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.