Funding Impact at Scale Through Market Segmentation
Speakers
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Debbie is Co-founder of Proximity Designs, a social business delivering affordable and innovative products for smallholder farms. Aung Din has engaged in design and economic research in Myanmar. She lived and worked in Mississippi, Cambodia and Indonesia, and holds a MA from Harvard University in public policy and development economics. She received social entrepreneurship awards from the Schwab Foundation (World Economic Forum) and the Skoll Foundation. Proximity designs and delivers new and critical low-carbon farm products and services that help farmers restore fragile soils, protect crops from pest and disease, save irrigation water and grow food in more productive and sustainable ways. Products and services support regenerative farming while boosting farm incomes by USD 250 annually. Since 2004, its services have spanned over 10,000 villages in Myanmar, enabling 5 million people to grow their farm enterprises and afford food, healthcare and education for their families.
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Director of Integrated Delivery, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
As the Director of Integrated Delivery, Dana works with both the Global Development and Global Health programs to speed up the launch, improve the delivery, enhance integration, and scale up the use of life saving and life changing products, services, technologies, and service delivery innovations.
Dana has broad experience in healthcare delivery and has designed, launched and managed successful health programs on five continents. Most recently, he was Chief Executive of Marie Stopes International, leading a global network of family health, reproductive health and HIV/AIDS prevention programs operating in 40 countries. Prior to that role, he was Senior Vice President of Population Services International (PSI). Dana has spent nearly 10 years living and working in Francophone West Africa and Pakistan.
Dana received his BA in Economics from the University of Notre Dame in Indiana, and his MSc in International Political Economy from the London School of Economics.
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Founder, FIGURE80
Graduating from Oxford University in 1983, Sam Parker started his career in business, working for 6 years in the agrochemical industry, with a focus on Latin America. After a two-year break, working as a volunteer with street children in Sao Paulo, Brazil, Sam returned to business with 11 years at UK-based commodity trading company, ED&F Man. Following posts in London, Caracas, New York and Singapore, Sam was appointed Managing Director of the company’s Asian business. In 2002, he returned to the development sector with a role at the International Save the Children Alliance, leading the organisational development of its 30 national members. 2006, Sam joined Water & Sanitation for the Urban Poor (WSUP), as its first CEO. WSUP is a not-for-profit company, which brings together private sector and NGO expertise to address the pressing global challenge of delivering water and sanitation services to the growing number of people who live in urban slums. In 2014, Sam won a Skoll Foundation Award for Social Entrepreneurship. In 2015, Sam was appointed Director of the Shell Foundation, which co-creates and funds the growth of social enterprises bringing essential services to low-income consumers, with a focus on renewable energy, sustainable mobility and SME finance. Recognizing the crucial importance of social entrepreneurs in achieving the SDGs, in 2021, Sam founded FIGURE80, an advisory firm that helps social enterprises to modernize governance and recenter business strategies for maximum impact.
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Founder + CEO, Global Development Incubator
Andrew Stern is the Founder and CEO of the Global Development Incubator (GDI), a non-profit incubator for transformational development ventures, working to build and scale the next generation of social impact solutions. GDI has designed and launched numerous groundbreaking efforts, including: building the first investor platform for blended finance in Convergence; putting global mental health on the map through citiesRISE; guiding the startup strategy and operations of the Global Fund to End Modern Slavery; and expanding financing for the world’s half billion smallholder farmers with ISF Advisors and Aceli Africa, among other initiatives.
Prior to GDI, Andrew was a Partner at Dalberg Advisors where he worked for 10 years, including as the Global Operating Partner and head of the Inclusive Growth Practice. Andrew helped start, design and launch the Aspen Network of Development Entrepreneurs (ANDE), a program at the Aspen Institute that propels entrepreneurship in emerging markets. Andrew previously served on ANDE’s Executive Committee and also as the founding Co-Chairperson for mothers2mothers, an internationally recognized health program preventing HIV transmission from mothers to children.
Andrew holds an MBA from Harvard Business School, a Master’s in Public Policy from Harvard Kennedy School, and a BA in Economics from Princeton University.
