Catalytic Funding: Why Human Capital Matters as Much as Money

The most quoted line of the Catalytic Funding panel came from Ken Shibusawa, great-great-grandson of the man on the 10,000 yen note, and it was about people rather than money.

“If you’re talking about catalytic capital,” he said, “you need catalytic human capital. Somebody that says — some Jedi knight says — this is important. You can have all the catalytic capital in the world in the treasure box. But it’s not going to be deployed.”

Japan has the largest pension fund on earth, the GPIF, at $1.7 trillion. It has been the world’s largest creditor nation almost every year for forty years. NISA is pulling dormant household savings into investment vehicles. Moderator Tim Kelly (Reuters) opened with the gap between all of that and what Japan actually puts into climate, development and crisis financing. Shibusawa (founder of Commons Asset Management), Jesper Koll (one of the longest-running Japan economists on the global circuit) and Anastasiia Dieieva (Ukraine, Tokarev Foundation) spent the session arguing about why, and what would change it.

Defining the term

The panelists did not start from a shared definition of “catalytic capital”. Shibusawa’s was the simplest: money that, by going in first, makes other money willing to follow. He split investors into financial ones, who avoid risk without a track record, and strategic ones, who chase returns through corporate strategy or new-business creation, and said catalytic capital exists mainly to bridge the two.

Koll pushed back. Japan, he said, has been a catalytic investor for decades. He cited GPIF’s early move on ESG investing a decade ago, the recent $10 billion Japanese government fund for medical supply continuity across Southeast Asia, and sanpō yoshi (三方よし), the Ōmi-merchant rule that good business serves seller, buyer and society. “If you look objectively,” Koll said, “Japanese public money is actually quite diligent in being mindful of not just going for shareholder returns, but spreading things out so that you do have catalytic, impactful investment that actually builds communities.”

Shibusawa answered with the Keizai Dōyūkai Africa Impact Fund. He spent months pitching about a hundred Japanese corporates and every major financial institution. No bank, insurer or pension fund came in as lead. “It was a corporate,” he said. “It was Japan Tobacco.”

Anastasiia Dieieva: capital that arrives when everyone flees

“To Ukraine, catalytic capital actually looks like patience in the very urgent time,” Dieieva said. “It’s the capital that arrives when everyone flees, when everyone leaves.”

She described three rules Ukraine has tested under fire. Invest in people before infrastructure: “If you invest into the capacity of a woman in a remote area close to the front line where there’s no hospital, and you help her become a health-tech entrepreneur, she will introduce telemedicine which will reach more people.” Fund ecosystems rather than projects, because projects have end dates and in wartime an ecosystem can compensate when one part collapses. And stop treating measurement frameworks as the work: “We are so obsessed with measurement of impact, like we have so many frameworks, but those frameworks crash and they don’t work in societies where you cannot apply these metrics.”

She said she was “really sick and tired of this empathetic part of impact — that impact should always be soft, it should be nice, social and environment should play together in the sandbox.” Her example was Ukraine’s DIA national app, on more than 30 million phones, giving digital access to public services through a wartime state. It cuts corruption and friction, and no conventional risk model would have lent it the capital to get built.

Koll brought it back to Japan. Nippon Cyber Defense, where he sits on the board, opened a Kyiv office last year. Four years under attack have made Ukraine the leading practitioner of applied cybersecurity, and Japanese capital goes there for the expertise Japan itself will need, not out of charity. “The courage for a CEO to actually commit while the going is tough,” Koll said, “I think that courage is going to become more and more valued.”

Pax Nipponica

Koll has argued for three years that the world is entering what he calls Pax Nipponica: neither the United States nor the People’s Republic of China can be fully trusted by any middle power, and Japan, rich, admired and demographically too old to threaten anyone, becomes the honest broker by default. “Japan is no longer threatening because Japan is old,” he said. “You’re not really worried about Toyota being the next big game changer in the transportation industry. Toyota will be a perfectly fine corporation.”

Koll’s point was that this makes Japan the counterparty developing economies, global health funders and post-conflict governments can work with, if Japanese institutions choose to.

Shibusawa went back to his ancestor. Eiichi Shibusawa, founder of more than 500 Japanese companies and the face of the new 10,000 yen note, argued 150 years ago that business and public good belong together. The original motive was survival: Japan had to industrialise or be colonised. The modern version, Shibusawa said, is different. “Japan will never be a superpower like the US or China. They have vast territories. But what Japan could show is resilience.” He meant the features that look wasteful in normal times, redundancy, multi-stakeholder accountability, slow integration, none of which register in ROE.

“If your business environment changes and you’re really efficient, you might be really fragile because you’re so efficient,” he said. Catalytic capital, as he described it, gives up some short-term efficiency for an environment that keeps compounding over generations.

The one ask

Kelly closed by asking each speaker for the one change Japan should make over the next three to five years.

Jesper Koll: tax incentives, specifically structural tax incentives for Japanese corporations that put capital into social-impact ventures. Today, he said, mobilising private capital for an Africa impact fund takes two years of pitching, a charismatic CEO and a Jedi-knight middle manager who survives a transfer to Hokkaido, and it usually fails anyway. He added that as Prime Minister Takaichi’s administration moves public resources toward armaments and defence, civilian social-infrastructure budgets will get squeezed, and private capital will have to fill the gap if the tax code allows.

Shibusawa: find and unleash the Jedi knights. The 2025 change to the JICA law, which lets Japan’s overseas development agency deploy first-loss catalytic capital after years of lobbying, was in his view the biggest shift in Japanese impact-capital policy in a generation. At TICAD last August, JICA put first-loss capital into three African impact funds with established track records. The instrument now exists. What is missing is people inside institutions willing to push such deals through layers of risk-averse middle management.

Dieieva: build the dialogue, share the language. Catalytic capital fails when giver and receiver use the same word to mean different things. Her ask was patient bilateral institution-building, embassies and intermediaries on both sides who understand what counts as risk in Kyiv and what counts as risk in Tokyo.

2027

The next Tech for Impact Summit returns to Tokyo on May 18–19, 2027. Japan as catalytic counterparty, the tax-policy lever, resilience versus efficiency, post-conflict reconstruction financing and the search for catalytic human capital inside institutions will run through next year’s investor-track programming.

The panel’s conclusion was that the instrument, the framework and the metric matter less than whether the person with signing authority will act before consensus arrives. Tax incentives lower the cost. The JICA law de-risks the structure. Somebody still has to sign.

T4IS 2027 is built for those people.

This recap is part of the Tech for Impact Summit 2026 retrospective series. Read the spotlight posts that preceded the panel for each speaker: Ken Shibusawa on patient capital and long-term value creation, Jesper Koll: why the smart money is moving to Japan, Anastasiia Dieieva on rebuilding Ukraine through technology and education, and Tim Kelly on covering Japan’s tech transformation.

Tech for Impact Summit 2027 is invitation-only. Search “Tech for Impact Summit” to explore membership and learn how senior leaders across finance, policy, and impact are joining the next cohort.