WORKING JOINTLY TOWARDS HARMONISATION
In January 2019, several international financial institutions got together to explore harmonisation of approaches, which resulted in an agreement between FMO, CDC and Proparco to work towards one harmonised model. In the months that followed, BIO, the African Development Bank (AfDB) and Findev Canada joined the effort, and activities have been aligned with the European Development Finance Institutions (EDFI) work program. In 2021, we welcomed CIF, KfW, OeEB, and PIDG to further work with us on model development. Currently the JIM is working on a program with the Partnership for Carbon Accounting Financials (PCAF).
DEVELOPMENT PANEL
Click on the logos to learn more about the organisations and their involvement in the Joint Impact Model
TECHNICAL EXECUTION
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PARTNERS
AFRICAN DEVELOPMENT BANK
"The collaboration with other DFIs allows sharing costs, permitting then to obtain high quality, country-level, regional, and gender disaggregated data on indirect, induced and forward-effect jobs creation at a much lower cost compared to an individual effort."
In 2016, the African Development Bank approved the “Jobs for Youth in Africa” strategy, with a target of 25 million jobs to be created by 2025. The same year, the Bank also launched with the European Investment Bank the “Boost Africa” initiative with an expected 25,000 direct jobs and at least 70,000 indirect jobs to be created. Jobs creation is also a key element of the AfDB priorities, the High5s, in particular “Improve the Quality of Life for the People of Africa” and “Industrialise Africa”. Moreover, indirect jobs creation is one indicator of the AfDB’s Results Measurement Framework 2016-2025.
In 2017-18, the AfDB has developed, in collaboration with Steward Redqueen, a pilot exercise to measure indirect and induced jobs supported by its investment in East Africa. The Bank is a founding member of the Joint Impact Model, and since 2020, has allowed us to measure indirect, induced, and forward effect jobs supported by our investments in both Africa's private and public sector
We decided to join the JIM team because the model is based on international data and initiatives and is developed jointly by several development finance institutions. In addition, all institutions using the JIM benefit from the knowledge generated and exchanged with other DFIs and are in position to bring their perspective into the discussions. This allows benchmarking our data on jobs creation with other major development institutions.
For now, the Bank is using the JIM to measure the expected jobs supported by its investments. In the future we plan to track as well actual jobs supported by our portfolio. We also plan to make further use of other key features of the JIM, including on CO2 emissions, and to work with other JIM members to extend and improve the model over the next years.
BELGIUM INVESTMENT COMPANY FOR DEVELOPING COUNTRIES
"Thanks to JIM, BIO is now able to document and measure the large indirect effects associated with its investments. This joint model is also a beautiful example of efficient collaboration between various institutions and a key achievement towards the harmonisation of impact measurement practices."
- Pierre Harkay, Manager of the Development and Sustainability Unit at BIO
In 2019, BIO joined the AfdB, CDC, FMO and Propraco in the working group in charge of developing a common approach to measure indirect effects of their investments. For a smaller DFI like BIO, with limited resources, this collaboration was also a unique opportunity to learn and access the potential of economic modelling.
Before the Joint Impact Model, BIO already reported on direct effects of investments. However, financial institutions and energy production projects - two types of investment for which indirect effects are at the heart of the development thesis - represent a large part of BIO’s portfolio. The use of JIM now allows an estimation of the magnitude of the enabling effects associated with these investments and more generally indirect effects of all investments.
BIO used JIM for the first time on the data relating to its 2018 portfolio, in an ex-post manner. The input data needed to run the model are basic and easily accessible data, which BIO had already been collecting for several years for all investments. Although a little formatting of the data was required, the first implementation of JIM went off without a hitch, facilitated by a friendly-user interface, a simple user guide, and an on-demand support provided by Steward Redqueen.
The first estimates from JIM confirmed the relative importance of the indirect effects associated with BIO's investments. They show that for every direct job in a client company, BIO would support an additional 15 indirect jobs. Not surprisingly, most of this effect does come from the finance and power enabling effects. The results also give some insights about the country-sector combinations that are the most impactful. For example, BIO’s investment in food manufacturing companies in Africa appear to be among the most important in terms of direct and indirect jobs supported.
BIO plans to publish first figures in 2021 and to pursue its collaboration with other JIM members to further develop the model. Improvements in several dimensions should be implemented in the next years and make the model even more reliable, comprehensive, and easy to use. If jobs, added value and CO2 emissions are the few key indicators covered at the moment, the model could in the near future be extended to additional impact dimensions such as for example the quality of jobs supported.
BRITISH INTERNATIONAL INVESTMENT
BII (Former CDC) invests to make a lasting difference to people’s lives, in line with our overall commitment to all the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, beginning with Goal 1 on eliminating poverty. We target a wide range of global issues, and people in Africa and South Asia experience positive impacts primarily through more and better jobs and opportunities (SDG 8); access to basic goods and services such as food, health, education and power (SDGs 2, 3, 4 and 7); and our action on climate change (SDG 13) and gender equality (SDG 5). We also mobilise additional sources of capital from partners because this is key to increasing the finance available to achieve the Goals (SDG 17).
Our Impact Framework aligns with the Impact Management Project’s (IMP’s) five dimensions of impact (What, Who, How Much, Contribution and Risk). We also address a sixth dimension: ‘How’ our finance contributes to impact. It is when impacts are achieved indirectly that we need to rely on impact modelling. Since 2014 BII has been modelling indirect employment across our portfolio to complement direct impact monitoring. This has primarily been used for monitoring and public reporting.
For each investment, we require that our investees report on impact indicators each year, aligned with standard definitions (HIPSO and Iris+). This provides us with a consistent approach to impact management. It includes a range of metrics aligned to our strategic objectives, such as how many jobs our portfolio supported, the local taxes contributed to governments, the amount of third-party capital we mobilise, as well as relevant metrics for our three priority sectors: financial services, infrastructure and climate, and SMART Industries (services, manufacturing, agriculture, real estate, and technology).
We have also signed up to the Task Force on Climate-Related Financial Disclosures and we disclose annually the progress we are making against our Climate Change Strategy by tracking portfolio metrics, notably our commitments to climate finance. One of the big benefits of JIM is the ability to complete a meaningful carbon footprint by including GHG emissions of relevant scopes across a complex investment portfolio, reaching the parts that investees are unable to measure themselves and/or report to us via intermediaries.
We are excited to be able to use the JIM to improve our monitoring efforts using a method with brings together learnings from a wide range of impact investors and development finance institutions. This is bringing much-needed consistency and comparability to the space.
Additionally, we are interested in being able to view and compare different impacts – positive as well as negative - to identify value-adding investment themes that provide low-carbon, good quality jobs. In future, we would like to see additional impacts added to the menu, alongside the three important impacts currently available.
FINDEV CANADA
“Collaborating with our peers to develop and strengthen the JIM model has enabled to quantify the indirect impacts of our portfolio. Common methodologies to measure impact data in a rigorous, efficient and comparable manner are essential to scaling development finance and impact investing.”
- Stephanie Edmond, Chief Impact Officer at FinDev Canada
FinDev Canada is Canada's development finance institution established in 2018 to support the private sector in developing markets to promote inclusive and sustainable economic growth. Through our loans and investments, we look to mobilize private sector investment in developing markets to support businesses that drive market development, women's economic empowerment and climate action.
In 2019, FinDev Canada joined our peers in the development of the Joint Impact Model. Our unified goal was to develop a common approach to enable investors to measure and report the indirect impacts of their portfolios in a consistent and comparable way.
The Model initially focused on estimating the impacts of investments on economic value-add and employment. In 2021, we joined a working group led by FMO to align the Joint Impact Model with the requirements of The Global GHG Accounting and Reporting Standard for the Financial Industry from the Partnership for Carbon Accounting Financials (PCAF). The PCAF standard enables financial institutions to measure and disclose the GHG emissions financed by their loans and investments in line with the recommendations of the Task Force on Climate-Related Financial Disclosures.
Given the lack of quality GHG emissions data available, especially in emerging markets, the JIM is a powerful tool to enable counterparties to estimate GHG emissions in line with the PCAF Standard. Thanks to the JIM, FinDev Canada is able to measure and report the GHG emissions associated with all our loans and investments.
Better understanding the climate impact of our investment and financing activities is a critical first step to align our portfolio with the Paris Agreement.
FMO - Dutch Development Bank
“The Joint Impact Model is part of FMO’s endeavours to work towards harmonised models, methodologies and indicators at a global level. Measuring and reporting on impact in a consistent and comparable way is essential to evaluate global development needs and priorities, assess effectiveness of investments, and drive impactful actions”
- Dietske Simons, Director Finance, Impact, and data at FMO
Since 2015, FMO uses the Joint Impact Model (JIM) to measure the indirect effects of its investments for indirect jobs and emissions. The model was originally developed to quantify FMO’s doubling and halving strategy. Over the years other development finance institutions (DFIs) started to use similar methodologies.
We would like to highlight that outputs of the JIM are just one of the elements that you need to assess impact from a bigger view. Together with our partners in the JIM, we have now established a solid cooperation where we can add future modules like quality of jobs to support impact measurement globally is much needed if we truly want to become transparent and seamlessly compare results with others.
In absolute numbers, the Joint Impact Model had led to lower estimated jobs, as the future effects are no longer calculated. This is visible for the first time in the interim report for 2020. With 417,639 direct and indirect jobs supported, the number is 35 percent lower than we reported at the end of 2019. As a different methodology is used, we will no longer use the results of the previous Impact Model for comparison or benchmarking purposes.
PROPARCO
Over the past three years, Proparco has worked hard to improve our impact monitoring systems and the Impact Model is one of the tools we have adopted to achieve this goal.
What is particularly exciting about the JIM is that it has been a joint effort to develop and improve methodologies and assumptions between a number of development finance institutions. Working together means that we can produce and publish impact results that are comparative between institutions, a real step forward towards transparency and accountability.
Proparco’s impact focus lies on three main themes: maintaining and creating high quality jobs, supporting a sustainable environmental transition, and providing access to essential goods and services such as healthcare and finance.
Today, Proparco uses the JIM to gain a greater insight into the indirect effects of our investments. We have previously reported on direct jobs and services to beneficiaries based on reporting received from our clients. The JIM allows us to go further and explore the indirect impacts of investments by looking into the potential of clients to support jobs in the value chain or via the re-spending of salaries..
In addition, Proparco aims to establish a carbon footprint analysis for each new project. Although we already have internal tools for achieving this, we are exploring the comparability of the results between the JIM and our internal tool, with promising initial results. As the financed emissions component of the JIM is developed further, Proparco will be looking into using the JIM as a simpler way of estimating the emissions of our operations.
STEWARD REDQUEEN
“The JIM is unique as it combines insights and learnings from multiple organisations and research studies into one single tool which enables investors to assess economic and environmental impacts of investments in an integrated way It. By making the model and its methodologies publicly available the JIM aims to promote much-needed knowledge exchange, transparency and harmonisation in impact measurement and reporting. ”
- Sabine Dankbaar, Director at Steward Redqueen
Beginning 2019 we brought together a few DFIs to explore opportunities to align approaches on indirect impact modelling. Identifying indirect impacts is a key aspect of understanding the developmental effects of investments. However, understanding and measuring these impacts for a full portfolio of investments is complex.
At that time, we already supported several DFIs with developing a model to measure these impacts, particularly job impacts. Although the methodology of these models was the same, individual approaches of organisations differed. Each organisation had its own focus areas and applied its own assumptions: some organisations measured total jobs supported, others the change in jobs; some organisations included all impacts related to their investee, other attributed these impacts to their invested amount; some organisations used data at time of commitment, others used monitoring data.
These differences strengthened public scrutiny on jobs’ numbers. Due to a lack of transparency on assumptions and methodologies, numbers were hard to interpret and compare. Furthermore, exchange on improvements and learnings was limited.
Together with FMO, CDC, Proparco, AfDB, BIO and FinDev Canada we set up a coalition of the willing, and developed a harmonised model to measure and report on indirect impacts, the JIM. We agreed to make the model publicly available and take a collaborative approach.
Going forward we aim to continuously improve and expand the JIM, together with users and external experts. Elements that deserve particular attention are enabling impacts of infrastructure investments, improving ex-ante quantifications, and relieving some constraints and limitations of the IO methodology.
We welcome you to join the discussion!
CLIMATE INVESTMENT FUNDS
The Climate Investment Funds (CIF) was established in 2008 to mobilize resources and trigger investments for low-carbon, climate resilient development in select middle income and developing countries. To date, 14 contributor countries have pledged over US$ 8.5 billion to CIF, which is expected to leverage an additional $61 billion in co-financing for mitigation and adaptation interventions at an unprecedented scale in 72 recipient countries. CIF’s large-scale, low-cost, long-term financing lowers the risk and cost of climate financing. It tests new business models, builds track records in unproven markets, and boosts investor confidence to unlock additional sources of finance. The CIF is the largest active climate finance mechanism in the world.
While CIF’s stakeholders might be familiar with the climate impacts of its investments, there is less knowledge of the contributions that CIF’s climate programs are making to national social and economic development objectives and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). These additional development impacts (sometimes called “co-benefits”) are generally difficult to assess and measure but can significantly strengthen the case for increased climate finance. To better understand the social and economic development impacts linked to climate programs, CIF is currently implementing several distinct activities. One of these activities is the portfolio-level analysis of the potential economic impacts linked with its renewable energy portfolios, the Clean Technology Fund (CTF) and the Scaling Up Renewable Energy Program (SREP) using the Joint Impact Model (JIM), along with other available tools.
By joining JIM, CIF is aiming to learn from other development finance and private sector actors working on better linking development impacts to their investment portfolios, while also benefiting from the most current economic and scientific approaches to development impacts. To read more about CIF’s early learning on development impact, check out our blog post “Social and Economic Development Impacts of Climate Finance: What We’ve Learned So Far”.
KFW DEVELOPMENT BANK
Employment impact measurement is a key challenge that will benefit tremendously from harmonisation and further joint development
On behalf of the German government, especially the Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ), and the European Union, KfW Development Bank finances and supports programmes and projects that mainly involve public sector actors in developing countries and emerging economies. We are committed to improving economic, social and ecological living conditions all around the world.
Systematically quantifying employment effects is a big challenge. We need to come to feasible estimations which requires modelling based on well-founded assumptions. In 2012, we developed a model to estimate the job effects on an aggregate portfolio level. In 2018, KfW Development Bank went a step further and commissioned Steward Redqueen to develop a financial sector-specific input-output-based model to estimate job effects. Currently, we are looking into options of including more sectors and making the estimations even more robust.
KfW Development Bank highly values the harmonization efforts of the JIM Group. We strongly support the founding members’ ambitious goal of joining forces and developing a common employment model. As a first step, KfW Development Bank has signed the Memorandum of Cooperation in January 2021. In parallel, we are in the process of assessing the applicability of the JIM for our employment reporting as an IFI and identifying potential adjustment needs. At the same time, we are committed to engage and contribute to further improving the model in 2021.
It will surely not be an easy way forward, but we believe that working together on impact measurement and reporting, specifically for employment, is an essential and big step towards more transparency and consistency.
OeEB – Development Bank of Austria
OeEB was founded in March 2008 as the development bank of the Republic of Austria. Our mission is to promote economically, environmentally, and socially sustainable development by investing in profitable private sector projects in developing and emerging countries.
As an impact investor, all our investments are made with the intent to generate measurable and sustainable development impact in developing and emerging countries. In doing so, we work in accordance with the "Operating Principles for Impact Management".
Measuring results is one of the defining characteristics of impact investing. All the projects we finance have a clear goal to contribute to improving living conditions in developing countries. We therefore regularly collect data from our clients and measure and monitor the impact of our projects.
A comprehensive Results Framework on portfolio level enables us to gauge progress toward the achievement of goals and to adjust relevant activities accordingly. The various indicators of the Results Framework are analysed on an annual basis and presented in our yearly Development Report.
With the introduction of the JIM tool, we aim to place an even stronger focus on analysing GHG emissions at portfolio level. “Climate protection is anchored firmly as a cross-sector goal within our strategy. We see the Joint Impact Model as a great tool to help us better understand our financed emissions which is a key step in our efforts around climate action. The JIM’s great advantage is its alignment with international standards as well as the fact that it allows us to estimate financed emission even in the absence of primary data, which is essential until the data quality at project level improves”, explain OeEB board members Sabine Gaber and Michael Wancata.
In addition to our initial interest for the GHG emissions part of the JIM, we are actively following the development around the value-add and indirect jobs part of the model. Following the increased interest towards harmonizing the reporting methods, we are in the process of testing and evaluating the indirect jobs indicators alongside the GHG emissions.
PRIVATE INFRAESTRUCTURE DEVELOPMENT GROUP
The Private Infrastructure Development Group (PIDG) is an innovative impact investor focused on developing and financing infrastructure projects in the poorest and most fragile countries in sub-Saharan Africa and South and South East Asia. PIDG develops and finances infrastructure in countries where the financing gap is the greatest, where Governments have less fiscal space, and where private investors are reluctant because of real and perceived risks. PIDG operates along the full cycle of an infrastructure asset and across the entire infrastructure capital structure through its companies PIDG TA (upstream and enhancing development impact), InfraCo Africa and InfraCo Asia (project developers and equity investors), Emerging Africa Infrastructure Fund (long term debt) and GuarantCo (local currency guarantees).
PIDG established a systematic approach to assessing the impact potential of prospective investments against its Theory of Change and investment thesis. This is part of PIDG’s end to end system to drive and demonstrate impact across the entire investment cycle. Each investment undergoes a quantitative assessment of expected and realised impacts in the following areas:
i. People: from improved access to sustainable and resilient infrastructure, particularly for low-income groups and women, and from the creation of jobs in the infrastructure projects and associated supply chains.
ii. Planet: through lower carbon intensity and improved climate resilience of new infrastructure, avoided GHG emissions, and exploring the viability of innovative nature proof solutions.
iii. Wider economy: through local contracts awarded in the infrastructure projects, forward linkages in the wider economy, developing technologically innovative economic sectors and increasing fiscal revenues.
iv. Market transformation: through expected replication of the innovative infrastructure solutions and unlocking new flows of finance from international and local private investors with a focus on local currency solutions.
Contribution to SDGs, Development Impact Risks and Climate Change risks are also systematically assessed through a Sustainable Development Impact scorecard which is built on the Impact Management Project’s norms.
PIDG put both climate and gender considerations at the core of its investment approach. At the Group level we introduced climate and gender KPIs for each PIDG company since 2019. In investment decision making, compliance with PIDG Climate Change Standards and Gender Equality Standard are two of three minimum compliance thresholds in the very first investment screening (the other being financial additionality).
Two of the main pathways and steps assumed in the PIDG theory of change are:
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Improved infrastructure helps businesses to grow and create more and better jobs. In order to achieve impact in this way, these services must be affordable to businesses. There may also be employment opportunities generated in the supply chain of the PIDG-supported infrastructure.
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The infrastructure company will pay taxes, as will the companies in the supply chain and those benefiting from the infrastructure.
The indirect economic impacts resulting from PIDG-supported infrastructure can often be higher than those which are captured by project level reporting. Thus, PIDG has had a long-standing interest in tools that help quantify these indirect impacts for which observed data is not available.
For example, PIDG partnered with Steward Redqueen to quantify the indirect impact associated with particular investments and published the results on PIDG website. Though using similar methodology to other DFIs, we were conscious that the results were not always comparable due to different assumptions used by different DFIs.
This explains our strategic interest in the JIM as an important component of wider efforts towards harmonised models, methodologies and indicators at a global level.
PIDG has been using the JIM since 2020 on select investments. In 2021 PIDG joined JIM Development Panel with the intention to:
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Integrate the JIM, where appropriate, into the broader ex ante investment assessments and decision-making process described above, by using the estimates of the likely future effects of an investment or portfolio.
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Contribute to further development of the module on the potential enabling effects of infrastructure projects beyond the energy sector, specifically for transport and telecom sectors.
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Contribute to further alignment of impact modeling within the sector including on GHG emissions.
We look forward to working with others and contributing through our experience and expertise in these areas.
PHINION
“The JIM project stands out, because of the great collaboration with the different partners and its relevance and impact. It has been a great experience to be part of such a unique and meaningful initiative. Together we were able to create an innovative methodology to provide valuable insights on key metrics for investments in developing countries. Any DFI concerned with the economic, social and environmental impact of its investments ought to use this model.”
- Dick Kruithof. Director at Phinion
Phinion is the technology partner of the JIM initiative. Our role was to provide broad IT expertise to transform the logical model into stable and mature software, provided as an automated web service, including hosting, security and support. We provided full stack development and DevOps throughout.
The strength of this partnership was that all members contributed with their expertise to create an integrated result. We were able to work closely together with Steward Redqueen and FMO to improve the existing model and create a stable automated version. We have applied a method of collaborative and continual design, build, test and improvement to arrive at a high quality result that closely meets the needs of DFIs.
We provided the following services:
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Functional and technical model design: Transforming the logical model framework into stable and high performance code.
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Front-end web application development: Contributed to the design and extending the user friendly web interface to use the JIM model.
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Application and database architecture: Back-end development and structuring of code and data models.
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Agile implementation and testing: Applying scrum methodology, continuous testing and code management.
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Hosting and security: Using our own private datacenter with service level agreement on performance, security and support.
Key to the success was that we focused on making the application user friendly in close cooperation with the end-users. Furthermore, because we have the capabilities to provide a complete technical solution, we were able to work together efficiently and effectively.
We are very proud of the result!
PARTNERSHIP FOR CARBON ACCOUNTING FINANCIALS
“We’re pleased to see PCAF signatories FMO and CDC leading the development of JIM,” said Giel Linthorst, Executive Director of PCAF. “We look forward to testing and refining the JIM tool so that it can be used by PCAF signatories investing in developing countries.”
The Partnership for Carbon Accounting Financials (PCAF) was launched globally in September 2019. Currently, more than 200 banks and investors have subscribed to the PCAF initiative. PCAF participants work together to jointly develop the Global GHG Accounting and Reporting Standard for the Financial Industry to measure and disclose the greenhouse gas emissions of their loans and investments. By doing so, PCAF participants take an important step to assess climate-related risks, set targets in line with the Paris Climate Agreement and develop effective strategies to decarbonize our society.