Grace has been engaged in base of the pyramid (BoP) research and social innovation projects in the ASEAN region since 2007. Over the past 10 years, she has handled projects that facilitated institutional building, program design, grants management, network development, and BoP community engagement towards social innovation and collective impact, working in partnership with targeted public and private institutions, and international development agencies such as Canada’s International Development Research Centre (IDRC), Rockefeller Foundation, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), and Oxfam GB. She is currently the executive director of UNIID-SEA, Inc. (www.uniid-sea.net; www.inclusiveinnovationhub.com), a newly established non-profit organization of higher education professionals and research institutions supporting “innovation for inclusive development” in Southeast Asia. She is also a consultant for inclusive business policy and knowledge management at the Asian Development Bank (ADB), and a lecturer at the Development Studies Program of the Ateneo de Manila University in the Philippines. Grace’s recent publications (serving as editor and contributing writer) include “Pathways Out of Poverty: Innovating with the BoP in Southeast Asia” (2012); “Scaling Inclusive Business Models at the Nexus of Poverty and Environment: Case Studies from the Philippines” (2017); “Enhancing Elections as Instruments of Democracy in ASEAN: A performance framework for Independent Electoral Commissions based on the experience of the Philippines and Thailand” (2017); and “How Resilient are Micro, Small, and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs) to Disaster and Climate Change Impacts: Insights from the Philippines and Indonesia (under review).
