What it really takes to finance social enterprises working at the last mile
On the final morning of the Asia Venture Philanthropy Network (AVPN) Global Conference in New Delhi, one of India’s impact investing pioneers said something that made the room sit up.
Our sector, he argued, has spent too long telling itself—and the world—that investors can always “have their cake and eat it too.”
He was not suggesting that deep impact and strong financial returns cannot coexist. We know they can. He was challenging a far more convenient proposition: that investors can routinely achieve deep impact, high returns, low risk, rapid liquidity, small ticket sizes, and low operating costs—all at the same time.
The moment felt significant—and closely connected to questions we have been examining at Miller Center.
Across three days at AVPN, one of the world’s largest gatherings of impact investors, philanthropists, policymakers, entrepreneurs, and ecosystem builders, we heard a field becoming more candid about the tradeoffs involved in financing impact.
The conference’s opening message was optimistic: Asia does not lack capital, and it certainly does not lack ideas. Nowhere is that more apparent than in India, where extraordinary entrepreneurial innovation exists alongside urgent challenges related to poverty, climate resilience, food security, health, energy, water, and livelihoods.
That optimism came with a pointed challenge to Asia’s billionaires, family offices, and other private wealth holders to move more capital toward philanthropy and impact. Speakers encouraged families to consider not only how wealth can generate returns, but how it can create a lasting legacy—and how their willingness to take the first risk could unlock additional investment.
But across the panels, workshops, and conversations we attended, a common theme emerged. The problem is not simply how much capital is available. It is whether the right capital can reach the right enterprise, at the right time, with the right expectations and support.
Four takeaways we brought home
1. Stop searching for one perfect instrument. Build a capital continuum.
One of the clearest examples came from a food systems financing session featuring the World Food Programme Innovation Accelerator, Bayer Foundation, and the United Nations Capital Development Fund.
The speakers described an emerging capital continuum where grants help enterprises test and validate new models; technical assistance builds organizational capacity; guarantees and concessional capital absorb risks other investors cannot; local-currency lending allows enterprises to grow without taking on inappropriate foreign-exchange exposure; and commercial investment becomes possible as the enterprise and its market mature.
No single instrument can do all of this.
We heard a similar point during Acumen’s Thriving Futures roundtable. S4S Technologies, an Indian social enterprise working with smallholder farmers, described how different forms of capital helped the company make different transitions. Grants enabled experimentation. Impact equity helped sharpen unit economics. Debt created cash-flow discipline. Commercial capital strengthened strategy. Awards and prizes generated credibility and attracted new partners.
At the roundtable, we kept returning to the idea of the ‘flavor of capital.’ It is a practical way to describe what entrepreneurs already know – that capital does not come in one flavor, and enterprises do not have one financing need. The financing gap is therefore often a sequencing gap. Enterprises struggle to move from validation to experimentation, from experimentation to organizational resilience, and from resilience to commercially financeable growth.
The impact ecosystem needs fewer isolated funding events and more connected pathways.
2. ‘Not investable’ may sometimes mean ‘your investment product doesn’t fit.’
At Miller Center’s AVPN workshop, Beyond the Cheque: Building Resilient Last-Mile Enterprises, more than 40 participants responded to a deceptively simple question:
What is stopping impact investing from effectively reaching last-mile enterprises?
One group was asked to examine the supposed shortage of ‘investable’ opportunities. They turned the question around.
If a fund created to serve last-mile enterprises repeatedly cannot find an investable pipeline, perhaps the pipeline is not the only product with a market-fit problem. The fund’s investment product may not fit the enterprises it claims to serve.
Ticket sizes may be too large. Collateral requirements may be unrealistic. Repayment schedules may bear little relationship to enterprise cash flow. Foreign-currency debt can expose businesses to risks they cannot control. Fund timelines may demand growth or exits that are incompatible with the markets in which enterprises operate.
Investors routinely ask entrepreneurs to demonstrate product-market fit. Impact investors should be willing to ask the same question of their own financial products.
This does not mean entrepreneurs require no additional preparation. Another workshop group explored how difficult it can be for founders to translate complex last-mile business models into the simplified frameworks investors expect.
A waste enterprise, for example, may combine household payments, corporate contracts, government relationships, data services, cross-subsidies, and grants. An agricultural enterprise may work simultaneously with farmers, banks, processors, government programs, and multinational buyers.
Investment-readiness support can help entrepreneurs explain who pays, who benefits, how money moves, what new capital will unlock, and which risks the enterprise can control. But that work should clarify complexity—not pretend it does not exist.
Investability is not something investors simply discover. It is something ecosystems help build.
3. ‘Beyond the cheque’ is not a slogan. It is risk management.
Some of the most candid discussions at AVPN concerned what happens after an entrepreneur raises capital.
Founders at the Acumen roundtable spoke about the difficulty of recruiting senior leaders, developing teams, strengthening boards, adapting strategy, and managing burnout. Investors may apply intense pressure for monthly growth while providing far less help with the people and systems required to sustain it.
That creates a dangerous contradiction. Capital can accelerate enterprise growth, but without organizational capacity, it can also accelerate fragility.
Participants also questioned the impact sector’s tendency to build its narratives—and sometimes its investment decisions—around heroic founders. Several entrepreneurs described feeling pressure to remain at the helm indefinitely, even when the organization’s next stage might require a different leadership structure or skill set. Yet recognizing when to strengthen the executive team, redefine a founder’s role, or prepare for succession can be a sign of institutional maturity—not a loss of commitment to the mission.
It also means allowing entrepreneurs to change.
Mission-driven entrepreneurs can feel pressure to remain loyal to the product, population, or delivery model with which they began. Impact investors should protect the mission while giving entrepreneurs space to respond to evidence and adapt how that mission is achieved.
This is why accompaniment matters.
At Miller Center, we increasingly think beyond acceleration as a time-limited intervention. Entrepreneurs remain part of a lifelong global network, with continuing access to mentors, peers, investment-readiness support, partnerships, and catalytic capital.
That support is not a remedial service for weak entrepreneurs. It is part of how strong enterprises navigate change—and how investors reduce risk.
4. Start with the problem, not the technology.
No impact conference in 2026 could avoid talking about artificial intelligence. But the most useful AI discussions at AVPN focused less on the sophistication of the technology than on everything required to make it useful.
Shekar Sivasubramanian of Wadhwani AI offered a memorable formulation: AI may represent only 3% of the solution. The other 97% includes problem definition, data, workflows, adoption, human judgment, institutional capacity, and safeguards.
That insight connected with a very different session on last-mile innovation.
Harish Hande of SELCO Foundation argued that innovators should begin with the problem—not with a preferred technology. A community may need irrigation, not necessarily solar irrigation. People need mobility, not necessarily electric vehicles. A street vendor needs a lighting system that supports how she actually sells her products, not the technology a designer finds most exciting.
The point is not to resist innovation. India is producing some of the most exciting technological and entrepreneurial innovations in the world. The point is to insist that innovation remain accountable to the people and problems it is intended to serve.
AI access cannot compensate for poor data, weak institutional ownership, or a solution that does not fit frontline workflows.
A technically impressive product can still fail—or cause harm—if it is disconnected from local reality.
Building the missing architecture
AVPN 2026 demonstrated that Asia does not lack ambition, capital, or innovation. But realizing that potential will require more of Asia’s private wealth to move intentionally toward philanthropy and impact, and for more asset owners willing to provide the patient, catalytic capital that others may not.
What remains incomplete is the connective architecture that transforms those assets into durable impact: aligned financial instruments, patient investors, investment-readiness support, capable intermediaries, market access, government partnerships, pragmatic impact measurement, and long-term accompaniment.
Miller Center sits in precisely this connective space—between entrepreneurs and investors, grants and investment, local knowledge and global networks, capital readiness and lifelong support.
Through our Accelerator programs, Entrepreneur Network, executive mentors, Miller Center Capital, and university resources, we are working to build pathways that meet entrepreneurs where they are and evolve as they grow.
If we want more capital to reach enterprises working in the world’s hardest markets, we have to stop asking only how much money moved.
We must also ask whether it was the right capital, at the right time, with the right expectations—and whether we resourced everything required to make it work.
