Impact Investing: Driving Change — course outline

The argument

An impact claim is worth exactly what the document does when it is not met

Impact investing is described far more often than it is examined. Almost every fund, bond and facility in the market carries an impact claim; comparatively few carry a mechanism that does anything when the claim turns out to be wrong. This course is built on the gap between the two.

One spine runs through all ten sessions and every instrument. Students learn to walk any impact structure along it and find the point at which it stops.

claim
document
control
evidence
escalation
remedy

How far can an investor go in monitoring impact before it is managing the business? That question sits under every session in the second week.

The sessions

Ten sessions, two weeks

Each session runs three hours: a live hour, often with a guest practitioner, and a second live hour of applied work — negotiation, document analysis, risk diagnosis or advice. Recorded mini-lectures and a curated context library carry the baseline material, so live time is spent testing judgment rather than transmitting definitions.

Week oneBuilding the claim

How impact gets defined, structured and written into the paper.

Foundations and impact integrityIntentionality, additionality and measurement; what separates impact from ESG integration and responsible investment; and how fund-naming and labelling regulation converts an impact claim into a legally significant representation.Guest
Development finance and blended financeDevelopment finance institutions and their mandates; additionality and concessionality; first-loss tranches, guarantees, technical assistance and catalytic capital — and the de-risking and market-distortion critique. The second hour runs a failure case.Guest
Impact funds I — structuringFund vehicles and the limited partnership; general and limited partner roles; embedding impact into investment strategy, exclusion lists, targets and reporting architecture; and fiduciary duty when investing for impact alongside return.
Impact funds II — the Abraaj teardownA real collapse taken apart: which side-letter, key-person, removal, excuse and draw-stop mechanisms would have caught it, and which would not. Negotiating investor protections in practice.Guest
Direct equity and portfolio governanceTerm sheets, board rights and reserved matters, information rights; stewardship, escalation and governance discipline; and grievance mechanisms inside portfolio companies.Guest

Week twoTesting the claim

What survives contact with scaling businesses, public markets, carbon registries and a regulator.

Venture capital and responsible exitVC term sheet mechanics, board composition, protective provisions and founder control; how impact terms survive successive rounds; and exit routes, including the conflicts in general-partner-led secondaries.
Thematic bonds — green, social and genderUse-of-proceeds structures, eligibility and impact reporting; gender bonds and the 2X lens; external review and the limits of private standard-setting; and the standing problem — what loss a bondholder can actually claim.Guest
Sustainability-linked and transition bondsKPI quality, target ambition and baseline integrity; recalibration after a merger or divestment; verifier liability and the assurance gap; and whether a coupon step-up is a remedy at all.
Carbon and nature financeCarbon-market integrity and the high-integrity architecture; what a carbon credit is in law — classification, title chain, invalidation risk; data integrity as the failure point; and nature-related disclosure and debt-for-nature structures.
Activism, litigation and enforcementImpact washing and greenwashing; NGO pressure, engagement against divestment, and complaints pathways; net-zero claims and emerging disputes involving financial institutions; and response strategy.

Who speaks in the room

Practitioners from both sides of the same fund

The guest roster deliberately spans the capital chain: the development finance institution that puts in the first-loss tranche, the manager that raises against it, and the asset owner deciding whether to commit at all. Individuals are not named here; their institutions and roles are, and the roster varies by delivery.

Impact fund managerGAWA CapitalBlended finance from the manager's side: raising against concessional capital, and what a first-loss provider actually requires in the fund terms.
Development finance institutionCOFIDESThe bilateral DFI's perspective on additionality, concessionality and impact reporting — and the discipline a public mandate imposes on a private structure.
Senior professional, sovereign wealth fundAustralia's sovereign wealth fundInvestor protections in fund investing seen from a large asset owner: side letters, governance rights, and how far monitoring can go before it becomes control.
Chief Investment Officer, impact investment managerAustralian listed-equity impact managerDirect equity and portfolio governance in practice: stewardship, escalation, and the case that social and environmental factors are financially material.

The same fund looks entirely different depending on whether you wrote the cheque, raised against it, or have to report on what it achieved.

Assessment

One memorandum of advice, one research paper, and a room that has to argue

10ParticipationLive-session contribution: polls, breakout exercises, document analysis and short reflection tasks.
40Case studyA memorandum of advice on one of two parallel cases — a blended-finance fund or a blended green bond — allocated at random, marked to matched criteria and moderated together.
50Research paperAn individual paper on an advanced legal question in impact investing or an adjacent field, developed with supervision through to submission.

A note on generative AI

Permitted, disclosed, and marked accordingly

Generative AI use is permitted in the case study with disclosure: a signed AI-use statement is mandatory, and the rubric is document-grounded, so a fluent answer that is not anchored in the documents is capped regardless of how it was produced. The position is deliberate. Students will use these tools in practice, and the assessment tests the thing that will still matter — whether the advice is supported by the paper.

What students take away

An adviser's judgment, not a vocabulary