It’s not news that impact investing is near to other forms of socially responsible business development. Jioulnar Asfari, director of the SOLj Center for the Promotion of Innovation in the Society, says the same thing. According to the expert, finding place for impact investing among other investment strategies is, in fact, an attempt to separate it from ESG investments (environment-social/sustainability-governance), which began to form a little earlier. There is a steady movement that sees the difference between the first and the second in that the ESG concept, as a rule, arises within already existing business and impact projects are initially created in order to solve certain social or environmental problems.
At the same time, experts have no consentience regarding the equivalence of the two parts of the definition — «transformative» and «repayable» ones. In fact, financial dividends are not a fundamental point for the majority: the main thing is that investments work for a stable social effect. Zero return on social bonds is permissible, says Elena Feoktistova, Deputy Chairman, Managing Director for Corporate Responsibility, Sustainable Development and Social Entrepreneurship of the Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs. "An investor can invest money as a social investments — in fact, as a grant, supporting social entrepreneurs, and that money, even if it doesn’t generate income, can be seen as an impact investment because it helps to solve specific problems," she said.
Jioulnar Asfari
MY FAVORITE IMPACT CASE
Ksenia Frank: Olga Barabanova and KINESIS. While still working as a volunteer, Olga finds out that wheelchairs for children are very heavy and do not provide sufficient mobility and are not individualized. Having set up the production of children's bicycles (Lisoped), Olga realized that the technology of making wheelchairs is not very much different from bicycles. Today Olga is producing light active wheelchairs in Moscow (the company is included in the register of social entrepreneurs): Kinesis is the first in Russia (and so far the only one) that makes personalized wheelchairs for children from 2 years old, adults and for Paralympians.
"A person who has created a successful business understands how to get what he wants with the help of investments. In business, this desire is measured in money. In impact investments — in social changes," Ekaterina Rybakova, President and co-founder of the Rybakov Foundation, supports the idea.
Summarizing, we can say: the definition scope can be wide — would be it useful. Thus, the founder of the Seven Suns Development Group of Companies, entrepreneur and social investor Alexey Ryzhkov believes that impact investing in principle should be understood as the activities of any companies that are somehow related to the positive impact arising. "I see ‘impact’ as a format that sooner or later everyone has to transit to," he says. Perhaps, different versions of the definition will again converge into a single picture at this ‘transition point’. "Impact Managing is the ability to see these aspects all as a whole. And there is an art to do it and now I see it more in terms of governments, that is, building a system of governance," Jioulnar Asfari says.
In fact, all market participants, which concerned the topic development, agree on one thing: investments should ‘work’, producing a clear and, if possible, measurable positive impact. It is still the second question — whether it will be possible to return funds invested and even more so to make a profit. The main thing is to achieve a measurable social effect… and be able to evaluate it.
"We decided for ourselves that since we want positive changes, they should affect the quality of people’s lives. And we will rely on feedback, on how people themselves evaluate these changes. Tens of thousands of people participate in our activities. We interview them. And we evaluate our impacts by the way they evaluate the impact of our programs, our projects on their lives," Ekaterina Rybakova says.
Venture investor Ksenia Frank is also confident that quantitative assessment when measuring impact raises many questions and is insufficient by itself. "In the work of the Timchenko Foundation, we do not tie grants only to the achievement of planned metrics (the Foundation introduced a monitoring and evaluation system in 2015). If metrics are too closely tied to funding, they can inadvertently provoke wishful thinking." Ksenia Frank notes that in areas such as social or environmental impact, the purely numerical equivalent of benefits can lead to a shift in focus: "We all know how to count «outputs»: number of classes held, manuals published and people who attended the class. Yet there is something much more difficult to assess and that very few people think about. That is what really has changed in the lives of these people and how stable these changes are."
Jioulnar Asfari agrees with the existence of an internal conflict between the known metrics of performance evaluation and, in fact, the impact evaluation. "The impact is such a semantic aspect, and its ‘birth place’ is the heart, and all the evidence is in the head. Therefore, it is important not to overdo it: the control and measurement system itself should not become a goal in itself. When we talk about impact, it is important to be able to see the effect of all indicators at the strategic level together." At the same time, Jioulnar Asfari notes, today the world market is beginning to form the impact evaluation standards necessary for public companies, there are indicators that can be measured and calculated, and the formation of a relevant evaluation system is, as a whole ring, a matter of time.
Ksenia Frank
Ekaterina Rybakova
MY FAVORITE IMPACT CASE
Ekaterina Rybakova: If we talk about the Rybakov Foundation's projects, it's difficult for me to choose. They include the University of Childhood and our course, which we developed together with The Higher School of Economics university as an evaluation and self-diagnostic tool for schools, as well as the school community «The School is the center of society». The course that we are now introducing into the curriculum of pedagogical universities is aimed at giving future teachers skills in community management, community building so that they can use them immediately in school.
Alexey Ryzhkov is sure that the metrics, in any case, are necessary for impact: "It is important that any sphere, any activity is viable in terms of metrology. It is important to develop criteria, it is important for society to coordinate them. It is important to use these criteria." At that Ryzhkov notes, along with universal criteria, there should be industry metrics. But they should be universal, relevant for all countries and activities — first of all.
However, everyone has no inherent optimism about the prospects for implementation of a single universal evaluation system. Ekaterina Rybakova believes that it will be extremely difficult to reach an agreement even at the level of one, single country. "In many ways, the question of preferences, what exactly you consider important for a certain sphere, plays a role here," she notes. Preferences — and, we add, the traditional "devil in details". "For example, one foundation states: we invested in the project — 300 children have been taught programming. My first question is: where are these children from? If these children played chess yesterday, and today you taught them programming, how much social effect is there? If yesterday they were drinking beer in the alleyway, and you brought them to the club, got them interested so they stayed, taught them programming and gave them a profession, then there is a real social effect", — says Ksenia Frank.