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Three Pillars for Measuring Impact in Inclusive Financial Services: Apis Partners and Accion Frontier Investments Group publish a framework for impact investors
In seeking to ensure a social as well as financial return on their investments in inclusive financial services, Apis Partners and Accion Frontier Investments Group created a framework to capture these services' unique aspects of impact. This gave rise to three core categories which they believe any fund manager investing in inclusive financial services can use to measure impact.
- Categories
- Impact Assessment
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Needed: A ‘Facebook’ for Impact Investing: Why the Sector Needs to Embrace Failure – And Also Produce Some Inspiring Successes
Impact investing has had some notable success stories, but no true breakout companies that – like Facebook – can inspire public attention and draw more entrepreneurs and investors to the sector. That's a problem, says Vox Capital director Daniel Izzo – as is the fear of failure, both financial and social, among investors. He discusses these challenges, and some possible solutions, in this video Q&A.
- Categories
- Impact Assessment, Investing, Social Enterprise
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NexThought Monday – Collecting Data That Matters: Nine tips for making sure your organization extracts the most value from measurement
Measurement is an iterative process. Metrics can and should shift as a company evolves from design to scale. Organizations should focus on collecting data that helps them improve their operations, such as data that can lead to them creating more value for their customers, producers and/or the communities where they operate.
- Categories
- Impact Assessment
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Defining ‘Good Practices’ in Microfinance: Smart Campaign Director Isabelle Barrès addresses the thorny issues of profits and pricing – and discusses its next steps
The Smart Campaign was launched to promote customer protection in microfinance – most notably by certifying the practices of participating MFIs. But critics have taken issue with the profits and pricing of some certified institutions. The campaign's director, Isabelle Barrès, responds to these criticisms, and discusses its next steps, in part two of our Q&A.
- Categories
- Impact Assessment
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An Uphill Climb: Smart Campaign director Isabelle Barrès, on the challenges of promoting client protection in microfinance
The Smart Campaign’s numbers are growing: It has certified 39 microfinance institutions as meeting its client protection standards, and these MFIs now serve slightly more than 20 million clients. But achieving this momentum hasn’t been an easy task for the campaign – or for the industry it’s trying to improve. Smart Campaign director Isabelle Barrès discusses the challenges in part one of this Q&A.
- Categories
- Impact Assessment
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Needed: Naïve People with Stupid Ideas: An interview with Intellecap co-founder and director Vineet Rai
When Intellecap was founded in 2002, few people would have predicted that it would become a social business and investing powerhouse. According to co-founder and director Vineet Rai, the company’s early years were defined by failure. He discusses the lessons he learned from these failures (and subsequent successes), Intellecap’s unique model and future plans, and many other topics in this wide-ranging video Q&A.
- Categories
- Impact Assessment, Social Enterprise
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NexThought Monday – Tapping the Potential of the World’s Largest Minority: Two keys to boosting employment for 70 million disabled people in India
After spending three months analyzing ongoing efforts to increase employment for people with disabilities at the base of the pyramid in India, the author saw two main problems: no collective goals have been established and there’s a lack of transparent impact data demonstrating the economic and social outcomes.
- Categories
- Education, Impact Assessment
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Measuring Client Health Outcomes Using Simple Indicators: Data collection is the easy part; the next test is helping organizations analyze, interpret
The Microcredit Summit Campaign is hoping financial services providers and others will use the “health outcome performance indicators” (HOPI) to assess the health and well-being of clients and their families, and believes wide usage of the HOPI could create short- and long-term value for practitioners, social investors and donors, raters and other actors.
- Categories
- Health Care, Impact Assessment
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