At the 71st Session of the UN General Assembly impact investing was discussed and the U.S. State Department and Bretton Woods II introduced the Trillion Dollar Challenge, intended to help achieve the UN’s 17 Sustainable development Goals by 2030. In September the United States and China formally entered the Paris agreement to join global efforts to combat climate change. This article analysis how on achieving the UN development goals will require trillions of dollars of investment and how decades ago, the vast majority of money going from rich to poor countries arrived as foreign aid. Impact investing marks a vital change, and points out how annual private financing from high-income to low-income nations has already exceed global development assistance by far. The potential for institutional investors to lead and magnify that effort—creating positive social impact while earning healthy returns for their stakeholders—is staggering. In his final address to the UN General Assembly, President Obama points out the importance of investing money for impact: “We can only eliminate extreme poverty if the sustainable development goals that we have set are more than words on paper. Human ingenuity now gives us the capacity to feed the hungry and give all of our children — including our girls — the education that is the foundation for opportunity in our world. But we have to put our money where our mouths are.”
