Impact Investing’s Next Challenge

Since the term “impact investing” was coined by the Rockefeller Foundation 15 years ago, the approach has challenged the common narrative that investors must settle for lower returns if they want to bring about change.

But there’s now another major hurdle to the mainstreaming of impact investing: standardising impact measurements to equip investors to make choices that best align with their goals.

“In financial markets, we have a whole infrastructure that allows any investor to make financial comparisons. But to determine impact we don’t yet have the same tools and resources available,” says Sophia Sunderji, research manager at the Global Impact Investing Network, an industry research and analytics nonprofit group.

Much like investors can compare mutual funds with similar styles and objectives, investors should be able to make decisions about investments by comparing impact, Sunderji says.

The challenge is twofold. The first is accurately measuring impact—it can take years for an investment to produce results, and it can be difficult to prove direct cause and effect.

Possibly even more challenging is standardising the data so that one investment’s impact results can be fairly contrasted with another’s.

But the industry is making strides. Sunderji is leading GIIN’s effort to establish a go-to industry resource for due diligence on impact. This involves establishing core metrics for each type of impact goal from infrastructure and education to climate change and ocean pollution. With a combination of industry research and detailed reporting by impact investments, GIIN is crunching the data and quantifying impact.

The objective is to standardize data—using factors relevant to the area of intended impact—on GIIN’s existing database called Iris Plus (IRIS+) to make it easily comparable.

For example, for impact investors who want to help the estimated 1.7 billion adults globally without access to basic financial services, relevant metrics may be how many loans were issued to small businesses in underserved areas or the number of people who accessed financial services for the first time. Such data are finely sliced and diced by factors such as gender, region, asset, or credit size to be more meaningful for comparative purposes.

GIIN’s standardization process also seeks to evaluate future outcomes, Sunderji says. An investor might issue an impressive number of microloans, but how many of their recipients went on to create successful enterprises?

Tools are also evolving to measure the impact of investing in opportunity zones, which were established in 2018 under the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. The law provides capital-gains tax incentives for investments in opportunity zones, which are areas identified as economically distressed.

The industry has seen average annual capital growth in the past three years of about 17% to just over $700 billion, driven in part by rising interest among institutional investors. Last year, insurance companies and pension funds each accounted for about 4% of impact capital, up from nearly nil five years ago, according to GIIN.

“Institutional investors are fiduciaries—they are finance-first and impact-second because they can’t

be sacrificing returns,” says Vikram Gandhi, founder and CEO of New Delhi-based VSG Capital Advisors and senior lecturer at the Harvard Business School. “They wouldn’t be investing if they didn’t think they could make market-rate returns.”

A next big driver of capital will be the estimated $40 trillion in wealth that will transfer from baby boomers to younger heirs over the next two decades, Gandhi says, adding that subsequent generations are more than three times more likely to include impact investments in their portfolios.

As tools to measure and compare impact are honed, enabling investors to choose effective investments, it is not just the capital that will be magnified—but its effectiveness in bringing about change.

Australia is in the midst of a ‘baby recession’ with preliminary estimates showing the number of births in 2023 fell by more than four percent to the lowest level since 2006, according to KPMG. The consultancy firm says this reflects the impact of cost-of-living pressures on the feasibility of younger Australians starting a family.

KPMG estimates that 289,100 babies were born in 2023. This compares to 300,684 babies in 2022 and 309,996 in 2021, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS). KPMG urban economist Terry Rawnsley said weak economic growth often leads to a reduced number of births. In 2023, ABS data shows gross domestic product (GDP) fell to 1.5 percent. Despite the population growing by 2.5 percent in 2023, GDP on a per capita basis went into negative territory, down one percent over the 12 months.

“Birth rates provide insight into long-term population growth as well as the current confidence of Australian families,” said Mr Rawnsley. “We haven’t seen such a sharp drop in births in Australia since the period of economic stagflation in the 1970s, which coincided with the initial widespread adoption of the contraceptive pill.”

Mr Rawnsley said many Australian couples delayed starting a family while the pandemic played out in 2020. The number of births fell from 305,832 in 2019 to 294,369 in 2020. Then in 2021, strong employment and vast amounts of stimulus money, along with high household savings due to lockdowns, gave couples better financial means to have a baby. This led to a rebound in births.

However, the re-opening of the global economy in 2022 led to soaring inflation. By the start of 2023, the Australian consumer price index (CPI) had risen to its highest level since 1990 at 7.8 percent per annum. By that stage, the Reserve Bank had already commenced an aggressive rate-hiking strategy to fight inflation and had raised the cash rate every month between May and December 2022.

Five more rate hikes during 2023 put further pressure on couples with mortgages and put the brakes on family formation. “This combination of the pandemic and rapid economic changes explains the spike and subsequent sharp decline in birth rates we have observed over the past four years,” Mr Rawnsley said.

The impact of high costs of living on couples’ decision to have a baby is highlighted in births data for the capital cities. KPMG estimates there were 60,860 births in Sydney in 2023, down 8.6 percent from 2019. There were 56,270 births in Melbourne, down 7.3 percent. In Perth, there were 25,020 births, down 6 percent, while in Brisbane there were 30,250 births, down 4.3 percent. Canberra was the only capital city where there was no fall in the number of births in 2023 compared to 2019.

“CPI growth in Canberra has been slightly subdued compared to that in other major cities, and the economic outlook has remained strong,” Mr Rawnsley said. “This means families have not been hurting as much as those in other capital cities, and in turn, we’ve seen a stabilisation of births in the ACT.”

Impact Investing’s Next Challenge

There’s now another major hurdle to the mainstreaming of impact investing.

Continued stagflation and cost of living pressures are causing couples to think twice about starting a family, new data has revealed, with long term impacts expected