A Reflection on My Journey into Sustainable Finance

Originally, my decision to attend SIPA was primarily due to my involvement in the Effective Altruism movement. I have been involved with and passionate about the movement and its goals ever since I discovered it as an undergrad here at Columbia in 2017 through an on-campus organization called One for the World. It was a defining experience for me personally, professionally, and academically because I had grown quite wary of the world of social impact up until then. My background prior to Columbia was primarily in the social sector. I had worked on a variety of different issues areas, in a variety of professional roles and geographic contexts, and in a variety of organization types, from nonprofits and NGOs to social enterprises and startups. And it was in this work that I had sometimes seen – unfortunately for my morale but fortunately for what it taught me and how it guided my future – the many problems with impact metrics. It became clear to me quickly that they were often poorly defined and there was almost no external evaluation or oversight. Organizations were free to define metrics in ways that made them look like transformational actors, even when it was clear that that was not the case. I had even witnessed organizations purposefully abusing their freedom to evaluate themselves, from choosing their own metrics and their definitions as well as how they would measure such metrics, all too often to mislead external stakeholders and make themselves more competitive in their grant applications and more attractive in their fundraising efforts. Consequently, I had grown quite discouraged about the ability of any organization to make impact and about any organization’s claims of having done so. How could I ever be confident that anything meaningful was occurring? It was the discovery of EA that renewed my faith in our ability to make and verify impact in the world. Personally, it introduced me to a community, philosophy, and system of values that made me a better analyst and decision-maker. Professionally, it made me committed to working at the intersection of international development and data-driven policymaking/research. Academically, it is ultimately why I eventually chose to come to SIPA to study both development and data analytics/quantitative analysis. However, my original goal was to help philanthropic resources be deployed more effectively by helping to do the kind of charity evaluation work that GiveWell does or the kind of research and strategic grantmaking that Open Philanthropy does. After finishing my capstone project this past spring with the IDB Lab, the innovation arm of the Inter-American Development Bank, helping them to design a new financial instrument that will help them to scale results-based financing in the Latin American and Caribbean region, I learned much more about the innovations happening in development finance by multilateral development banks, donors of various kinds, and the many actors under the sustainable finance umbrella. I also subsequently got to do some work in ESG finance this summer. These experiences showed me that there are other ways to help deploy capital in more optimal ways. As I complete my final semester this fall, I have chosen to take advantage of my final time at SIPA by taking as much coursework as I can on sustainable finance, including this course, INAF 8908: Sustainable Investing Research Consulting, which has allowed me the opportunity to gain even more sustainable finance experience with a great client. My consulting team is working with a global leader in impact reporting. Our project is aiding their work in fostering corporate sustainability in North America by creating two databases of relevant U.S. companies, analyzing their investor sentiment in earnings calls, reviewing their sustainability reports, and reporting on the takeaways of trends, commonalities, and anomalies to ensure both the relevance of these Standards and their current disclosures in meeting the new requirements enacted by The European Commission which will impact certain U.S. companies. I am excited to be a part of this standard-setting work and am sure I will learn a lot more about this space throughout the project. There is something about standard-setting and analytics work that forces you to learn a lot about the space you are evaluating. I realize I have the chance to still achieve my original goal of doing work that helps allocate resources more optimally but now in a different way. I have the chance to get in on something transformational early on. Given my original goals of attending SIPA, and of my professional journey up until now, this feels like a perfect way to end my time in graduate school. I hope it will also be a perfect segue into whatever chapter comes next for me post-SIPA.