The Brief

The Brief: Fund managers go east in search of Asia’s impact capital

ImpactAlpha · May 26, 2026

Greetings Agents of Impact! This week, find Jessica Pothering at Katapult Fest in Amsterdam, David Bank at GLI Forum Latam in Lima and Erik Stein at LatAm Climate Innovation Summit in Mexico City. ImpactAlpha is the media partner for all three conferences. Say hi!

In today’s Brief:

  • Go east, young (and old) fund managers
  • Workforce housing in an Ohio Opportunity Zone
  • Sustainably sourced cosmetics in Africa
  • Courageous capital in an age of autocracy

Asia’s Moment: The ‘now generation’ shaping the future of impact investing (podcast). The term impact investing may have been coined in the West. The practice’s future is being shaped in the East. From Singapore to South Korea, Japan to Hong Kong, investors in a mosaic of Asia-Pacific markets are defining Asia’s distinctive edge in the global impact investment ecosystem: patient capital, intergenerational stewardship and disciplined innovation. Giving the movement momentum is a rising “now generation” steering the region’s innovative operating businesses and investment portfolios toward sustainability and social impact. “There’s this undercurrent of energy and willingness to try and come together,” Katy Yung, who leads the Hong Kong-based Sustainable Finance Initiative, tells ImpactAlpha’s Dennis Price on the latest Agents of Impact podcast. “The reality is it has to be an intergenerational effort.” SFi’s Impact Summit convenes next week in Hong Kong as part of a week-long series of events bringing together more than 300 leading family offices, asset owners and private investors from Hong Kong, the Asia-Pacific region and beyond.

  • On the agenda. In town for the summit are impact chief investment officers Hareesh Nair of Tsao Pao Chee Group and Noelle Laing of Builders Vision; ⁠bankers Tom Road of Barclays Private Bank and Marie-Laure Schaufelberger of Pictet; Rocky Tung of Financial Services Development Council and Ivan Chew of Brightlight; and philanthropic leaders Chii-Fen Hiu of Temasek Trust and Motoi Kawabata of Japan Social Innovation and Investment Foundation. ImpactAlpha’s Jessica Pothering will lead a discussion with RS Group’s Annie Chen and Sana Kapadia of Heading for Change on how Asia’s investors are defining impact investing on their own terms. ImpactAlpha is SFi’s Impact Summit’s media partner.
  • Market dynamics. Asia’s different markets are evolving in distinct ways. Singapore benefits from strong government support and intermediary networks led by Temasek, Singapore’s state-owned investment firm. Japan’s ecosystem has been shaped by pension funds and policymakers. Hong Kong, with its blended history, is carving a role as a hub for cross-border collaboration and blended finance experimentation. According to SFi’s recent survey of asset owners, more than 90% of respondents allocate to sustainable investments, while 17% dedicate more than half of their portfolios to such strategies. 
  • Aligned capital. With impact investing facing headwinds in the US and Europe, fund managers from the West are traveling to Asia in search of capital from wealthy families and institutions. More than half of the capital for Leapfrog Investments’ $1.2 billion fourth fund came from Asian investors, including Temasek and Hong Kong insurer AIA. Last year, London-based TLG Capital, with a focus on small business finance in Africa, raised capital from Singapore-based Tsao Family Office. Yung says Asian family offices are looking for investments that complement their operating businesses, provide learning opportunities around issues such as biodiversity or agriculture, or create pathways for deeper engagement with communities. “That sort of instinct and DNA around impact for family offices in Asia has always been around,” Yung explains. “It’s just that the term has not existed.”
  • Keep reading and listen in, “Asia’s Moment: The ‘now generation’ shaping the future of impact investing (podcast).” Get the podcast in your feed by subscribing on Apple, Spotify or YouTube.

Dealflow: Affordable Housing 

Arctaris invests $4.1 million in workforce housing in an opportunity zone in Ohio. The town of Lima, Ohio, population 35,000, has a housing shortage severe enough to stunt the growth of its workforce. Arctaris Impact Investors is putting $4.1 million into an 18-unit development to create rental housing for healthcare workers connected to the nearby Mercy Health – St. Rita’s Medical Center. The investment, in one of the state’s opportunity zones, is the first from a $25 million initiative between Arctaris, the Lima municipal government, and the Lima/Allen County Chamber Foundation. It “represents exactly the kind of intentional investment our community has been working toward,” said Lima Mayor Sharetta Smith. “This deal is proof of concept that collaboration works and that investment in small and rural communities can have meaningful impact,” said Arctaris’ Nihar Sait. 

  • Place-based investing. Boston-based Arctaris has similar place-based investing programs in Arizona, Colorado, Maryland and Pennsylvania (see, “Impact investments in Opportunity Zones could drive home ownership – with a few policy tweaks”). The firm issues impact notes to accredited and institutional investors to raise capital for the programs, combining first-loss capital from local community foundations, governments and other philanthropic partners to spur housing, jobs and community economic development. Arctaris is also advocating for federal policy to drive homeownership through opportunity zones.
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Barka Capital invests in Laboratories Adeba for sustainable cosmetics. The New York and Côte d’Ivoire-based climate impact fund invests in African companies supporting sustainable agriculture, food systems, renewable energy and land restoration (see, “Seeding impact investing ecosystems in Senegal, Burkina Faso and Côte d’Ivoire”). It participated in a $200,000 funding round for Laboratoires Adeba, an organic skin and haircare company, also based in Abidjan, that sources its ingredients from a network of female farmers. CDC-CI Capital, the venture capital and small business investment arm of Côte d’Ivoire’s public finance agency, also invested. The deal is Barka Capital’s second organic cosmetics investment since March, when it took part in a $1 million funding round for Ghana-based Lyvv Cosmetics. Both Adeba and Lyvv use locally-sourced shea and cocoa butter, palm kernel oil and other sustainably produced ingredients. “This is exactly what we are built to back: founder-led, locally rooted, internationally competitive,” the Barka team said.

  • Restoration GP. Barka is in the market with a targeted $20 million fund. It secured $4 million last year from World Resources Institute Africa. WRI’s funding complemented an $8 million investment from the US International Development Finance Corporation and a $4 million grant from the Bezos Earth Fund in late 2023. To develop its pipeline, Barka runs a land restoration accelerator program, whose latest cohort supported 21 companies from the Rift Valley in Kenya, six from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Burundi and Rwanda, and four companies from Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire’s Cocoa Belt. Barka is also an implementation partner for the Greenpreneur Incubation Program in Côte d’Ivoire, an initiative of Seoul-based Global Green Growth Institute and backed by Korea’s development agency.

Dealflow overflow. Investment news crossing our desks:

  • New Hampshire-based Conservation Resources made its first investment from its second farmland fund, acquiring a 155-acre kiwi and citrus farm in California. (Conservation Resources)
  • Texture secured $12.5 million in a Series A equity round, led by VoLo Earth and Equal Ventures, to build an energy operating system for electric utilities, hardware equipment manufacturers and grid service providers. (Texture)
  • Acumen America has invested in ThriveLink, a St. Louis, Mo.-based developer of an AI-powered voice recognition tool that helps people with low levels of literacy apply for healthcare and essential social services. (Acumen America)

Impact Voices: Meeting the Moment

Courageous Capital: Impact investing in an age of autocracy. “Democratic backsliding rarely arrives as a coup. It comes through the slow consolidation of economic and institutional power – the narrowing of who can access resources, whose voices shape systems, and which communities can build durable futures,” Enduring Planet’s Dimitry Gershenson and Blended Value’s Jed Emerson write in a provocative guest post on ImpactAlpha. Gershenson and Emerson, who has authored a multi-part “Antidote to Autocracy” series, connect the current moment with longstanding issues in impact investing, including opaque and protracted decision-making. They think many impact investors may see themselves in their broad assessment: “Whether framed as risk management, fiduciary duty or ‘quiet leadership,’ a majority of foundations, family offices, endowments, high-net worth individuals and other allocators are slow-walking if not delaying their deployment of capital as an intentional choice in the face of rising autocracy.”

  • Accelerate deployment. “Today’s reality offers a unique opportunity to reflect and do better, so we can fill the void left by dismantled public institutions,” Gershenson and Emerson write. Among the recommendations: Reframe the recipient of capital, not as a supplicant, but as a constituent whose time, dignity, and resources deserve institutional respect. Slow deployment of capital exacts a substantial societal opportunity cost, they say. “Founders with existing capital networks, credentialed advisors, and patient runways might survive a 12-month diligence process. First-generation founders, community-based fund managers, and early-stage social enterprises generally cannot.”
  • Radical accountability. Practicing democracy in the investment process requires safe pathways for feedback and incentives for managers and allocators to act on it, the authors say. They call for funders to publish metrics such as Time to Term Sheet, Time to Wire and Time to No in their impact reports, as well as demographic data on who receives capital and who makes decisions. “The people who receive capital must have standing to evaluate the institutions that deploy it,” they write. “Transparency is not just a best practice—in this moment, it is a form of institutional accountability that democratic systems require from those who claim to serve them.”
  • Keep reading, “Courageous Capital: Impact investing in an age of autocracy,” by Dimitry Gershenson and Jed Emerson. 

Agents of Impact: Follow the Talent

Don’t miss these ImpactAlpha partner events:

CapShift appoints Carleigh Douglas, previously with the Center for High Impact Philanthropy, as managing director of client solutions… Maisie Silverman, former marketing director at 3i Members, joins The ImPact as a senior communications manager… Earthshot Ventures taps Bethel Gashaw, former development consultant at Generate, to help its investor community identify and evaluate founders building at the intersection of major technology shifts and impact.

Candide Group seeks a principal for its Afterglow Climate Justice Fund in Oakland… Ownership Works is looking for an advancement intern and a manager of culture and business transformation in New York… Sorenson Impact has an opening for an impact VC senior associate in Salt Lake City… The Resolution Foundation is hiring a senior or principal investment manager in London.

👉 View (or post) impact investing jobs on ImpactAlpha’s Career Hub.

Thank you for your impact!

– May 26, 2026