BagoSphere at Impact Forum 2012

“All of you here today are critical to helping shepherd Asia’s evolution as a leader in the impact investing community – appropriately held at one of the epicenters of that evolution: Singapore.”

– Dr. Judith Rodin, President of the Rockefeller Foundation

At February’s Social Business Week in Singapore, the BagoSphere team met Durreen Shahnaz, Founder and Chairwoman of Impact Investment Exchange and Founder and Managing Director of Impact Investment Shujog. Conversations followed with Durreen and her team about putting BagoSphere on their Impact Partners Platform. With the kind sponsorship from Bank of America Merrill Lynch, BagoSphere had the privilege of participating in the inaugural Impact Forum 2012 and the Social Enterprise (SE) Showcase also happening at the Forum. We are extremely grateful to IIX and Merrill Lynch for this incredible opportunity.

At the Social Enterprise (SE) Showcase, BagoSphere and 3 other social enterprises pitched in front of 30 impact investors. We joked that it was the first time being in a room of investors that you don’t need to explain what a social enterprise is. There was good interaction and Q&A with the impact investors after the pitch.

As the first of its kind in Asia, one of the forum’s purposes was to “Impart a deeper understanding of impact investment, impact measurement and market readiness of Social Enterprises around Asia.”  The forum no doubt did its part in bringing the stakeholders together, and over 2 full days, serious topics such as impact measurement and the state of impact investing in Asia were discussed. It also featured high profile speakers and panels from financial institutions, governments, International Organizations, as well as social enterprises.  

We felt that the overall atmosphere at the forum was a combination of excitement and optimism with a twinge of realism. Consider the discussion on Impact Investing by Stanford Social Innovation Review – The Trouble with Impact Investing, “On its face, impact investing seems like a great deal—organizations get cheap money (er, “patient capital”) and investors get real impact. It’s great when it works that way, but the case for impact is often dubious, and there is a lot of confusion about when impact investing works and when it doesn’t.” One thing is clear from the Forum - there is still a great deal of exploration, experimentation and discussion on both sides (investors/philanthropists and social entrepreneurs) that is needed. We are glad that Impact Forum made its debut in South-East Asia, where BagoSphere will be most active.

At the end of the day, BagoSphere is an enterprise. We are raising capital to start a business – an organization that creates shared value to all our shareholders. Our shareholders includes rural youths whom we have pledged to empower out of poverty, the local government whom we are working together to solve youth unemployment, the call centers whom we are working to solve their human resource needs, and microfinance institutions to create micro-training loans for their clients.

In other words, its business as usual at BagoSphere.