Investment promotion is a competitive business, and nowhere more so than in Asia and the Pacific, which attracts more foreign direct investment than any other region. Each year a finite number of factories, data centres and regional headquarters go looking for a home, and hundreds of agencies compete to win them. Officers in these agencies guard their investor pipelines the way traders guard positions. So why did ten senior women in the field just spend eight weeks coaching the competition — for free?
The answer starts with a problem the profession rarely names. The work runs on teams and partnerships, but the learning does not, and that gap is wider for women. There is no degree in investment promotion. The skills that decide outcomes, reading an investor's real intentions, pitching a location credibly, continuing to support an investor after they have invested through aftercare, are learned on the job, usually from whoever sits nearby. In a large agency, that works. In a small one, there may be nobody nearby who has done your job before. Siti Mahmud of the Brunei Economic Development Board put it simply: coming from a small economy with a relatively young IPA, she valued the rare opportunity to learn from accomplished women leaders in the field whose wealth of experience provided practical guidance that strengthen her professional development.
For women, the gap compounds. Women fill the ranks of the region's investment promotion agencies (IPAs) but thin out sharply toward the top, which means the person a young professional would most naturally learn from, someone who has navigated the same rooms, the same negotiations and the same assumptions, often is not in the building at all. She is in another agency. Frequently, on another continent.
This is the proposition ESCAP and FDI Center set out to test with the Women in Investment Promotion mentoring pilot. It pairs women working in IPAs with seasoned counterparts anywhere in the world and sees whether genuine professional exchange happens or whether the pairs stall, as mentoring schemes so often do. Between April and June 2026, nine mentoring matches, spanning fourteen countries met one-to-one, joined expert sessions and worked on challenges the mentees brought from their desks in Bhutan, Brunei Darussalam, Kazakhstan, the Lao People's Democratic Republic, Malaysia, the Philippines and Thailand.
The pairs did not stall. What surprised us was why they didn't.
The most instructive finding of the pilot is what participants came to call the distance effect. The closer another IPA sits geographically, the more directly it competes for the same investors, and the more guarded the conversation. Pair China Pring of the Philippine Board of Investments with Karina Bazuchi of ApexBrasil, half a world and eleven time zones away, and the guard drops. The two discovered their leadership journeys ran in parallel; when China's team shifted from market-oriented to sector-oriented promotion, Karina had already lived through the same transition in Brazil. They found the eight weeks too short and simply kept meeting. Distance, it turns out, is not the obstacle to professional exchange in this field. It is the enabler.
And the exchange was concrete, not ceremonial. Siti worked session by session with her mentor, Nicola Watkinson of TheCityUK, refining Brunei's investor pitch: Nicola assigned homework between meetings; Siti returned with reworked slides; and the two have agreed to keep meeting now that the programme has ended, because the learning, both say, runs in both directions. Elsewhere in the cohort, one mentee folded her mentor's investment fast-tracking experience into her agency's work plan; another left with a redesigned investor survey. Mentees' self-assessed confidence in pitching and investor targeting rose over the eight weeks, and every mentor asked to stay on for the next cohort.
There is a policy point buried in this. Governments across Asia and the Pacific spend heavily on the hard tools of investment attraction: incentives, zones, promotion campaigns. But FDI follows trust and information as much as tax holidays, and the region's investment facilitation agenda increasingly depends on soft infrastructure: relationships between the institutions investors actually deal with. Nine mentoring pairs created working channels between sixteen agencies that did not exist three months ago, at a fraction of the cost of a single promotion campaign. Building the pipeline of women who will lead the region's IPAs is not a side benefit. It is the same project.
The programme will be formally launched at the ASEAN Investment Forum 2026 in Manila on 10 November, where the mentors and mentees will finally meet in person. The competition for investment will carry on; it always does. But no one in this profession should have to learn it alone. As of this year, in Asia and the Pacific, fewer women will.
Women professionals in investment promotion agencies interested in joining the next cohort can register their interest following this link.
The mentoring programme is being delivered with support from the UK Mission to ASEAN as part of the ASEAN Green Investment Catalyst (AGIC) programme funded by the ASEAN-UK Green Transition Fund.
