Christopher Walker

Biography

Chris Walker works to scale up innovative, entrepreneurial solutions to development challenges and provides advice on various innovative finance initiatives at Mercy Corps. He also advises Mercy Corps’ impact investment arm, Mercy Corps Ventures, which invests in and accelerates impact-oriented, for-profit businesses. He previously managed the Innovation Investment Alliance, a funding and learning partnership between the Skoll Foundation and USAID that financed the scale-up of social enterprises. In addition, Chris is an adjunct professor at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service, where he teaches a graduate course on impact investing and innovative finance.

Previously, Chris was the head of the Innovative Finance Program at the Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition (GAIN), where he designed and built initiatives that attracted investment capital to address malnutrition. These included partnerships with impact investors to provide equity and debt financing to businesses having a positive impact on nutrition, and incubation support for African food and agribusiness companies. He also led the creation of the Access to Nutrition Index (www.accesstonutrition.org), a ranking of the world’s largest food and beverage companies on their nutrition practices which serves as an assessment tool for the sustainable investment community. Prior to GAIN, Chris was a Fellow with Acumen, a non-profit social venture capital fund, and worked for one of Acumen’s investments, Ziqitza Health Care, in Mumbai, India. He has also worked on international economic and development policy issues at the Millennium Challenge Corporation, the U.S. Treasury Department, and the U.S. State Department. Chris has a Master in Public Affairs from Princeton University and a Bachelor of Arts from Williams College.