In this keynote, David Bohigian, senior official at the Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC), frames impact investing as a moral imperative, rejecting the notion of externalities that separate pollution or labor rights from economic activity. He outlines OPIC’s $22 billion portfolio and its role as a pioneer of blended finance, mobilizing private capital through political‑risk insurance, project finance, private‑equity support, and a new venture‑capital initiative. Bohigian highlights regional priorities – the Central American Northern Triangle, the Indo‑Pacific, cross‑border Middle‑East infrastructure, and Africa’s Power Africa program – and a gender‑focused “2X” initiative to double women’s economic participation. He introduces the Impact Lab, OPIC’s first R&D hub for product innovation and measurement harmonization, and stresses the need for data‑driven feedback loops to learn from under‑performing deals. Using historical analogies from the Pony Express to the telegraph, he argues that the world is now entering a global information economy where technological change is accelerating dramatically, demanding new thinking to avoid past mistakes. The talk concludes with a call for collaboration across governments, foundations, banks, and investors to scale blended finance from billions to the trillions required to meet 21st‑century development goals.
Chapters
Everyone you love, everyone you know, and every human being who ever lived lives on this mote of dust in a sunbeam. As you know, that wasn't me who said that. That was Carl Sagan. But I think it frames what I want to talk about today. I want to talk about what the U.S. government believes in, in impact investing, and I want to start with something that I don't believe in, which is the economic concept of externalities. You look at this photo, where are the externalities? It's everyone on the planet together, and the concept that pollution doesn't count or that labor rights don't count is absolutely absurd. I've spent my entire life working in Silicon Valley, New York, London, in the world's most innovative venture capital firm, the world's largest hedge fund, the world's largest wealth management firm, and the world's most important government. And so I believe that I can help people translate between those worlds to understand that we all live in this world and we need to catalyze capital in order to improve it. Today I work for the Overseas Private Investment Corporation, which has a $22 billion portfolio that truly is one of the world's original impact investors. And beyond that $22 billion portfolio, what the Overseas Private Investment Corporation does is catalyze capital, to bring in money from the major asset managers, to bring in money from the major banks, to bring in money from foundations in what's becoming known as blended capital. And we do that through political risk insurance, we do that through project finance, and we do that through supporting private equity funds. Sorry. Sorry. No, that's okay. Making new friends. And so I want to talk about some of our initiatives, and then I want to talk about some of the challenges that I think in this room we can start to solve together. Our initiatives include first and foremost supporting and empowering women to go think about that as an economy larger than India and China combined. It's what we're calling 2X, not just for the chromosomes but the ability to truly catalyze capital in the world. I'm thrilled to have been at the Global Economic— or Global Entrepreneurship Summit last week. In India, and we'll continue to push those initiatives to truly catalyze an incredible force for stability and prosperity in the world. We operate in 100 countries around the world, and I want to highlight just a few of them as some of the regional initiatives that I would hope to be able to work on with you in the years ahead. One in Central America, the Northern Triangle. El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, 3 very difficult countries for businesses and capital to operate in. Second, throughout the Indo-Pacific, from India to Indonesia, when you look at that circle of humanity on that blue dot that I showed you earlier, half the world's population lives in the Indo-Pacific. It is absolutely stunning the opportunities that we have as an impact community to make a difference there. Next, a Middle East initiative to build cross-border infrastructure throughout Jordan, Israel, the Palestinian Authority, and Egypt, and the greater Middle East and Afghanistan. Major impacts we can have there to both advance developmental goals as well as U.S. foreign policy. And we'll continue to work in Africa where The Obama administration developed a tremendous program, Power Africa, that we'll build on in the Trump administration to not only power Africa but also develop the infrastructure that's so crucially needed there. So those are our regional initiatives, and then I'd like to talk briefly about the lines of business, and I also want to talk about not just the initiatives at the regional level but truly a mission for all of us and a mission larger than OPIC, a mission larger than the U.S. government, which is catalyzing capital and creating entrepreneurial environments globally to meet 21st century challenges. So our lines of business, as I mentioned, debt finance, private equity, political risk insurance. We truly invented political risk insurance and it's important for us to get out of markets where that exists today. So we offer longer tenors, we offer terms in places that others fear to tread. I've gone around the world asking for people for help in Afghanistan. I'd love to meet somebody here today who can help us there. Private equity, we support over $3 billion in private equity firms, and I'm proud to say that just last month I launched the venture capital initiative for OPIC to try and bring the best of Silicon Valley to the world because I truly believe that entrepreneurs are some of the world's finest citizens. And debt finance, major projects from power to healthcare to roads and trying to ensure that we are helping those people who can develop their lives through catalyzing capital. And what we're trying to do is, again, catalyze that private capital. As you probably know, blended finance is now larger than official direct assistance. It's the second largest international capital investment flow after foreign direct investment. And so what we need to do to catalyze that capital is to ensure that everyone understands in the capital stack where their interests lie. We're represented by some amazing foundations here. There are businesses, some of the largest banks in the world, some largest assets and asset managers in the world that we're talking to, to develop new products so we can all work together to go from the billions that are going out there today to the trillions that are needed to support the development goals of the world. So I'm also proud to say we've launched an Impact Lab, which is the development finance community's first-ever R&D facility to try to understand how we can work with some of the speakers here today and some of the groups who are represented to not just think about the products that we can create together that are going to catalyzes capital, but also to think about new processes we can all use together such as harmonization of measurements that we'll talk about more today, that we're talking about new partners and bringing new partners into the community as well as bringing in new people and trying to think differently to go from those billions to trillions that we need. These are just some of the areas in which OPIC works, and I'll tell you, I just started there the last 4 months. I mentioned a lot of other places that I've worked before. And so when I was going through the Senate confirmation process, I had a chance— it doesn't work as fast as you'd like— and I had a chance to talk to people about a unified theory for how capital can unleash human potential. And I failed. I failed. I realized that after talking to Poets and philosophers and even politicians that it's a market out there, right? So if you care about water, if you care about education, if you care about energy, that's fine with me. I consider these all branches on a tree. And when I talk about catalyzing capital, it's to strengthen the roots, it's to strengthen the trunk so that more capital is coming in here. And I think that's the key. So that we can create more clean water, so we can create more affordable homes, so that we're powering the Earth, as you saw on that first slide, to again unlock human potential. And here's how we do it. We'll talk about this on the next panel a little bit. Amanda talked about it earlier. And you don't hear this often from the U.S. government, but I'm here to learn. What we— That got you. What we are trying to understand is how we can best unlock human potential, and we do that right now through a rules-based approach. And there's the debate in Europe about the rules-based versus spirit-based approach. We have a development matrix that counts up to 100 points using a 25-page document to understand that. I'd like to move us into a learning organization where we're trying to understand impact and understand data to create feedback loops within our organization. So that's truly why I'm here today. While I'm up here talking to you, I— there is a gap between what we know and omniscience for all of us in the room. But the feedback loops that we need to start generating for all of us are important. I'm pretty sure that about half of our deals are below average, right? But we need to figure out which ones those are and how we can learn from them. And frankly, while I've worked on artificial intelligence and big data for investment firms in the past, what we need in many cases is just the small data to be able to clean up our datasets and to be able to put us on a footing to be courageous enough to be able to learn. Because the challenges ahead are enormous. We right now are moving into a global international information economy. So why am I showing you the Pony Express? All right, and those guys on the right, they're not being green, they're not planting trees. Those are telegraph poles. And what President Lincoln called a wild scheme was putting in the transcontinental telegraph, because at that time it took about 20 days to get mail from the middle of the country to the coast. And so the government program of the Pony Express probably would have continued to develop bigger, faster horses. All right, but by catalyzing capital, by setting out a goal for the private sector to create a transcontinental telegraph, it connected the country and now has connected the world in a way that was impossible to go from 20 days to a matter of milliseconds. And that's the kind of challenges we're again facing today. This Pony Express rider looking over his shoulder at the telegraph poles going in, It's probably no different than the truck and lorry drivers who are looking over their shoulder at cars that are going to— cars and trucks that are going to be autonomous. At this point, we are moving from a regional agrarian economy to a national industrial economy. As I said, we're moving now into a global information economy, and what I worry about is the major disruptions that occurred in this era, to not repeat those mistakes as we continue to move forward in the 21st century. So I'm going to show you some economic indicators that we all talk about today. All right, the stock market up by 70% this century, the global labor force up by more than 20%, and global GDP more than doubled. That's what they talk about in London and Beijing and Washington and Tokyo. Here's what they talk about in Silicon Valley. Here's what they talk about in Bangalore. It is the technological capacity is doubling to a point where it's up by 40,000% compared to those indicators I was showing you earlier. So if you combine those slides, what's the indicator that matters? The other 3 lines are still there. You just can't see them compared to what's happening. And as Einstein said, problems cannot be solved with the same level of thinking that created them. So we need to be thinking about this and make sure we don't have a collective failure of information to meet these 21st century challenges. They're going to be just as enormous as when we were moving to the economy that we remember in the 20th century. So we need all of your help to underscore what Thomas Jefferson said, which is that I believe in the dreams of the future more than the history of the past, and I need your help to get there. Thank you. Thank you, David.
