Beyond Grants: Rethinking How We Finance Social Change | Hosted by Smita Jha

​Host: Smita Jha

​Smita Jha is a social impact and strategy leader with 30+ years of experience across the corporate, consulting, government and development sectors. She has held senior leadership roles at BCG, PwC, Genpact and Hindustan Times, and was the founding CEO of CEGIS. She currently works independently with organisations across the social impact ecosystem on systems change, scaling, governance, social impact and innovative finance.

​Session: Beyond Grants: Rethinking How We Finance Social Change

​Philanthropy and CSR alone cannot finance the scale of change India’s social and environmental challenges demand. So, what comes next?

​This introductory session will demystify innovative finance—from blended finance and catalytic capital to impact investing, guarantees and concessional capital—and explore how different forms of capital can work together to unlock impact.

​Moving beyond jargon, the conversation will ask a fundamental question: How do we design the right capital for the problem we are trying to solve? The session will also examine when innovative financing genuinely adds value—and when a simple grant may be the better answer.