The Sasakawa Peace Foundation (SPF) is a Japanese private foundation established in 1986 with an endowment from the Nippon Foundation to enhance international cooperation. After merging with the Ocean Policy Research Foundation in 2015, SPF has set its focus on five key areas: to address a variety of societal challenges that fast-emerging Asian countries currently face, to stimulate greater socioeconomic progress through women’s empowerment, to promote understanding and strengthen relationships with Muslim-majority countries, to further strengthen Japan – U.S. relations, and lastly, to develop programs to promote the long-term sustainability of the world’s oceans. Under the Gender Investment and Innovation Program, we plan to co-design and fund projects to support women entrepreneurs, entrepreneurial ecosystem development with a gender lens (via incubators, accelerators and GLI) and women’s economic empowerment in South East Asia. In 2017, we launched the Asia Women Impact Fund, an investment vehicle to intentionally support women’s economic empowerment and promote gender equality while achieving the double bottom line where positive development outcomes for women and girls and sustainable financial return are generated.