London, UK, Wednesday 17 November – Leading international providers of sustainability standards and guidance have come together to create the Impact Management Platform, a collaboration to mainstream the practice of impact management. As a first product, the ‘Platform’, whose steering committee brings together a set of multilateral organisations, has launched a web tool that outlines the core actions of impact management and links to the resources to help organisations and investors implement them.

Over the past decade, there has been significant growth in demand for organisations to improve their impacts on people and the planet, and to contribute to achieving the Sustainable Development Goals by 2030. Core to making this possible is effective impact management. However, the growing number of initiatives supporting different aspects of impact management have been difficult for enterprises and investors to navigate. With the climate crisis and COVID-19 pandemic demonstrating the fundamental interdependencies between markets and sustainability issues, the urgency to build a coherent and complete system of principles, standards and guidance for how to improve sustainability impacts has never been greater.

Through the Platform, partnering organisations will work together to identify opportunities to consolidate existing sustainability resources, collectively address gaps, and coordinate with policymakers and regulators to support the mainstreaming of impact management. This effort represents the next phase of a global collaboration that, until now, was facilitated by the Impact Management Project (IMP), a five-year consensus-building forum designed to run until 2021. Earlier work included facilitating sustainability disclosure initiatives to agree a shared vision for corporate reporting to meet the needs of all stakeholders, and supporting the consolidation of the investor-focused disclosure initiatives into the IFRS Foundation and its new International Sustainability Standards Board (ISSB). The Platform, whose Steering Committee includes multilateral organisations that will also advise the ISSB, provides a complementary forum for the broader task of supporting practitioners to manage their sustainability impacts.

Partners planning to work together through the Platform include B Lab, Capitals Coalition, CDP, Climate Disclosure Standards Board (CDSB), Global Impact Investing Network (GIIN), Global Reporting Initiative (GRI), Global Steering Group for Impact Investment (GSG), International Finance Corporation (IFC), Impact-Weighted Accounts Initiative at Harvard Business School (IWAI), Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), Principles for Responsible Investment (PRI), Value Reporting Foundation, Social Value International, United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UN DESA), UN Development Programme (UNDP), UN Environment Programme – Finance Initiative (UNEP FI), UN Global Compact (UNGC) and World Benchmarking Alliance (WBA).

A joint launch webinar at 10am EDT / 3pm GMT / 4pm CET on Tuesday 23 November will share the vision and future of the Platform with representatives of the Platform Partners. This will include a keynote dialogue with Mathias Cormann, Secretary General of the OECD, and Inger Andersen, Under-Secretary-General of the United Nations and Executive Director of the UN Environment Programme. Click here to register for the event. 

The Impact Management Platform website can be accessed at www.impactmanagementplatform.org

About the Impact Management Platform

 The Impact Management Platform (‘Platform’) is a collaboration between leading providers of public good standards and guidance for managing sustainability impacts. Through the Platform, partnering organisations aspire to:

• clarify the meaning and practice of impact management;
• work towards interoperability and fill gaps as needed; and
• have coordinated dialogue with policymakers.

The Impact Management Platform website supports practitioners to manage their sustainability impacts – including the impacts of their investments – by clarifying the actions of impact management and explaining how standards and guidance can be used together to enable a complete impact management practice. The website can be accessed at https://impactmanagementplatform.org/

About the founding Partners

Partners planning to work together through the Platform include:

• B Lab
• Capitals Coalition
• CDP
• Climate Disclosure Standards Board (CDSB)
• Global Impact Investing Network (GIIN)
• Global Reporting Initiative (GRI)
• Global Steering Group for Impact Investment (GSG)
• International Finance Corporation (IFC)
• Impact-Weighted Accounts Initiative at Harvard Business School (IWAI)
• Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD)
• Principles for Responsible Investment (PRI)
• Social Value International (SVI)
• United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UN DESA)
• UN Development Programme (UNDP)
• UN Environment Programme – Finance Initiative (UNEP FI)
• UN Global Compact (UNGC)
• Value Reporting Foundation (VRF)
• World Benchmarking Alliance (WBA)

Descriptions of all these organisations and their logos can be found here.

Contact

Jo Fackler
Engagement Lead, Impact Management Project
info@impactmanagementplatform.org
+44 (0) 786 0125 088

by Emily Gustafsson-Wright, Senior Fellow, Brookings Institution

Nearly 120 million students remain at home due to school closures resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic and, although many education systems have transitioned to some form of remote learning, research has shown that the access and quality of remote learning opportunities has been uneven, with low-income countries and populations facing the greatest barriers leading to high levels of learning loss. In fact, it is estimated that today, 63 percent of children in low- and middle-income countries face learning poverty -the inability to read and understand a simple text by the age of 10, representing an increase in ten percentage points since before the pandemic. Furthermore, labor market challenges persist and have been exacerbated – compared to 2019, total employment fell by 114 million as workers became unemployed or dropped out of the labor force. This combination of human capital and productivity loss will have devastating consequences for decades to come if urgent action isn’t taken.

Last month at the annual GSG Global Impact Summit, leaders in the impact investing sector from across the globe gathered to discuss these and other entrenched and intractable social and environmental challenges that have been aggravated by the pandemic. Two sessions focused on using innovative financing to harness private investment to enhance delivery and strengthen government and service provider capacity through a focus on outcomes, measurement, and accountability. Mechanisms that were discussed included social and development impact bonds (SIBs and DIBs) and outcomes funds in which impact investors provide upfront capital which is repaid—with interest—based on the program’s achievement of predetermined social and environmental outcomes and income-share agreements, in which payments for training are repaid contingent upon beneficiaries obtaining quality sustained employment. A few common themes emerged from the discussions.

More money alone isn’t enough

In both sessions, there was clear agreement that more money alone will not address the outsize challenges at hand.  This point seemed poignant in an environment focused on driving private capital towards social good. In fact, there is a need for more than that. The panelists emphasized a shift in focus to outcomes and capacity building as the most important drivers of improved social and environmental impact. For example, Mercedes Miguel, a former Secretary of Education in Argentina, emphasized translating policy into practice through capacity building on the ground to ensure the effective use of constrained budgets. Mika Pyykkö, who has been involved from the beginning of the outcomes-based financing journey in Finland, highlighted the difficulty and importance of the change in mindset around outcomes in government.  

Data and measurement matter (a lot)

To facilitate the outcomes-focus and capacity building, data and measurement are crucial. Abha Thorat-Shah discussed how, through the Quality Education India (QEI) DIB, they have invested in these two pillars. This project has not only tapped into and strengthened data collection among the four education operators involved, but it has used this opportunity to build evidence and knowledge that can be applied across the education sector in India and beyond. Understanding both costs and the effectiveness of interventions as well as what pivots may be necessary along the way and applying this knowledge to future planning in the sector is crucial to tackling the learning crisis facing us today as well as other social challenges.

Partnerships are critical

Another common thread across the discussions was the need for collaboration and cooperation through multi-stakeholder partnerships including the public, private and third sectors. Such partnerships, they emphasized, can ensure that a variety of skills and expertise are present so that programs are efficiently designed and beneficiary needs are placed at the forefront. This new type of PPP, partnerships for public purpose, “emphasize not whether the partner is from the public or private sector, but whether these collaborations and their impact have a publicly oriented purpose”.  Furthermore, a mix of types of influence and risk appetite can help to both level the playing field and most appropriately spread risk across parties. Annie Knickman-Plancher and Jake Edwards from Social Finance U.S. discussed such partnerships in their SIB projects as well as their income-sharing agreements (Career Impact Bonds*) for employment in the state of Massachusetts in the United States. One program, through a short diesel technician training, has managed to increase wages of program participants without a college degree by 75 percent.

Design with scale and sustainability in mind

A challenge faced across many of the innovative financing projects described in both discussions and in the overall market is their small size relative to the overall challenges faced in both the education and employment sectors, as noted above. The drivers of the small project size are to some extent the flipside of the above points: entrenched models of social services funding based on inputs, capacity constraints, and poor coordination across stakeholders. There is another aspect however, which is that often projects aren’t designed with scale or sustainability in mind from the start.  There are, however, some exceptions: Daniel Uribe, from Fundacion Corona in Colombia, described how the world’s first SIB in a developing country gave way to a second and then the development an outcomes fund pooling funding for potentially a multitude of projects in the employment sector. This model also allowed the stakeholders to capture learnings along the way to improve design and implementation of future projects. Jared Lee explained how the Education Outcomes Fund (EOF), after much groundwork in building up its mission, has now been established as trust fund at UNICEF which facilitates links across the education sector including with local governments. In addition, EOF has aimed to create standardized outcomes contracts, drawing on both U.K. outcomes contracts and DIBs around the world, with the goal of facilitating scale and sustainability.

In sum, as a global community committed to ensuring equitable access to quality services and safe healthy communities, there remains much work to be done. Focusing on the quality required to achieve outcomes, data and measurement and partnerships, all with scale in sustainability in mind, will be a critical part of this work. For the impact investing community, this means deepening short-term investments in systems building with an eye on long-term gains.

*Note that while termed impact bonds, Career Impact Bonds do not fit the Brookings definition of an impact bond, but instead are an income-sharing agreement with payment contingent upon success.