Impact Finance - Philanthropy, Investment and Blended Finance

With its first edition in 2001, and its renewed strategy in 2015, the Annual International Conference on Impact Finance, Philanthropy and Investments for Peace and Sustainable Development, keeps pace each year with the advancement of agile solutions and tools available to players in the field.

"Impact Finance and Partnership Opportunities:
Transdisciplinary impact projects as new funding sources to meet the goals of the UN and NGOs"

Monday, 8 December 2025 at Palais des Nations, United Nations, Geneva, Switzerland - Room XII - registration required, see below

In partnership with





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 Frame

Following the publication of the AGILE tool and its 5 families of criteria in the White Paper of the Geneva Foundation for the Future, this session will be an opportunity to compare its concrete applications (Dry Run).

Infrastructures, industries, start-ups, foundations, philanthropists, family offices and impact funds will discover how to apply AGILE to their field: self-assessment, scaling a business model, differentiating projects or identifying the most financially profitable impact initiatives.

Actors of the International Geneva, NGOs and UN System in particular will be able to integrate this tool into the structuring of transversal impact projects, enabling both the breaking down of silos and access to these new forms of financing.

Participants will leave with ready-to-use operational methods, directly applicable to their daily practice.

The exchanges between the stakeholders of this meeting will take place both in the form of a Round Table between the speakers and in the form of group debates involving the Assembly’s audience.

Geneva - NYC - Santiago - Nairobi - Cairo

Geneva - Monday, December 8, 2025, Morning

10th Annual International Conference on Philanthropy and Impact Investments for Peace and Development

 Call for contribution

What agile tools for Impact Finance? See the call for papers here.

 Proceedings from Previous Years

View this section.

 Program

SCHEDULE AND SPEAKERS

You will find the complete program here 15 days before the event.

from 08:00: On-site: Access badge generation for building entry
09:00–09:30: Welcome in the room and one-on-one meetings
Conference Opening, Introductory Remarks and Protocol, Session Introduction
M. Thomas EGLI, Host of the Geneva Forum (Geneva Forum) and Session Chair, Switzerland
09:45–10:45: Pitch Round (6 min. max. per speaker)
10h00-11h30 : (Official Opening Conference Workshop )
  • 09h45-10h00 : Interactives presentations in prime time
  • 10:00: Official opening - Between financing International Geneva and developing a financial hub for impact: what economic models? General adaptation issues and development opportunities.
  • 10:05: Opening remarks by Mr. Thomas EGLI, Founder and CEO of the Geneva Forum and protocols
  • 10:15: Opening remarks by Mr. Vincent CONUS, Counsellor on Sustainable Development and Global Health at the Permanent Mission of Switzerland to the UN in Geneva
  • 10:25: Introductory remarks by Ms. Béatrice FERRARI, Director, Directorate of International Affairs, Canton of Geneva
  • 10:35 : Mr. Vincent SUBILIA, CEO, Geneva Chamber of Commerce, Industry and Services
  • 10:45 : Mr. Anthony MILLER, Chief Coordinator, Sustainable Stock Exchanges Initiative, UNCTAD-DIAE, United Nations, Palais des Nations, Geneva, Switzerland
  • 10h55 : Mrs. Karen HITSCHKE, CEO, Building Bridges Foundation, Geneva
  • High-level speakers and guests
10:45–11:30: Open Roundtable and Breakout Group Workshop
Moderated by Mr. Thomas EGLI
11:30: End of morning session
From 11:30: Networking Opportunities
12:00: Free Lunch
13:30–14:00: Welcome in the room and one-on-one meetings
14:00: Conference Opening, Introductory Remarks and Protocol, Session Introduction
M. Thomas EGLI, Host of the Geneva Forum (Geneva Forum) and Session Chair, Switzerland
14:15–16:10: Pitch Round (6 min. max. per speaker)
Matthias SAMMER, LuLarge - Trustworthy Data Intelligence

HayStack - Audit-grade geolocation for sustainable finance

Abstract



Problem. High-stakes decisions in finance, insurance, infrastructure and supply chains are being made without trustworthy, audit-ready asset locations. Existing coordinates are fragmented, imprecise or unaudited, and rarely tied to clear ownership and evidence. This undermines compliance with sustainable-finance rules, misstates risk and exposure, and allows “green” claims that cannot be defended.

Solution. Haystack builds an audit-grade location backbone for real-world assets. For each site it returns a latitude–longitude pair with calibrated uncertainty, linked to the legal owner, a machine-readable evidence trail, and the outcome of rule-based checks (for example, protected-area buffers and legal siting constraints). Under the hood, the platform ingests disclosures and operational records, uses multilingual natural-language processing to extract facilities and owners, fuses text and tabular signals in a multidomain statistical model to estimate coordinates with calibrated uncertainty, and then applies a symbolic rule engine to enforce administrative and environmental constraints before packaging results with full provenance. The data foundation spans corporate and regulatory filings, permits and environmental assessments, procurement and logistics records, curated public registries, and authoritative geospatial layers (administrative boundaries, protected areas, hydrology and elevation), complemented by partner datasets and targeted validations.

Cecilia SERIN, Catalytic Finance Foundation

Catalytic Finance Foundation, leveraging blended finance for the SDGs

Abstract



Catalytic is a Swiss non profit supporting the development of private capital for the SDGs.

In the last months we announced our engagement in 3 big initiatives:
Accelerating clean urban transport in Brazil:
Together with Bloomberg Philanthropies, Brazil’s Ministry of Cities, BTG Pactual, The Mitigation Action Facility, and WRI Brasil, we’re supporting the launch of the Brazil E-Bus De-risking Fund — an €80 million blended finance vehicle designed to mobilize up to USD 500 million and deploy more than 1,700 electric buses across Brazilian cities.
https://lnkd.in/eNa2CjCM.

Catalyzing sustainable land use:
Catalytic will lead the technical assistance facility for Mirova’s Sustainable Land Use Strategy, a next-generation blended finance platform that supports nature-positive business models and communities worldwide.
https://lnkd.in/eaUEZgss

Launch a USD 93 million trust for Central African Forest
https://canopytrust.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/press-release-commitment-canopy-trust-final-.pdf

16:10–16:20: Presentation of the question to be addressed
16:20–17:25: Breakout Group Work
17:25–17:50: Interactive Roundtable (Feedback Session)
17:50–18:00: Closing Remarks
18:00: End of the workshop
19:00: Geneva Forum Networking Dinner

Following this session a statement will be published by the Geneva Forum to summarize what was discussed and decided during the session, and a prototype of an agile impact assessment tool for finance projects will be made available to partner organizations.

 Registration and Memberships

During the Geneva Forum, you can be a member of the audience, contribute ideas for Impact Projects or be in the process of scaling up Impact Projects, propose a Poster presentation, or submit a conference proposal to be delivered at the event. (Deadline for submitting an abstract: see the call for contributions for the conference)

To participate in the Geneva Forum, you must subscribe to the Membership "Event".

By subscribing to one of the memberships, you become a member for a period of one year.

Once your membership has been validated, you will receive all the necessary logistical information, as well as the link to generate your badge for each event, a few days beforehand.



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