News
The 2X Challenge: Financing for Women was announced at the G7 meeting in Charlevoix, Quebec on June 9, 2018 by the member-countries’ development finance institutions (DFIs). The initiative calls on “DFIs to mobilize their own funds, as well as private capital, to unlock resources that will help advance women as entrepreneurs,
The international impact investing industry is growing and performing well. In fact, impact investors now manage nearly $230 billion worldwide. They also show strong commitment to measuring their results. These are some of the top-line findings of the latest survey by the Global Impact Investing Network, the industry’s premier trade association.
The American Evaluation Society’s blog site, AEA365, features an article by Niels Dabelstein on the pioneering evaluation of the International community\s response to the Genocide in Rwanda in the early 1990s. Published in 1996, writes Dabelstein, “the evaluation report presented a comprehensive, independent evaluation of the events leading up to and during the genocide
Grace Lyn Higdon and Peter O’Flynn, research at the Institute of Development Studies, have kicked off a new blog series that will highlight ways and means of increasing citizen participation in the impact investing process and strengthening the “downward accountability” of the field.
This is the title of an article in the spring 2018 edition of Corporate Knights. Among other examples, the article profiles the Adidas Group as an exemplar in its policies on human right defenders and in its ranking in the KnowTheChain partnership.
In a recent AEA365 post, longtime evaluation thought- and practice-leader Rick Davies highlights the advantages of the Basic Necessities Survey (BNS) as a simple, democratic and rights-based tool for measuring poverty in a wide range of contexts. Read his blog and access BNS resources at AEA365
Sweden’s Expert Group for Aid Studies has published DFIs and Development Impact: An Evaluation of Swedfund, assessing the results of that institution’s investments in terms of financial performance, employment creation, taxes generated, and ESG (environmental, social and governance) enhancement of its investee companies.
In their peer-reviewed article entitled Impact Investing: Measuring Household Results in Rural West Africa, published in the ACRN Oxford Journal of Finance and Risk Perspectives, Ted Jackson and Karim Harji point to the importance of impact investing making a significant contribution to the well-being of villagers in a region dealing with extremism and poverty.
In their new AEA365 blog, Ben Fowler and Richard Horne encourage evaluators charged with measuring the impacts of job creation to: first, rethink their definition of a job and second, not shy away from more complex measurements of job creation. They provide more detailed advice in their report, Measuring job Creation in Private Sector Development.
A recent OECD blog by Rory Clarke underscores the nature and significance of the ongoing conflict between nomadic pastoralists and farmers in sedentary communities in West Africa and the Sahel. The deepening of this conflict can further destabilize already fragile areas in this part of the continent.
