Rehana Nathoo

Rehana Nathoo found impact investing the way she describes it: through sheer dumb luck and really great timing. She started her career with the United Nations Capital Development Fund in East Africa, working on the ground in Uganda and Tanzania to help prime local financial markets and build better relationships between communities and the institutions that were supposed to serve them. That early, practical experience shaped everything that followed.

From there, she went on to help lead the impact investing grantmaking program at the Rockefeller Foundation, design the Social Finance program and pilot impact investment fund at Bank of New York Mellon, and lead the impact investing portfolio at the Case Foundation. She saw early and clearly what many in the field were still figuring out: that impact without transparency and data was too easy to fake, and that widening the tent required translating the language of impact into something the whole financial world could act on.

She founded Spectrum Impact to do exactly that. A strategy consulting firm that helps organizations expand their impact investing footprint, Spectrum works across the full spectrum of capital, from foundations and family offices to institutional investors and corporations, building the strategies and products that move intention into practice. She also teaches impact investing and global development as an adjunct professor at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service, ensuring the next generation of practitioners is trained with the same rigor and clarity she has brought to the field for over a decade.

Rehana has been a consistent supporter of Invest for Better, providing one of our early grants and helping shape how we think about impact investing strategy in our earliest years. We are honored to celebrate her here.