TBN Asia Conference 2017 Overview

Datuk Dr Kim Tan, pioneer of impact investing, realised that charity rarely helps the causes it champions and came up with a more intelligent solution. 

He places great importance on the ownership of assets, because it helps migrate people from the informal to the formal economy. “It’s very expensive living in the informal economy … the poor get charged a lot more for everything. If they want to borrow money, for instance, they have to go to a loan shark. The products they buy are all in small packages that cost a lot more per unit than what you or I would buy in a supermarket.

Datuk Dr Kim Tan, pioneer of impact investing, realised that charity rarely helps the causes it champions and came up with a more intelligent solution. 

Impact investing — that is, putting money into projects or companies that help solve a social problem and make money — seems like a natural progression. Yet, we have only started to notice this trend in the past few years.

The old way of doing things, channelling charitable funds or aid money into projects with social impact, had been going on for decades. Few questioned the efficacy of these projects or looked to see how effective they actually were.

One of these few was Malaysian-born biotech entrepreneur Datuk Dr Kim Tan, who visited a shanty town in South Africa in 2001, and was appalled at the conditions he found and the seeming hopelessness of the situation.