Building resilience in times of disruption: Promoting long-term investments through the DFI model

Raj leads a global team of over 100 Devexers and serves a community of one million global development professionals. His experience in 50+ countries, including a childhood partly spent in India, informs his work. Raj is the author of The Business of Changing the World.

Vipul is the Co-Founder and CMO of BigBasket and oversees the marketing and finance functions of the firm. As a seasoned senior executive with considerable experience in the IT, retail, e-commerce and internet space, he has successfully built strong teams that deliver results, and strategic operations whose efforts span distribution channels, marketing and product management, and merchandising. Prior to BigBasket Vipul was Investment Director at Peepul Capital Advisors, President of Trinethra Super Retail, Co-Founder and Vice President at Fabmall, and Business Development Manager at Wipro.

Yasemin Lamy joined CDC as Deputy CIO in August 2018. She is responsible for the Catalyst Strategies, a portfolio aimed at transformational, system-level impact and innovation across its target geographies of Africa and South Asia. Prior to CDC, she spent three years building two new portfolios for Omidyar Network: one portfolio to develop empowering digital identity technologies and one portfolio to establish a trendspotting capability. Previously, she worked across several different roles within capital markets at J.P. Morgan, starting out in fund-linked derivatives and then as a credit derivatives analyst, before building and leading the impact investment platform for the firm. Yasemin has published widely and provided expert advice to the OECD, World Economic Forum and others. She holds a Masters in Financial Mathematics from King’s College, London and a Bachelor in Mathematics and Philosophy from the University of Pennsylvania.

Jean-Paul Adam is the Director for Technology, Climate Change and Natural Resources Management in the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa. Prior to taking on this role, he served in the Government of the Republic of Seychelles in several Cabinet positions. He was Minister of Health from 2016 to 2019. He served as Minister of Finance, Trade and the Blue Economy from 2015 to 2016 where he negotiated a debt for climate change adaptation swap and launched the process for Seychelles to become the first issuer of a Blue Bond. Between 2010 and 2014, he was Seychelles’ Minister of Foreign Affairs, where he advocated for countries to embrace the concept of the Blue Economy, to improve sustainability for island and coastal countries. Before entering the Cabinet, between 2005 and 2009, he occupied several senior roles in the Office of the President of the Republic of Seychelles including Director General for presidential affairs, Principal Secretary for the Office of the President and Secretary of state in the presidency. He started his career as a career diplomat in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs between 2001 and 2004. He is a holder of a Masters in International Political Economy form the University of Manchester (UK) and a BA in English Literature and French from the University of Sheffield (UK).

Unnikrishnan Divakaran Nair, Head of Climate Change at the Commonwealth Secretariat, looks after the climate change programme of the Secretariat. Before Commonwealth he was with the GGGI India Program Lead. UnniKrishnan was responsible for facilitating the strategic delivery and execution of GGGI initiatives in India. Before that he used to manage the climate finance and natural resource management vertical of GIZ in India and has also served the UN climate change secretariat (UNFCCC) at Bonn. UnniKrishnan is a development professional with over 18 years of experience in the areas of Climate Change Adaptation & Mitigation Project Development and Implementation, Policies on Climate Finance, International Accreditation to Climate Funds including the Green Climate Fund (GCF) and expertise in climate vulnerability and livelihood issues in Agriculture, Water, Oceans & Forestry in the Rural Development Context of Developing and Least Developed Countries (LDCs). He worked with a range of organizations from the civil society to community-based organizations to private sector, bilateral and multilateral agencies.

Dr. Jale Samuwai is the Climate Finance Advisor for Oxfam in the Pacific, and is currently responsible for covering the 10 Pacific countries in which Oxfam have a program footprint. He holds a PhD in Climate Change from the University of the South Pacific (USP) and is the first graduate from USP to attain this qualification. His PhD thesis specifically looks at climate financing in the Pacific region. In addition, he has published 8 peer reviewed articles on sustainable development issues in the Pacific in ranked journals outlets and has also written 3 technical reports on climate change/finance related issues in the region.

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