Co-Creating Financing Solutions Through The Application Of Futures Thinking, Systems Practices And Innovation Methods
EVPA in partnership with the Jacobs Foundation embarked on a journey to design a space for funders, investors, and other stakeholders to co-sense existing realities, explore future opportunities and co-create practical financing solutions to systemic challenges by applying experimentation, system thinking and innovation methods. The first Lab is envisaged to be on education later this year, but the Transformative Finance Lab method may be applied to any challenge in any sector.
Why such a Transformative Finance Lab? We believe that new methods and approaches are needed to enhance the contribution of capital to the kind of transformation required today. While societal problems are complex and interconnected, financing solutions addressing them are usually developed and applied in an isolated and disconnected manner. That is the problem the Lab aims to address.
Who should join us? We invite investors, impact finance professionals, innovation experts and futurists to learn more about Labs in transformative finance, possible outcomes and design options. And we invite participants to share with us how such a Lab relates to your work. The IFB session will be based on the open interview series EVPA conducted with leading lab managers and experts in this field in the past weeks and feed into an upcoming Lab Design Workshops hosted by EVPA on 3 May.
This session is organised in partnership with Artha Network, the host of the Impact for Breakfast platform.
Watch the Recording
> Download the slides
If you still have further suggestions on topics/challenges to which a Lab process could make a real difference, please add them here.
We invite you to fill in this short form (which will take less than 5min, promise!). This will help us for the upcoming Transformative Finance Lab Design Workshop on 3 May.
Donika Dimovska
Anja Koenig
Anja-N. Koenig is an impact investing, entrepreneurship and sustainable development expert as well as a trained facilitator in collaborative innovation and system change processes. She has more than 20 years of professional experience in the DACH region, (Central and Eastern) Europe, MENA, Africa, Asia and Latin America working with public and private sector clients on impact strategies, innovative finance and public private partnerships as well as incubating innovative projects for impact.
Until 2018 she supported entrepreneurship development in emerging countries at Swisscontact Foundation in Zurich. In 2015, she co-initiated and led Finance for Change at the Impact Hub Berlin to promote and encourage the use of finance for impact amongst philanthropic funders, business angels, VC funds and financial institutions. Between 2010 and 2014 she researched ways to strengthen the social investment market in Turkey, supported by Rockefeller Foundation and Mercator Foundation, before designing and leading the JP Morgan Chase Foundation Social Investment Programme at the Entrepreneurship Centre of Sabanci University in Istanbul. She also worked with Financial Advisory Services of PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) in Frankfurt, including in the impact evaluation of German Development Bank KfW and with PwC Transaction Services of PwC in Nairobi. She came to Kenya in 2004 as a long-term government advisor appointed by German Development Agency GIZ. She spent several years with economic consulting companies in London, advising public and private sector clients on public-private partnerships, regulation and policies in (renewable) energy, water and telecommunications sectors.
Since 2015 she has been co-host of the Impact Investing Roundtable Berlin (now Impact for Breakfast Berlin), a member of Women in Social Finance and a mentor with impact career organization On Purpose Berlin and German women career platform MentorMe. She holds an MBA from University Mannheim/Germany, a diploma in Political Science and Economics (IEP Science Po Paris/France) and a Post Master's Certification in Development Studies (GDI, Germany). She obtained additional leadership and facilitation qualifications inter alea from the Presencing Institute at MIT (Theory U), the Generative Facilitation Institute and the LEAD Academy, both in Berlin.