From her office in Delhi, Dr Nisha Dhawan is doing something her predecessors at EMpower never did: running a global foundation from the Global South. The new president and CEO of the New York-headquartered foundation, which was set up 25 years ago by emerging markets investment professionals to channel money back into the regions generating their returns, was never asked to relocate. That, she says, is the point, and it is a recognition of the importance of leadership that’s close to the people an organisation is helping.

“I was never asked to get on a plane and move to London or move to New York,” she says. “And that, I think, is not only different for EMpower, but it is different for the sector as a whole.” Her appointment lands at an awkward moment for development finance. Official development assistance from OECD donor countries fell 23.1 percent in real terms in 2025 to $174.3bn, according to preliminary data published by the OECD in April – the steepest single-year drop on record. The US alone drove three-quarters of the decline, falling by 56.9 percent.

At the same time, investment capital is flowing back. US ETFs focused on EM stocks absorbed almost $31bn over the year, according to estimates from Strategas Securities.

Investment, philanthropy or a hybrid
The World Bank has put the financing gap needed to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by 2030 at around $4trn. But can private capital, whatever form that may take, whether it is investment, philanthropy or some hybrid, meaningfully fill a gap of that scale?

Dhawan, who started at Deutsche Bank and Barclays in London before completing a PhD at IIT Delhi, has spent 14 years inside EMpower watching the answer evolve.

“It is absolutely possible,” she says of philanthropy stepping into the vacuum. “It is amazing to see how the philanthropic sector has stepped up, namely individuals. I feel like there is a lot more risk capital, for lack of a better word, coming from individuals than we have ever seen. And corporates are really thinking through their role, their responsibility in what it means to be giving back in the markets they are investing in.”

It is amazing to see how the philanthropic sector has stepped up

EMpower has deployed over $60m across nearly 400 locally run organisations in 15 countries since 2000. But what EMpower brings to the table is more than just capital, it is a different model of sustainable giving, and what that kind of philanthropy can do, Dhawan argues, is sit beside investment capital rather than replace public funding.

“We know that top down investment doesn’t work,” she says. “If we flip the script where that top down which is necessary and non-negotiable investment in the emerging markets is clubbed together with meaningful, strategic, effective philanthropy at the local grassroots level. That is where the magic happens, because that is where they meet in the middle. And that is where you are going to see the needle moving in emerging market countries.”

Almost 70 percent of EMpower’s money comes from financial services, raised largely through galas and donor networks in London, New York and Singapore, but the granting decisions are kept local. Country teams based on the ground identify and back local organisations directly, and partners are funded for 10 years rather than the one- or two-year cycles typical of the sector. In India, for example, the final call on which new organisations to bring into the portfolio sits with EMpower’s youth fellows. These are young people from the communities the foundation serves.

Investment strategy
Of course, it is not just in India that EMpower taps into the knowledge of the people it is helping. In Mexico, fellows are helping design the investment strategy in the country. In South Africa, a cohort is shaping how mental health programming gets embedded across the regional portfolio. And in Indonesia, fellows have helped build a secular and reproductive health curriculum that is now used across grantee partners in the greater Jakarta area. “It is young people creating a curriculum that is then embedded across several of our organisations,” Dhawan says. “Expertise lies in the hands of the people that we most want to serve.”

Dhawan rejects the sector’s habitual obsession with scale in numbers. She points to the Antarang Foundation, whose school-to-work modules the Indian government now runs across six states; Virlanie in the Philippines, working with young people born on the streets; and a partner in Argentina that helped embed mental health programming across Buenos Aires.

“Success can be depth and it can be influence and influencing others in a meaningful way,” she says. “The greatest cream that rises to the top is that for us success looks like sustainability.” That meeting point between commercial and concessional capital is where investment managers like Triodos Investment Management are operating.

Triodos recently signed an agreement with the Austrian Development Bank and with FMO. Their investment will be integrated into the Hivos-Triodos Fonds, a fund that will then be used to deploy capital into agriculture, renewable energy and the like.

Maritza Cabezas, senior investment strategist, says one of the ways the group can create greater impact is by “collaborating with institutions whose sources of funding can be cheaper than ours, and in that way getting more attractive investments for our clients. It has to be at the lowest cost possible but have the highest impact possible, and therefore we find these partnerships through blended finance quite attractive.”

Cabezas adds: “We have several examples of how we work with different development financial institutions to finance projects that need attractive funding costs in order to be viable. We finance agriculture projects in Ghana that use technology in the agricultural sector.” But there are challenges. She says that because large development finance institutions are very demanding, their requirements can be challenging for the smaller investees Triodos funds in emerging economies.

Considering the impacts
Another challenge is the existence of non-like-minded investors that do not consider the impact they are having in emerging markets. Because the cost of considering impact isn’t transparent, returns of those who are doing harm to people and the planet can seem higher. Therefore, it can be difficult to attract the capital that is needed to invest in areas that Triodos prioritises, such as financial inclusion or biodiversity.

For EMPower there is another difficulty to attracting capital. Its giving largely tracks the financial markets its donors work in, with the foundation feeling the 2008 and 2013 downturns clearly. But institutional funders, where roughly 30 percent of its funding comes from, provides a counterweight to market cycles and lets the organisation back its boldest ideas.

What we want to make sure is that this time no one is left behind

“Ford Foundation, Co-Impact, SIF, all of these organisations who have the technical wherewithal, but also the gravitas, have enabled us to try out our boldest ideas, whether that is girls making the final decisions about our grant making, or whether that is bringing together youth fellows to decide curricula,” Dhawan said. Adam Heuman, vice president of global development at EMpower, agrees and recalls what the organisation’s co-chair Mary-Therese Barton, who is also CIO for fixed income at Pictet Asset Management, says.

“The way she puts it is that emerging markets are back as an asset class. And that is something to really celebrate. What we want to make sure is that this time no one is left behind,” he says. “We hope that there is a boost to what we are able to do in terms of capital inflows. But how we use that is to make sure that no young person gets left behind.”

One way Dhawan wants to ensure that is done, and other investors also think about it as well, is by applying a gender lens to every single investment decision.

“We can’t talk about moving the needle in a market and seeing overall GDP going up if we are not considering the people that live within it,” she says. “And we can’t consider the people that live within it if we are not meaningfully double clicking on the lived realities and the barriers, the additional barriers that women and girls face.” She adds: “If we start thinking about young people who are not in education, in entrepreneurship or in technical training, and we break down that number, very often, it is a woman or a girl. If everybody got to start thinking about disaggregating for gender in a meaningful way, or even just assuming the gender lens, it would change the planet.”