Shilpa Patel is a Senior Advisor at ClimateWorks Foundation with expertise in development banking, financial structuring, international climate policy and blended finance. Shilpa served as the Director of Mission Investing for the past five years, working with partner foundations to design and implement mission investment strategies with the potential to catalyze private finance and drive investment in climate mitigation activities.
Prior to joining ClimateWorks, Shilpa was an independent consultant for a number of organizations on climate finance and was Principal Advisor to the Finance Center at the World Resources Institute. Shilpa started her career in the World Bank, where she worked on private sector development across a number of sectors, regions, and economies in transition, including agriculture in the Maghreb and financial sector reform in Vietnam. At the International Finance Corporation, she led several project finance transactions in the global south before creating an innovative incubator for environmental finance. She was asked to set up the IFC’s climate practice and headed its work on climate strategy and metrics, including understanding the impacts of climate change on private business and IFC’s operations.
Shilpa holds undergraduate and graduate degrees from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, and has taught courses on Project Finance at Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business.