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Flipping the Script: Why Small and Growing Businesses Should Lead the Researchers – Not the Other Way Around
All too often, global development research hinges on the interest of researchers, rather than the knowledge needs of small and growing businesses and their impacted communities. This can leave entrepreneurs with plenty of reports, but no practical tools for continuing to collect and use data themselves. Analysts at the William Davidson Institute, Gente Del Futuro, Practical Action and ANDE propose a better approach: letting small businesses lead the way.
- Categories
- Entrepreneurship, Technology
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Does ‘Impact’ Lie in the Eyes of Investors in India?
India faces an annual financing gap of US $565 billion in achieving its SDG targets - which creates a huge opportunity for impact investors. But according to Mohit Saini at the Fletcher School, the country's investors have no specific, well-accepted definition of impact. He discusses this challenge, and how standardized, sector-specific metrics could help address it.
- Categories
- Impact Assessment, Investing
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New Era, New Data: Why ‘Financial Inclusion 2.0’ Will Require a Different Approach to Measurement
Financial inclusion is entering a new era, says Grant Robertson at FinMark Trust. The movement’s first era focused largely on boosting financial access – but its impact on poverty and wellbeing was limited. The new era – "financial inclusion 2.0" – will focus more on expanding real economic opportunity. But to support this goal, the sector will need a new approach to data.
- Categories
- Finance, Impact Assessment
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Press Release: Impact Investors Growing Increasingly Sophisticated at Impact Measurement and Management (IMM), Even Amid Challenges
The new report, which surveyed the GIIN’s largest respondent pool, captures data from 278 impact investors and 109 two-year repeat respondents. It provides the most comprehensive view of how impact investors assess their social and environmental impact, and the trends that have shaped IMM practices in the past two years.
- Source
- Press Release
- Categories
- Impact Assessment, Investing
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Is Government the Key to Scaling up Graduation Programs? Results From an Impact Evaluation in Latin America
Graduation programs fight poverty by offering participants the tools and resources they need to create a viable livelihood. But while these programs have shown impressive results, they're costly to bring to scale. Tatiana Rincón and Adriana Insaurralde at Fundación Capital explore whether the graduation approach can be rolled out by governments without compromising its impact, based on evidence from a ground-breaking impact assessment.
- Categories
- Entrepreneurship, Impact Assessment
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Big Data, Big Opportunity: Is Data Science the Key to Universal Energy Access?
Rural dwellers at the base of the pyramid are living largely "data-less," un-digitalized lives – but that's changing quickly with the spread of pay-as-you-go energy and the financial access it enables. In spite of the dangers of wrongly screening out customers as potential credit risks, denying them both further electrification prospects and access to credit, Guilhem Dupuy of GAIA Impact Fund and Thibault Lesueur of Solaris Offgrid take an optimistic view. They discuss why new off-grid energy data is an opportunity for increased investment, industry growth and economic justice.
- Categories
- Energy, Technology
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Inside the Quest to Measure the Impact of Impact Investing
How do you measure the impact of reliable weekly milk purchases on the lives of small-scale Indian dairy farmers? What if you need to compare that with the impact on American college students of courses about dating violence and sexual harassment? This is the kind of valuation challenge impact investors have been grappling with for years. Purely financial investments come with an accepted methodology for measuring return on investment. But with investments in projects or organizations working to deliver social or environmental impact, there’s no shared accounting framework for measuring the value of what’s been achieved.
- Categories
- Impact Assessment, Investing
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From Counting Women to Valuing Women: Practical Impact Measurement Tools for Complex Contexts
The old way of measuring the gender equality of a company or program consisted of simply counting women – from the number of female employees and clients, to the number of women beneficiaries and board members. The new way is all about valuing women by collecting data on how they are impacted by a company or program. Rebecca Baylor at WDI's Performance Measurement team provides some concrete strategies for gender-based impact measurement and management.
- Categories
- Impact Assessment
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