Peter Johnson

As co-founder & co-managing partner, Peter helped create the model for making sustained, institutional-quality, market-return impact investments in emerging and frontier markets starting with DWM’s first impact investment in 1999. In the more than two decades since, Peter’s innovations and drive for higher standards in investing and impact have been influential across the industry.

At DWM today, Peter oversees fund management and key investor relationships, all within DWM’s investment focus of inclusive finance, agriculture and rural communities, off-grid solar and climate action, water and sanitation, education, housing and, a special focus of Peter’s, women’s economic opportunity.

Before co-founding DWM, Peter specialized in emerging and frontier markets as an investment banker at Bankers Trust (now Deutsche Bank), working out of London, New York and Cairo. From London, he structured direct investments in Asia, Latin America, and Eastern Europe. From New York, he created multiple bond issues to restructure $14 billion of debt to the U.S. government by sovereigns in Asia and Africa. In Cairo, Peter opened and managed the firm’s Egypt office and negotiated the company’s first debt-for-equity swap (Sudan) and first financing backed by workers’ remittances (Saudi Arabia to Egypt).

Peter has served on numerous impact investing-related boards, including as chairman of the pioneering women-focused microfinance & health institution Pro Mujer International.

Peter received a BS from the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University and an MA from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. He is a native English speaker, competent in French and conversant in Spanish.