PLY: As mentioned yesterday , work continues apace on a dedicated website for Social Impact Bond News at SocialImpactBondNews.com.
The newsletter itself will continue to be distributed first by email of a morning and then we will add the archives to the site along with other material / links which seem pertinent.
Today the vital. Prerogative of education in India and especially to empower women and make a better society. Also more discussion of measurement standards…
Girls Education In India To Provide Test Case For Innovative Financing
Devin Thorpe – Forbes
The world’s first-ever Development Impact Bond has been issued to support education of girls in India. This proof of concept financing could open a new channel of funding for the international development programs.
Modeled on social impact bonds or pay-for-success programs, the Educate Girls Development Impact Bond funded by the UBS Optimus Foundation will earn its return only if educational outcomes in terms of literacy and numeracy among girls are achieved.
Phyllis Costanza, CEO of UBS Optimus Foundation, explains, “Our aim is to establish a proof of concept’, showing potential donors and investors how development impact bonds can contribute to societal gains while also still offering financial returns.”
“What’s different about the Educate Girls Development Impact Bond is that is 100% focused on the outcomes achieved,” she adds. “It’s not just about getting marginalised girls into school; it’s about keeping them there – and ensuring they make real progress in literacy and numeracy.”
Does The Emperor Have No Clothes? Standards For Social Impact Measurement
Matt Robinson – NPC
There has been a recent flurry of discussions on impact measurement and social investment. Oranges and Lemons, a review of the impact measurement practices of leading UK social investment intermediaries, was released in June and revealed a diverse spread of different approaches and methodologies in reporting social impact. Then the first real analysis of the performance of FutureBuilders was published; one of the major recommendations of the report was that social impact needs to be tracked alongside financial impact from the outset.
In July, the G7 Social Impact Taskforce rolled (back) into town. Alnoor Ebrahim, Associate Professor at the Social Enterprise Initiative at Harvard, gave one of the sharpest presentations detailing the varied state of impact measurement among global impact investors. And then the OECD—masters of all things to be organised and classified—hosted an expert meeting focused on improving impact data collection, following their 2014 report Building the Evidence Base.
What have we learnt from all these meetings, reports and the jaw-jaw in general?
On the one hand, social impact investing activity around the world seems to be genuinely mushrooming—two years ago events like G7 plenaries were mainly about the UK, and to an extent the US, outlining their developments and the rest of the world listening. Now Portugal, Japan, Brazil and several other countries are reporting a rapid roll-out of impact investment deals and even plans for more ‘wholesalers’ along the lines of Big Society Capital.
On the other hand, we still know very little about what impact is actually being created by social impact investing as a whole. Alnoor Ebrahim identified a paradox: most impact investors seem satisfied with the impact they are having, but very few impact investment funds report on social outcomes (as opposed to inputs or outputs). More prosaically, as one well-known charity CEO recently suggested to me, ‘most impact investing impact reports are a celebration not an analysis’.