James Blewett

James has more than 20 years’ experience in international development. After qualifying as a Chartered Management Accountant, he worked in corporate finance in the UK and Eastern Europe, managing a series of privatisation deals. He has advised on transactions with a cumulative value of more than $1 billion.

A number of short term economic and private sector development assignments as an independent consultant in the Balkans and Asia led to team leader positions and longer-term assignments in Asia and Africa. James has worked in Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Iraq, Nigeria and Somaliland. James has significant experience and expertise in market systems development and is a regular contributor to specialist forums. 

He has designed and overseen the implementation of a number of challenge funds – notably the Afghanistan Business Innovation Fund and the Agriculture Technology Transfer research challenge fund. James is a shareholder and has been a member of the advisory board of the UK registered private equity fund, InFrontier, which specialises in pre-emerging market investment and is an investor in a UK social enterprise investing in agri-product processing.

Contributions

Blogs

• The challenge of scale: refining general practices [2016]
• New research: Improved scaling up of market systems interventions [2016]
• Making it big: steps for scaling up [2015]

Resources

• Pre-intervention investment toolkit [2019]
• BEAM Webinar: From analysis to action [2017]
• The challenge of scale: how can better pre-intervention analysis lead to improved scaling up success rates? [2016]
• Impact at scale: the challenge of moving from pilot interventions to sustainable, widespread change [2016]