Accidental Father of Impact: Nick O'Donohoe on Leading BSC, BII & Building Investability in Emerging Markets

Episode notes

Blended finance is what makes the hardest deals in emerging markets investable. Nick O’Donohoe knows this better than most. As the former CEO of British International Investment, he helped deploy billions into infrastructure, healthcare, and manufacturing across Africa and South Asia, using capital structures others considered too risky. In this episode, Nick explains how BII used blended finance to back high-risk infrastructure and essential services where commercial investors rarely go. He shares how impact measurement evolved from hand-waving to hard metrics and why the tools matter if you want to invest seriously in social impact. We talk about: why some returns only come with risk no one wants how “patient and flexible” actually plays out on the ground why capital structure is the real difference-maker in emerging markets why one of their funds was designed to lose money but didn’t If you think emerging markets are too risky, listen to someone who ran toward them. - Discover More from SRI360°: Explore all episodes of the SRI360° Podcast:

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