The Impact Equation

For the 100th episode of The Impact Equation, we’re joined by Paul Ronalds, CEO of Save the Children Global Ventures, to explore how venture capital, technology and innovative finance can scale solutions for children around the world. The episode closes our special series profiling three of its investments: Amparo, fitting prosthetic limbs in a single visit; PrimaKu, reaching 3 million+ parents across Indonesia; and reach52, bringing healthcare and medicines to underserved communities.

We finish where we started the series: How do you find, fund and scale ideas that can change millions of lives?

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In this episode, we sit down with Sam Staincliffe (Uplift360), Nicolas Brien (Wastetide), and Elisabeth Bröring (MWT GmbH & Co. KG) for a deep dive into the practical realities of the circular economy. While they approach the challenge from different angles—using AI, processing technology, and downstream applications—our guests share a singular mission: shifting the perception of "waste" into the reality of valuable secondary materials.

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Michael Young is co-founder and co-CEO of Lindus Health, an AI-native contract research organisation that runs clinical trials end-to-end and has begun licensing therapeutics to take through trials itself. A former special adviser in the Home Office and 10 Downing Street, where he worked on the UK Life Sciences Strategy, Michael joined Adam and Rafi to explain why running trials, not discovering drugs, has become the biggest bottleneck in medicine. He unpicks the incentives that keep contract research slow and expensive, reflects on Kate Bingham and the Vaccine Taskforce, describes how Lindus can now run five drug programmes for the...

Maia Ramarosandratana is the Founder of Projet Jeune Leader, an organisation she launched in 2013 and has since built into one of the most ambitious efforts to drive to deliver comprehensive sex education through public schools in Madagascar. Maia has led PJL from an early initiative to a scale model now serving more than 50,000 students each year. Maia has scaled while insisting on programme quality, investing in rigorous monitoring and evaluation, building partnerships with government, including the Ministry of Education, and expanding both budget and reach tenfold. Shantanu is a Mulago Fellow and this interview is the third in a...

Mary Long-Dhonau OBE has spent more than 25 years helping people prepare for one of the UK's fastest-growing climate risks. Known across the country as Flood Mary, she became an advocate after her own family home flooded repeatedly with contaminated sewage. Faced with little practical support and caring for a young son with severe autism, she turned that experience into a mission to help others recover more quickly and prepare more effectively. In this episode of The Impact Equation, Mary explains why flooding is no longer something that only affects communities beside rivers. As our climate changes, surface water flooding...

Mati Carbon, led by founder and Mulago fellow Shantanu Agarwal, made history in April 2025 by winning the $100 million XPRIZE Carbon Removal. In this episode, Shantanu shares how Mati uses enhanced rock weathering to turn pollution into soil-enriching fertilizer for smallholder farmers in the Global South. We discuss the unique model that combines rigorous climate science with a non-profit governance structure, exploring whether effective climate solutions can be both technically credible and distributively fair. Shantanu is a Mulago Fellow and this interview is the second in a series of three episodes with our friends at the Mulago Foundation https://www.mulagofoundation...

Today's episode we welcome Peter Briffett, CEO and co-founder of Stream. Most people are paid at the end of each month but bills and emergencies don't keep to a calendar, so the lowest-paid end up borrowing - through overdrafts and payday loans - to bridge the gap. Stream lets workers draw earnings they've already accrued, and has grown from there into savings, financial coaching and benefits, built around the employer rather than a bank. It now reaches more than three million workers across roughly a thousand employers, including the NHS, is backed by social-impact investors and recently closed a $90m S...

Folake Owodunni is the co-founder and CEO of Emergency Response Africa. ERA is a healthcare technology company improving how medical emergencies are managed across Africa, starting in Nigeria. They operate the largest network of trained First Responders, ambulances, and verified emergency-ready hospitals. This network allows them to connect people experiencing medical emergencies to the help they need, anytime, day or night. Folake is a Mulago Fellow and this interview is the first in a series of three episodes with our friends at the Mulago Foundation https://www.mulagofoundation.org.

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Lord Francis Maude is a senior British political figure and former minister. His career spans three Governments, four decades and multiple continents. Having had his first ministerial post under Margaret Thatcher, Francis has long experience and deep understanding of how governments work. From his early days in the HM Treasury to leading reform in the Cabinet Office, he became one of the architects of modern UK public service reform. As Minister for the Cabinet Office during the coalition years, he drove efficiency, digital transformation, and a sharper focus on execution inside government.

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Adam and Rafi review the last seven episodes in our regular wash up conversation

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Mark Bjornsgaard has scaled and exited seven businesses in healthcare, finance and music. As founder of Deep Green, Mark has worked out how to turn waste heat from AI data centres into heating local infrastructure and homes, with billions of investment. In this conversation, Mark talks through the long road to making that idea commercially viable, why earlier versions failed, and why the real breakthrough came from solving an economic problem rather than leading with a green one. He is refreshingly direct on what it takes to build: kill weak ideas early, stay obsessed with the customer problem, and...

How does a trained chemist transition into an investment banker, a senior British diplomat in Beijing, and ultimately, the CEO overseeing the world’s most critical environmental disclosure platform? In this episode Rafi sits down with Sherry Madera, CEO of CDP, to map out her curiosity-led career and explore how data has become the ultimate force for global change. From navigating the thick PM 2.5 smog of Beijing to steering massive data strategies at the London Stock Exchange Group, Sherry has spent her life translating complex risks into actionable boardroom intelligence. Rafi and Sherry dive deep into the mechanics of CDP—an i...

Lord Michael Barber is the founder of the Prime Minister’s Delivery Unit under Sir Tony Blair, author of How to Run a Government, and the global pioneer of deliverology. Over the past three decades he has advised governments around the world on one of leadership’s hardest questions: not what to do, but how to get it done. In this episode, Lord Barber reflects on the experiences that shaped his approach to leadership, from his Quaker upbringing and early years as a teacher to building a delivery system at the heart of government. The conversation explores why execution so o...

This roundtable special brings together three founders working at different edges of the same question: how do we rebuild our relationship with nature through markets, products, and everyday economic choices? Cain Blythe is the founder of CreditNature, a platform designed to unlock large-scale investment into biodiversity and ecosystem recovery by making nature measurable and investable. His work sits at the frontier of nature finance, where ecological integrity and capital markets collide.

Will Foulkes leads Stabiliti, which embeds a “Green Margin” into commerce to fund verified local restoration. His focus is on making nature funding frictionless within everyday tran...

Lucy Kellaway is an award-winning journalist, former Financial Times columnist, Business Journalist of the Year, and recipient of an OBE for services to education. Shortly after her 58th birthday, she left a 30-year career at the FT to retrain as a maths teacher and went on to co-found Now Teach with Katie Waldegrave. Joined by Graihagh Crawshaw-Sadler, CEO of Now Teach and former Director of Strategy and Learning at Teach First, who has helped turn the organisation from a compelling idea into a sustainable model supporting career changers into teaching. With thanks to our friends at Ark for helping...

Yossi Abramowitz is a renewable energy pioneer, co-founder of the first utility-scale solar fields in both the Middle East and sub-Saharan Africa, co-founder of Gigawatt Global, and a Nobel Peace Prize nominee. Over the past two decades he has helped build renewable energy infrastructure across Israel and Africa, bringing clean power to communities that had long been excluded from reliable energy access. In this episode of The Impact Equation, Yossi reflects on the activist movements that shaped him, from the Soviet Jewry campaign to anti-apartheid organising, and how those experiences informed his approach to building entirely new industries. He...

Rafi and Adam reflect in this 20 minute conversation on the past 7 guests.

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Ryan Kohn has spent the last decade answering a challenge that stumps most founders: how do you scale a massive consumer brand while leaving the planet better than you found it. As the co-founder of PROPER, he took a kitchen-table startup and built it into Europe’s largest independent healthy snacking group. But alongside selling millions of packs across 15 countries, he embedded a deep commitment to the environment into the company’s DNA. Now, Ryan is turning his hand to climate philanthropy at scale, pioneering a new initiative called Point One to help reach more people to take responsibility for...

Professor Tim Spector has spent three decades asking: why do people respond so differently to the same food? As a genetic epidemiologist at King’s College London and founder of the Twins UK registry, he built one of the world’s richest long-term datasets on health, genetics, and environment. The insight that our gut microbiome may matter as much as our genes when it comes to metabolism and disease risk, helped to launch ZOE, a science-led nutrition company combining large-scale research with consumer testing to personalise diet advice. ZOE’s studies, including the large Predict trials and the widely used Cov...

Edward Booty is founder and CEO of reach52, getting essential healthcare products and services to people the system doesn’t reach. Edward has spent his career working across health systems in low and middle-income countries, where access isn’t just about clinics or medicines, but trust, distribution, and behaviour. Through reach52, he’s building a community-driven model that combines digital platforms with local health workers, integrating public and private sectors to reach millions of people typically left out of formal healthcare. This conversation is the third in our series with our friends and partners at Save the Children Global Ventur...

Didit Indraputra is founder and CEO of Primaku, a fast-growing digital health platform transforming how parents in Indonesia access trusted guidance on child health and development. Muhammad, or “Didit” as he is known, began his career in finance, but a defining personal moment shifted his trajectory. Becoming a parent sharpened his awareness of how confusing, fragmented, and unequal early childhood health support can be, especially outside major cities. This is the second episode in our series with our friends at Save the Children Global Ventures.

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For nearly twenty years, Katie Oliver has been a driving force behind one of the UK’s most significant education charities, Ark. She was at the forefront of growing the Ark network from one academy to dozens of schools. In 2019, she took on a new mission: founding Ark Start, a group of five London nurseries that are built alongside the Ark schools network and is in the process of expanding across the country. Today, as Managing Director of Ark Start, she is demonstrating how to close the attainment gap from day one. This episode is part of our special series wi...

João Abreu is a Brazilian public health innovator and the co-founder and executive director of ImpulsoGov, a non-profit scaling data-driven tools and technology into Brazil’s universal public health system - the world’s largest single-payer public healthcare network. Founded during the COVID-19 pandemic, ImpulsoGov has grown to partner with governments in hundreds of municipalities, helping health teams use data to act proactively, equitably and preventively. Joao's organisation has won international recognition, including selection to the MIT Solve Global Health Challenge, and reflects João’s deep commitment to closing gaps in access and quality of care by putting re...

Luke Tryl is executive director of More in Common UK, the research organisation that has become the reference point for understanding what British voters actually think - and how often the political class misreads them. In this episode, Luke walks us through More in Common's seven-segment model of British values, built on Jonathan Haidt's Moral Foundations Theory and Karen Stenner's work on authoritarianism. He explains why the morning of 24 June 2016 convinced him the whole political class in the UK had missed something fundamental about the country, and why the answer is not government by focus group but better listening...

Rafi and Adam reflect in this 20 minute conversation on the past 7 guests.

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In this episode we're joined by a legend of the climate change movement. Once a Cambridge mathematician, manufacturing executive and then on to the UN high level climate champion for COP26, Nigel Topping has spent decades bridging the gap between factory floors and the likes of the Paris Agreement. Now, as chair of the UK Climate Change Committee, Nigel is steering the UK towards its 2050 targets with the same data-driven precision he once used as a Cambridge mathematician.

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This is the next episode in our latest series with our friends at 100X Impact. Kruti Bharucha is CEO of Peepul, bringing over two decades of leadership across some of the world’s most demanding institutions from McKinsey and the World Bank, to the IMF becoming an advisor to global CEOs on finance, risk and organisational performance. She could have stayed in global boardrooms. Instead, she chose to take that firepower into the education system. Kruti leads Peepul, an NGO that works shoulder-to-shoulder with state governments to improve education at scale across India. In Delhi, they run exemplary schools wh...

In this episode, Adam and Rafi speak to Rodrigo Garcia Gonzalez, co-founder and co-CEO of Notpla, a company replacing single-use plastic with materials made from seaweed. What began as a student experiment has become a manufacturing business operating across nine countries, supplying packaging to stadiums, global brands, and major food service providers. Notpla has been recognised with the £1 million Earthshot Prize, alongside awards from Fortune, Time, and Wired. Notpla has grown from a speculative invention to working with companies like Just Eat Takeaway and Compass Group, and replacing 35 million units of plastic so far.

Nick Hurd is the fourth consecutive generation Conservative MP in his family, the UK's former Minister for Civil Society, and he now chairs the Foundation for Social Investment and the GSG Impact network, which spans 48 countries. In this episode, Nick shares his family's tradition of public service (his father was Margaret Thatcher's Foreign Secretary), former Prime Minister David Cameron's vision for the Big Society, the growth of the UK’s social investment market, and the creation of the National Citizen Service (NCS). Looking to the future, Nick talks about the growth of the global impact economy, the role of government, an...

To mark Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day, on 13th April, Rafi and Adam interview three remarkable figures in British public life: Professor Sir Anthony Finkelstein, Lord Daniel Finkelstein OBE, and Dame Tamara Finkelstein DCB. The children of two survivors who endured the camps of the Holocaust and the wastes of the Siberian Gulag, they have together risen to eminence in journalism, the civil service, and science, making a truly significant impact to Britain and the wider world. Recorded before a packed audience at JW3, London’s Jewish cultural centre, this is the first time all three siblings have appeared together in...

As Chief Executive of Yorkshire Housing, Nick Atkin leads the region’s largest provider of affordable, eco-friendly homes. He also chairs major regional partnerships and is pushing the government to treat housebuilding as a national priority. His team is at the vanguard of using data, sensors and AI to make housing services work better for the people living in those homes. In this episode of The Impact Equation, Nick joins Adam and Rafi to talk about why housing matters so much to health, dignity and life chances, and why leaders in the sector cannot afford to get stuck in sp...

This is the first episode in our second series, Scaling Tomorrow's Social Unicorns, with 100x Impact. Rhea Yadav leads impact and strategy at Wysa, the AI-led mental health platform that has supported more than 7 million people across 95 countries. She founded the organisation’s impact business and now works across governments, health systems, NGOs and employers to take evidence-based mental health support into places where care is scarce.

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In their latest wash up episode, Adam and Rafi reflect on recent episodes to explore how systemic change happens at a local and global level. They discuss the "triumph of place-based localism" through Simon Case’s work in Barrow and Claudine Blamey’s community-led flood resilience at Aviva, emphasizing that impact is most effective when rooted in the reality of people's lives. They examine the power of "harnessing capitalism for climate," contrasting Alyssa Gilbert’s focus on scaling innovation at Imperial with Luke Leslie’s investor-led approach to carbon markets and nature-based assets. The conversation also highlights the human side of leade...

What does it really take to deliver humanitarian aid in the world’s most fragile places? In this episode of The Impact Equation, we sit down with Madlin Sadler, Chief Operating Officer at the International Rescue Committee - an organisation working at the sharpest edge of conflict, disaster and displacement.

Madlin offers a rare, inside view of what it means to operate in over 40 of the world’s most crisis-affected countries; where systems have broken down, need is accelerating, and resources are shrinking. Madlin shares what it looks like to deliver vaccines to children in remote conflict zone...

Edward Timpson is the former Children’s Minister, part of the family behind Timpson, and brother of Lord James Timpson, now a Labour prisons minister. In this conversation with Rafi’s former Ministerial boss, Edward reflects on growing up in a family that fostered more than 80 children, alongside one of the UK’s best-known family businesses, recognised for both its high street services and a culture built on trust, kindness and second chances. That experience shaped everything that followed: family law, politics, reform in government, and his work today across children’s services and family care. Edward’s life and career...

Luke Leslie is the co-founder and CEO of Key Carbon, investing directly into businesses generating high integrity carbon credits, from clean cooking stoves in sub-Saharan Africa to regenerative agriculture in Europe and mangrove restoration in Myanmar. Luke explains how Key Carbon has borrowed from royalty and streaming models used in mining, then adapted them for carbon markets. The result is a more hands-on and structured approach that is attracting hundreds of millions of dollars of institutional finance into nature investment.

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In this episode, Rafi sits down with Claudine Blamey, Chief Sustainability Officer at Aviva. Claudine’s story starts far from the boardrooms of British business. She arrived in London from Tehran as a child, speaking no English. That experience shaped a mindset that has stayed with her throughout her career: nothing is forever, and even the most complex situations can be navigated. Three decades later, Claudine has helped shape sustainability strategy across sectors – from sustainable buildings at British Land to aviation’s first net-zero strategy at easyJet, and now climate and nature strategy at Aviva. In this conversation, she reflec...

This episode we're joined by Summer Kennedy for a special episode looking back at our first series with Fast Forward. In this series, we’ve featured three amazing entrepreneurs backed by Fast Forward, a trailblazing accelerator backing tech nonprofits solving urgent, global problems at scale. Summer quite literally drives Fast Forward forward; shaping the strategic vision and building the systems that get the organisation there. Her path to leadership has been anything but linear: from teaching first grade in Oakland to spearheading tech-for-good initiatives, Summer’s career proves that the most impactful journeys don’t follow a straight line. We refl...