When I was studying climate justice, human rights, and urban policy in the Global South over the past few years, my classmates and I were all united for the same purpose: fighting global inequality in development and discovering pathways to secure infrastructure and improve human well-being. But alongside that shared vision, a question kept surfacing that none of us could easily answer: who is paying for all of this and why?
This semester, I got the chance to explore this question through SIRI practicum. I am interested in what are the mechanisms behind development projects, especially in the world’s most fragile markets. My project sits at the intersection of development finance and impact measurement. The organization I am working with is an investment fund under an international organization that deploys catalytic financial instruments in least developed countries and small island developing states. By absorbing the earliest and riskiest layer of an investment, the fund changes the risk profile enough that larger financiers, such as development banks, private investors and domestic financial institutions, are willing to follow. The goal is for every dollar of concessional capital to mobilize several times that amount in public and private finance. But deploying capital is only half the challenge. The harder question, and the one at the heart of our project, is how to measure whether these catalytic interventions work. Without credible measurement, the organization cannot demonstrate accountability to its funders, learn from what works, or make the case for continued investment in catalytic finance. This is especially difficult given the contexts in which the fund operates. Its projects span dozens of countries, multiple financial instruments, and sectors ranging from smallholder agriculture lending to municipal infrastructure to digital payments. Data infrastructure in these markets is often thin, and the real-world constraints of collecting information in frontier and fragile settings mean that even well-designed indicators can be difficult to populate.
Our team is supporting the organization’s impact monitoring unit in building a compendium of blended finance indicators, which should be a practical, standardized menu that project teams across the portfolio can draw from when designing their results frameworks. The work involves reviewing indicators used in past projects, benchmarking against established frameworks, and recommending a streamlined catalogue that balances comprehensiveness with usability. We are also exploring an innovation dimension, involving tools like artificial intelligence, mobile data collection, or blockchain that might enhance measurement, making it more efficient, credible, and scalable in environments where traditional data collection is costly and unreliable.
What excites me most about this project is grappling with questions I have not encountered in a classroom setting before. This includes how to determine the right indicators for investments that spans multiple countries and instruments and determine whose perspective matters most when defining success. I am beginning to see that impact measurement is not just a technical exercise, but a negotiation between competing priorities, and learning how to navigate that negotiation is what I hope to take away from this Practicum.