We would like to welcome Emily Davila as our Beyond Profit Guest Blogger from the Clinton Global Initiative. This is her first post of many.
At Beyond Profit, we have had our eye on the Global Impact Investing Network. Though the idea for the network was conceived in 2007, the GIIN has been laying low, quietly building its bank of investors. But expect to see the network in the news during the upcoming Clinton Global Initiative, where it will announce the members of its founding Investors’ Council.
GIIN has been given an initial grant by the Rockefeller Foundation, as part of their $30 million Harnessing the Power of Impact Investing Initiative, a not-for-profit initiative dedicated to increasing the effectiveness of impact investing, which it defines as investments aiming to solve social or environmental challenges while generating financial profit. While Rockefeller has given an initial grant to the GIIN, there are other funders involved who will eclipse Rockefeller’s funding. Intellecap’s own Sankalp Forum received support from this initiative as well.
The Rockefeller Foundation believes that the following challenges must be addressed for impact investing to reach mainstream investors:
- Lack of coordination hampers collaboration necessary for the industry to mature.
- Intermediation—the placement of money between investors and the businesses and projects that can use it productively—is generally sub-scale and specifically embryonic in sub-sectors such as public health and agriculture.
- Basic market infrastructure and the investment ecosystem necessary to identify, vet, and monitor investments efficiently is missing or fragmented.
The network has strong ties to Monitor Group and Intellecap (the company that publishes Beyond Profit), the latter of which recently hosted a stakeholder meeting to discuss the opportunities and challenges for global impact investing in India.
Social business blogger Rodney Schwartz, a self-proclaimed skeptic, has faith in the initiative. Smith applauds its international approach, and thinks it has struck the right balance between action and reflection, consultation and decision.
At Beyond Profit we plan to stay tuned – and we’ll try to deliver some fresh insight when we hear from GIIN first-hand at the Clinton Global Initiative where we’ll be blogging live.
For more information on impact investing, see the article we published in the first issue of Beyond Profit by Antony Bugg-Levine. Also of interest: the Monitor Institute report, “Investing for Impact, Social & Environmental.”
