do like education, solutions around education, assess how the food, health and all that. So I'm wondering what kind of metrics would you suggest like when you're looking at Child Lens Investing, how do you measure that? How do you, what are frameworks for measuring such kind of investment? Measurement, sounds like a Caitlin question. Yeah, happy to take that one. I mean, I hate that like all of my responses not in this panel but in life are generally, it depends and it depends on the sector. And health is not a huge portion of our portfolio so I can't kind of think through some of the health specific metrics that you might think of but like Christina said, you know, they're building this impact metrics bank of existing impact metrics. So kind of sourcing from the existing metrics that are out there. And I mean really like if you think about the five dimensions of impact, what, who, how much, impact risk and contribution, this is just another who that we haven't thought of. We're not coming up with brand new metrics. These are just the same metrics that we're collecting if you're measuring health outcomes. This is just measuring the same health outcomes for children. I mean there might, there's probably certain sectors particularly education where the metrics do change so kind of take what I'm saying with a grain of salt but it's really, it's less about completely changing our measurement approach and more about centering a stakeholder that has not been a consideration in the past. So hopefully that helps a little bit. Do you have anything to add to that? I mean, we'll publish the framework is out. The toolkit will be published on our website. Hopefully by the end of this week and with it will be a link to the metrics bank so we encourage you to look at that. And I love what Caitlin said, it's about the who. Now because we are asking investors to also consider the impact on indirect beneficiaries, investors might be already tracking impacts or sorry outputs and outcomes for their primary target. So again, if it's about affordable housing, it's a number of housing units on the market that are now affordable, number of housing units that have more than two or three rooms which are typically for families. But we are asking investors to track additional metrics that are available, again, they're not new metrics but if possible, how many newly housed children as a result of those housing entities. So this is an example of an extension of existing metrics but moving beyond just the direct beneficiaries to indirect beneficiaries which we know are children but are not getting counted or measured. Great. Joy, you got a few minutes of prep time now. I'm not sure it is. When he does it, it works. So Joy Anderson, Criterion Institute and we've been alongside UNICEF and others in thinking through what would a child lens investment look like and I had actually a question back to you because one is I think what you've reinforced so well and what we learned in gender lens investing is it's important to continue to say we're not creating a new reality. We're not suddenly saying there's this thing that you're gonna create, children already exist. They are already affected by our portfolios. It's not like a new thing that we're making up. It's already there. The question is whether or not you have a clear lens to see it and I think that's where people get confused. Oh my gosh, there's gonna be more than one lens. We have to think about race and gender and children and well yes, you really should be thinking about all of those things at the same time without your head exploding but I think that's there. So I had actually raised my hand to ask a question, David, before you called me out but because one of the things we learned in gender lens investing where I think we went wrong early on is all of our early convenience around gender lens investing didn't actually include very many gender experts, honestly. It was created by people who were responding to investor needs that were talking about investment opportunities, looking at the data case and it was all really good work. And building the traction and all of that but so maybe one of my questions is many of you named the sort of expertise about how to look and UNICEF has this in spades, right? Sort of how do you look at in having a lens, how do we make sure it's a smart lens that actually is drawing from child rights organizations, the people who have been saved the children, people who have been looking at children's issues for a long time, how do we make sure that that depth doesn't get lost in this new movement? Because I think it's one of, we were underwhelming in gender lens investing. We sort of got focused on women on boards and didn't have a deeper, more robust story and so it's, I think this is going in a different direction but I'm curious about that and I'll also just reinforce Christina's point. We are doing tomorrow a session in the morning that really is just what we used to do for the gender lens investing breakfast here that are like, everybody come together and talk about what you're doing to build the field of child lens investing so that will be tomorrow and not a panel just a whole bunch of people talking but that's my question to you. All right so if you can craft your answer to sort of how to be smarter and what's next and make it a closing statement then you get extra points. Oh I always wanted the extra points so I'm gonna do my best here. Sorry, it's the nerd in me. It's a really good question Joy and I think that is why we wanted, we felt very strongly that UNICEF had to be at the table as a convener but obviously not the only voice in the room and that's because we do have deep programmatic expertise, not the only one clearly on what has worked for children across different thematic areas of investment and different geographies and so certainly in development of this framework we socialize this extensively within UNICEF, within our different divisions, our social policy team, our different program divisions, et cetera, our child rights and business teams to get their input and so that framework is reflective of that expertise. In terms of what's next, I mentioned that we're asking people to very much reflect. We think that one of the things that we've heard is an opportunity, not just to need an opportunity to take this incredible framework that is at a high level and deepen it, go one layer deeper into thematic areas where truly that expertise that UNICEF has will come to life. So, and I often hear my colleague Erin saying this, well what's the difference between a WASH fund and a WASH child lens investing fund? We need to bring that to life. What are the particular outputs and outcomes that we know are hugely important in the WASH space? And by the way, they may vary by geographies, but my guess is they may not. And then bring that to life. We're not gonna be certifying funds, but we can certainly bring that knowledge through a deeper development of thematic guide. So that is definitely something that we're already in conversations on and thinking about. And then my closing statement. I leave you with this vision, right? Today, we always hear this rally call for net zero. And some of you said it before, but what if the rally call is no poverty, half of child poverty? That needs to be the rally cry by all private sector investors, not just philanthropists and governments. Yeah, my answer will be less sophisticated to, I mean, Joy's question, just copy as much as possible, don't try to reinvent. I mean, UNICEF has done all sorts of great work. We have our own kind of version that builds off that, tries to take it a little bit further. So just, you know, the EdTech fund here, the Global Alliance on Improved Nutrition has a, I mean, Joy, to your point, many fund managers are already doing child lens investing. They're just not talking about it. So I think for those people who wanna join in, just kind of use what's out there and then start talking about it more. The community of impact investors in this room, I mean, if they just simply decided to adopt child lens investing, we already have a force, a force that can go to kind of broader markets and take this to a new level. And so some of this is just about coming together as a community and saying, let's give voice to children because in this community, children don't really have a voice. So all we have to do is take a few easy steps to adopt this and we're already kind of like halfway through this battle. So talk to every impact investment fund manager on this campus about child lens investing. And Roberta, you have to get in on the game too as well. Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition. I mean, obviously plus one to what Christina and Preet said, I will, you know, I think there's two kind of angles that I'd like to take here in terms of like who's an expert as well. So obviously looking at the research and relying on like the programmatic experts like UNICEF and Save the Children, it's one of the reasons we were so comfortable but also excited to engage with this framework. But in our portfolio, the experts are the fund managers. That's who we ask. Of course, the research is important. The academics are important and it's important to test our assumptions against what the research says is likely to happen. But we put a lot of faith, a lot of weight into our fund managers' experience on the ground and then the entrepreneurs' experience on the ground as well. And so how can we, and I'd love to like leave folks with this, you know, how can we elevate the community voice and children's voices here? You know, whether it's through surveys, whether it's through asking their parents, and I know there's all sorts of complications we can get into after the panel about what parents might say versus what children might say. But how can we go direct and really understand what children think about the impact that we're creating for them? How do we elevate community voice? And then I guess, you know, one just kind of parting thought. I've said it before, but I'll say it again. Just start asking questions. If you are a fund manager, start asking your portfolio companies. If you are an LP, start asking your GPs. Just start asking questions about how this might be relevant to the fund, to the portfolio company, to the entrepreneur, to the small business, to their family. And I think folks will be just really, really surprised at the positive response that they'll get. Terrific. So ask questions, socialize in the impact world and poverty and child poverty.