This year’s Sankalp Forum, coyly named the “Unconvention Summit” after its link up with Villgro, had a heavy focus on impact investing. Sessions ranged from ways to encourage more angel investment in India, to innovations in financing social enterprises and approaches to align donors’ agendas in fostering the sector.
But an important undercurrent to the entire summit was a question that Vineet Rai, managing director of Aavishkaar, posed in one of the opening sessions: Is impact investing living up to the claim of impact?
This is an important consideration that extends to the social enterprise sector more broadly (and it’s something past Sankalp events have explored as well—I previously wrote about them here and here).
Without measurable and well-defined social impact, social enterprises differ little from regular businesses, which also achieve ancillary social benefits such as employment generation, and the delivery of quality goods and services. But should social enterprises measure their impact at the enterprise level? How much should that impact count -and to whom? And how often should the measurements take place?
These are hot topics of debate, but but it’s clear that for policymakers and mission-driven funders to find impacting investing and social enterprise valuable, positive social impact must be attained. And diverting significant amounts of donor or public funding into the social enterprise sector should also require that this impact be achieved more cost-effectively than their non-profit counterparts or the status quo.
What mechanisms are in place to ensure that impact investors and the enterprises using their capital work to maximize the social impact that distinguishes their name? While none of the summit’s sessions explicitly addressed this subject, various participants touched upon the issue.
