Impact Investing and the New Business Landscape: Reflections on a Transformative Year with Nexii

Nexii's Janelle Morris reflects on her experience as a Princeton in Africa fellow with Nexii.

Industry Round Up: May 11

News snapshot

• Morgan Stanley Smith Barney launches Investing with Impact, an investment platform designed to provide investors with impact investment opportunities
• Intellecap Impact Investment Network (I3N), India’s first angel investor network, signs partnership with Toniic, a worldwide investor network, to further their collective mission of catalysing impact investments
• Omidyar Network announces £1.3 million grant to develop Social Impact Bonds globally, funding Social Finance’s UK organisation with £493,436 and its sister organisation in the US with £800,000 over the next two years
• US Secretary of State, Hilary Clinton, announces a $44.5 million Global Development Alliance between US Agency For International Development (USAID) and Skoll Foundation. The partnership is aimed to help identify and invest in social entrepreneurs and scale social enterprises
• Entrepreneur and impact investing advocate, Ron D Cordes of the Cordes Foundation, explains that you don’t have to be Bill Gates to have an impact in the article, Impact Investing for the Rest of Us
• Despite impact investing gathering momentum in various countries across the world, its development is not as fast track in some countries. Melissa Ip of Social Enterprise Buzz takes a look at the current state and prospects of the social enterprise in Japan in her article, Promoting Social Entrepreneurship in Japan
• Paula Goldman, director of Omidyar Network, questions whether philanthropic funding in impact investing is put to good use in The Distortion Risk in Impact Investing, featured on the Standford Social Innovation Review (SSIR) blog
• Beth Busenhart decodes impact reporting and measurement tools in the first of a series of impact-reporting-related articles to be featured on CSRwire Talkback
• As part of its centennial celebrations, Rockefeller Foundation launched the 2012 Innovative Challenges, calling global innovators to submit solutions to global issues with a chance of being awarded up to $100,000 in grant support. Entries close on 25 May and more information is available here

Weekend reads

• Nonprofit Finance Fund releases Risk Trade-off Continuum for Different Structural Approaches to Pay-For-Success Financing, a report containing their recent findings into the Risk Trade-offs involved in various social impact bond structures
• Reynders, McVeigh Capital Management publishes a paper titled Financial Focus On Social Returns: Complementing Portfolios With Impact Investments. The report details how investing in specific social ventures can complement balanced portfolios and highlights three areas in which the authors claim 

Keys to unlocking the power of impact investing - A book review

Whether you’re new to the impact investing field or an experienced social entrepreneur or investor, Impact Investing: Transforming How We Make Money While Making a Difference (Impact Investing for short) offers an insightful look into the impact investing field.

Impact Insights: The Climate of Impact Investing

The constellation of peoples, planet and profit, have endured cyclical patterns of instability and prosperity forever. It is part of the circle of life. Resilience and perseverance sustain societies during stretches of instability, until the fresh pioneering environmental, political, or economic alternatives are adopted by the mainstream. Just as perennials recover gradually in late winter before spring, innovative economic solutions globally are budding against the lingering frost of the extreme volatility of the past five years. Despite this sub-optimal climate, determined thought leaders continue to sow investment in positive impact entities, entities that place equivalent emphasis on profit maximization as well as the delivery of social and environmental impact as a viable future engine for economic growth and development.

No longer the misfit: New legal structures create room for the social enterprise

The social enterprise is a misfit in the realm of legal structures, camped out in the middle ground hedged between for-profit and non-profit. Its founder, the social entrepreneur, is a unique character, too mission focussed to set up shop with the corporate boys, while too profit-focussed to dream with the NGOs.

Social Impact Bonds: A Potential Model for Consideration

Since its unveiling, Social Impact Bonds have gained international attention among governments, investors and social entrepreneurs. With various pilot projects already underway, we explore another possible usage for the Social Impact Bond - renewable energy.

Industry Round Up: April 27th

News snapshot

• Echoing Green responds to David Brooks’ op-ed published in the New York Times criticising the social enterprise in their article, “A Healthy Dose of Idealism: How David Brooks Got It Wrong”
• Impact investment fund, LeapFrog Investments, invests USD $5.5 million into Express Life Insurance Company, boosting efforts to provide affordable insurance for low-income consumers in Ghana
• Benjamin Wald of Inc. shares tips on fund raising in his article, “How to Pitch to Venture Philanthropists”
• The funding gap for social ventures in the UK is estimated at GBP 1 billion, according to the Cabinet Office, which also noted the failure of private capital markets to provide sufficient capital to social ventures
• Incofin Investment Management, Fairtrade International and Grameen Foundation to establish First Fund, a fund that will provide long-term loans to cooperatives and associations of smallholder farmers in Latin America, Africa and Asia
• Efforts are underway to implement the Benefit Corporation, a US legal structure, in Latin America, pioneered by recently launched Sistema B
• The Rockefeller Foundation launches the Global Centennial Initiative to identify and pursue innovative solutions for the next century
• Think with Google looks at the role of data in responsible investments, highlighting how the focus needs to be on facts to drive capital to invest, in their article, “Data For Change”

Weekend reads

• The Monitor Group, in collaboration with Acumen Fund, has published a report addressing the role of philanthropy amidst growing interest in impact investing to provide solutions for global issues. The report, “From Blueprint to Scale”, highlights the heightened need for philanthropy in order to truly actualise the impact in impact investing
• The World Bank has just released the first set of data of the Global Financial Inclusion (Global Findex) Database, a project funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The Global Findex documents how people in 148 economies save, borrow, make payments and manage risk. More information and a report based on the recently released findings entitled “Measuring financial inclusion: the Global Findex Database” is available on the Global Findex website
• Social impact bonds are gaining momentum in the United States. McKinsey on Society explores the potential and challenges of these emerging structures in their article, “Will social impact bonds work in the United States” 

Is incumbency the enemy of collaboration?

Nexii's founder and CEO, Tamzin Ractliffe, explores the role of competition in the social enterprise.

Industry Round Up: April 13th

News Snapshot

• Evan Carmichael of The Entrepreneur Blog highlights the top bloggers covering the impact investing and social entrepreneur arena in “The Top 30 Social Entrepreneur Blogs to Watch in 2012”
• Big Venture Challenge helps “Seven social entrepreneurs secure £1.1 million of growth capital”
• UK government launches Big Society Capital, a £600-million financial institution created to build the social investment sector and provide easily accessible finance for social enterprises, community groups and charities
• Calvert Foundation’s recently launched impact investing initiative, WIN-WIN (Women INvesting in Women INitiative), awarded $1 million grant from Citi Foundation
• Online fundraising continues to grow as fast as retail e-commerce, according to a recent report by Convio reviewed by Joanne Fritz of About.com
• Philanthrocapitalism expands on the value of social entrepreneurs in tackling global issues with a fresh approach in their blog, “The Paradox of Flux”
• Six entrepreneurs share how they identify and invest in environmentally-focused enterprises in NextBillion article “Tools of the Trade: Building a Robust Deal Pipeline of Impact Companies in Emerging Economies (Part 1)”
• The Global Impact Investing Network (GIIN) interviews Judith Rodin of the Rockefeller Foundation on its upcoming work in impact investing
• Tony Elumelu Foundation partners with Co-creation Hub to fund technology start-ups in Nigeria 

Weekend Reads

• NextBillion, in partnership with Ashoka, have launched an e-book, “The BIG IDEA: Global Spread of Affordable Housing”, which provides a collection of articles from various thought leaders on affordable housing. The full e-book is available online for free, here.

To Profit or not to Profit? Report from the Harvard Social Enterprise Conference

Nexii’s Jack Breslauer shares key insights from the infamous Harvard Social Enterprise Conference held at Harvard Business School, Boston in February.