Pivot to Finance and Impact Investing
On September 24, 2025, Rehana Nathoo (Founder and CEO, Spectrum Impact), John Duong (Founder & CEO, Kind Capital), Stephen Cashin (Founder & CEO, Pan African Capital Group), and Araba Sapara-Grant (Senior Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning Manager, Strive, DAI) discussed their career journeys and offered insights on how international development backgrounds and skillsets are highly valuable in this field. Kyla Denwood (Georgetown SFS) moderated this event, and Steve Radelet (Georgetown SFS) also provided additional commentary.
This session was the eighth in our Pivot to New Career Paths seminar series, designed to offer attendees the opportunity to hear from colleagues who have already made these important career transitions and glean how to best embark on these changes themselves.
Across the international development community, we all champion causes that advance environmental stability, social equality, and good governance—did you know that you can work in service to these same ideals in finance as well?
Undoubtedly, many of us have worked to forward these causes throughout our careers in a variety of sectors—including energy, microfinance, healthcare, and agriculture. With the ongoing shifts in the development field, the financial sector offers us a new potential path to follow to continue our work on these important issues.
Numerous financial firms are leaning on impact investing—using capital to drive both financial returns and measurable social and environmental outcomes—to pursue corporate social responsibility projects, among other invaluable initiatives. More important, many of these firms are looking for development professionals to guide and enhance their operations.
During this event, the featured panelists all agreed that there are significant opportunities in this space, even if we lack specific financial training. In fact, each speaker highlighted the importance of our soft skills, familiarity with U.S. government practices, and broad international experience as especially attractive qualities.
Furthermore, they stressed that many of the skills we developed over the course of our careers at USAID and its implementing partners are directly applicable to career opportunities in finance and impact investing. Indeed, skills such as monitoring and evaluation (M&E), stakeholder engagement, project management, and other sector specific-expertise can help guide us to new employment opportunities to fill areas of need for a wide range of organizations—all we need to do is seize these opportunities as the arise!
The panelists concluded the event by emphasizing a critical point: we all have significant experience advancing the world’s most critical issues. Both private financial firms and the investing operations of various other organizations are looking to do the same kind of work. The challenges our world faces have no simply vanished. In other words, there is a clear need for our skills and expertise.
We can all pursue careers in finance and impact investing roles in order to forward these causes with capital. Most important, we can thrive in these roles. Our backgrounds bring a crucial value-add for many companies operating in this space, and opportunities exist for us to take the next step and pivot into this exciting field!
Other Previous Sessions
Please feel free to browse our other previous sessions to access summaries, video content, and more information about our other events!