Paying for Progress: How Monetizing Impact Unleashes Growth

A landscape of different tools now exist to pay companies for the positive externalities of their operations. A plastic recycler in Kerala earns plastic credits for diverting ocean-bound waste, and can use that additional revenue to pay fair wages to their workers. A company that preserves biodiversity can monetize that impact and drive more value to local and Indigenous communities.

However, too few of these instruments are scaling to meet the scope of the problems we face. Deforestation rates increased by about 2 million hectares in 2024. A third of all plastic waste was not properly managed. We need outcome-based finance to fundamentally shift the way our economic systems operate, not to tinker at the margins.

This interactive workshop will bring together entrepreneurs, investors, and philanthropic funders to design more effective ways to scale tools that pay companies for producing positive impact. It will be structured in 4 parts:

1. Participants will learn from a company monetizing its impact, a funder dedicating capital to pay for positive externalities, and an investor structuring vehicles to bring the two together.
2. Participants will propose and vote on key principles for scalable impact-linked finance, on behalf of various actors (company, funder, intermediaries).
3. Participants will be sorted into mixed groups of philanthropists, investors, and entrepreneurs to design a vehicle that could raise and deploy sufficient capital to shift the development and growth of solutions. This will be structured around a key problem for which there is some evidence of impact-linked finance moving the needle, but not at scale.
4. Participants will share their designs with the group then answer questions. The session will end with a summary.