Impact Finance - Philanthropy, Investment and Blended Finance

faces a financing gap that neither aid nor private capital can close alone. Blended finance, combining concessional public funding with private investment, offers a practical structure to bridge it. This presentation examines how philanthropic capital can absorb first-loss risk in infrastructure and social impact projects, unlocking larger private finance flows in markets where perceived risk keeps investors out. Drawing on cases from West Africa, it identifies the conditions under which blended structures have worked, where they have failed, and what institutional reforms would make them effective at scale.

I developed international award winning model of "Lifestyle Approach to Wealth". At Millésime we work from one premise: wealth cannot be planned in pieces. Tax, legal structuring, succession and family governance only work when they are designed around how a family actually lives, not as separate disciplines bolted together. Impact capital deserves the same lens. A project can score well on governance or alignment and still be the wrong fit for a family if nobody has asked how it sits inside their succession plan, their cross-border tax exposure, or the multi-generational story they are building. Research conducted as part of an LL.M. in Tax at the University of Geneva Faculty of Law makes the stakes concrete: comparing the tax treatment of equivalent financial instruments for Swiss-resident and Brazilian-resident investors shows that an identical allocation can swing by more than one percentage point in net return, and reverse which instrument is actually optimal, purely as a function of residence and legal wrapper, with no change to the underlying investment. The same blind spot exists in impact allocations. This presentation proposes a practical addition to evaluation frameworks such as AGILE: a whole-life structuring check, wealth, family and life together, that lets family offices turn a strong impact diagnosis into capital their clients can actually deploy, and a return they actually keep. Awards: Family Wealth Awards LATAM-Miami 2025; Swiss Wealth Briefing Awards 2026; City Wire LATAM awards 2025;

Impact evaluation frameworks screen the project: its financial base, its theory of change, its governance, its scale potential. These criteria predict how well a project is built. They predict less well whether the project will still be standing in five years, because a project’s ability to deliver and sustain impact depends on conditions that sit outside the project itself: the market it sells into, the supply chain it draws on, the regulation it operates under, the funders and infrastructure around it. When those conditions hold, a well-built project performs. When they erode, even the best-scored project struggles, and no criterion applied at project level will have flagged it in time.

This talk proposes adding a criterion that project-level frameworks currently omit: an assessment of the structural adaptive capacity of the system a project depends on, alongside the project itself.

Two variables define the exposure. Condition decay is the state of the enabling conditions: whether the resource base, the funding pool, the regulatory setting or the market a project depends on is stable or deteriorating. Structural rigidity is the capacity of the surrounding system to reorganise when conditions change: concentrated dependencies, limited substitution options and no history of adaptation under past stress mark a system that will not adjust in time, whatever the individual actors within it intend.

A project embedded in a rigid, decaying system carries risk that project-level criteria cannot see, because that risk sits in the network around the project, not in the project’s own numbers.

The fashion industry illustrates the mechanism outside impact finance: two decades of company-level ESG engagement left the sector’s structure, fragmented supply chains, short cycles, concentrated economic profit, largely unchanged, and one impact investor eventually exited the sector rather than continue engaging company by company. The pattern generalises. Company-level and project-level evaluation, however rigorous, cannot detect or correct risk that is produced at system level.

For the AGILE tool, this suggests a fifth criterion alongside the financial base, impact, human goals and scale potential already identified: a structural conditions screen, built from a small number of indicators (concentration of dependencies, substitutability, diversity of the surrounding ecosystem, evidence of past adaptation) applied to the sector or geography a project sits in, before or alongside project-level scoring.

The screen would flag projects that score well on their own merits but sit in a system unlikely to sustain them, and would give funders a basis for directing some support from the project to the shared conditions around it, such as standards, infrastructure or coordination among peer projects.

The presentation draws on Resilion’s methodology work on industry-level adaptive capacity for financial and impact portfolios, and on published analysis of why company-level and project-level theories of change persistently underperform their promise.

Beyond conventional selection criteria and standard project analysis processes, a corporate foundation’s impact strategy relies on activating two essential and often underexploited levers: partners and employees. This presentation explores how to build horizontal partnership relationships and co-construction with supported organizations, moving beyond the traditional donor-beneficiary logic through an impact analysis. It then details the employee onboarding and engagement solutions that transform staff into authentic ambassadors of the philanthropic mission. This transdisciplinary approach demonstrates how aligning internal and external stakeholders multiplies the real impact of corporate philanthropy, while strengthening alignment between corporate purpose and concrete actions. Keywords: Corporate foundations ; Co-construction ; Horizontal partnership ; Employee engagement ; Multiplied impact ; Philanthropic ecosystem

Geneva has been one of the main centers of global governance for many decades as it houses numerous of the most important multilateral organizations as well as national and international non-governmental organizations. Over time, it has created a unique environment to allow these organizations to operate and interact in a unique ecosystem. As a result, Geneva positioned itself as a special international political and normative zone, or hub, where the private sector, governments, and civil society can interact and collaborate.

For decades, also serving as the European headquarters of the UN, International Geneva has created an entire ecosystem enabling functioning of IO’s, state missions, and international personnel, establishing communication channels, administrative, socio-cultural, and economic infrastructure.

The current crisis at the United Nations, caused mainly by the United States’ withdrawal from dozens of institutions, commissions, and UN bodies (all together 66 announced), as well as its withdrawal from financial commitments, has resulted not only in a major financial crisis and a lack of liquidity but also in the need to reformulate the operational strategies of international organizations based in Geneva, causing a domino effect and impacting the entire system.

This crisis manifests itself, among other things, in massive job cuts and the relocation of international organizations to other countries to offset operational costs. However, this also has much broader implications: the relocation of organizations - including their outflow from International Geneva - is accompanied by the transfer of knowledge, funds, expertise (institutional memory), sponsors/donors, and key partnerships and networks.

My project and presentation is based on the assumption that as governance erodes, so too do decision-making processes, values, networks of contacts and cooperation, mechanisms for collaboration, and thus, the ability to respond effectively and efficiently to global problems. This appears also to be a central concern for Geneva as well.

However, this crisis could be also seen as an opportunity for Geneva to reposition itself in future as a true global governance hub (e.g. it might trigger greater engagement from non-Western philanthropy and the revitalization of sectors from the Global South).

Given the above context, during my presentation I will briefly address a few problems. First, the possible scale of the erosion (or fragmentation?) of global governance, its symptoms, and its consequences for various actors involved. Second, a question regarding the future role of International Geneva in this process, including the identification of key challenges, opportunities and scale of consequences. Third, identification of the role, key challenges and opportunities for philanthropic foundations within this dynamic.

Primary research method: Network analysis: with a particular focus on the role of International Geneva and philanthropic foundations (including graphical representations to present research findings). *Network analysis is a method used to study the structures, relationships, and connections between actors within a given system. In addition to analyzing the characteristics of individual actors, network analysis focuses on how they are connected to one another and how these connections influence the shape of the entire system.

In particular, this method involves mapping the network of connections: including the identification of all major nodes of cooperation, key-dominant actors, characteristics of mutual connections and relationships, areas of cooperation, the roles of individual actors, patterns, relationships, central and peripheral actors, etc.

It will allow for the identification of centers of cooperation, the "shortest" connections between actors, as well as possible consequences and potential solutions (it allows detection of weak points, optimization of structure, points of erosion, decision-making centers, or their transfer, ctr).

Biodiversity Club is an international initiative aimed at supporting the creation, financing and long-term resilience of private nature reserves worldwide. The project seeks to connect landowners, conservation organisations, scientists, local stakeholders, philanthropists and impact-oriented funders in order to protect areas of high ecological value through durable and locally anchored conservation mechanisms. Rather than acting as a centralised operator, Biodiversity Club is designed as a facilitator and international network, helping to identify conservation opportunities, strengthen partnerships, mobilise appropriate resources, and develop operational tools. The project explores a key impact-finance question: how can private and philanthropic capital contribute effectively to long-term biodiversity conservation while ensuring ecological integrity, transparent governance and measurable impact ?