Resource Type
Guidance and Tools

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"The Middlebury Institute's Center for Social Impact Learning in partnership with SVT Group report offers a shortcut to practical information about how impact investors are tracking and reporting their social and environmental impact today. The report also includes advice from impact investors to those new to the field, and summarizes the history of impact investing, key terms and concepts in impact measurement, and trends, and provides a practical guide to the most relevant publications."

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"This new resource by CSR Asia provides guidance and toolkits to help companies improve their gender diversity performance and design strategic community investment programmes aimed at empowering women economically. It intends to help companies see the value in investing in the economic empowerment of women in their workplaces and communities."

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"Lean Data is an approach to impact measurement developed by Acumen. The approach involves two main elements: A shift in mindset away from reporting and compliance and toward creating value for a company and its customers; and the use of methods and technologies for data collection that emphasize efficiency and rapid response while still achieving a sufficient degree of rigor. This document is designed to serve as a field guide to help you conduct Lean Data projects. It is meant to be practical and action oriented."

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"The Navigating Impact project was created by the Global Impact Investing Network (GIIN) to help investors select impact strategies and adopt metrics that indicate performance toward their goals. Created in consultation with industry experts, impact investors, and standards setters, the Navigating Impact project provides an on-ramp to setting and streamlining impact strategies."

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"The Gender Equality Mainstreaming (GEM) Framework is a practical manual and toolkit for assessing gender equality, and identifying, implementing and measuring gender equality mainstreaming strategies within companies. The framework builds upon the environmental, social and governance (ESG) investment standard by mainstreaming gender across ESG criteria. Designed for organizations seeking financial and impact returns through investing or providing support to companies, the manual is applicable to a wide range of investors (e.g. private equity funds, government donors, foundations) and capacity builders (e.g. accelerators, technical assistance providers, NGOs). The ultimate aim of the framework is to transform companies to be more gender equitable while supporting business growth and impact."

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"The GRI Standards help organizations’ understand their outward impacts: on the economy, environment, and society. This increases accountability and enhances transparency on their contribution to sustainable development. Organizations can either use the GRI Standards to prepare a sustainability report in accordance with the Standards. Or they can use selected Standards, or parts of their content, to report information for specific users or purposes, such as reporting their climate change impacts for their investors and consumers."

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"There is good news: there are many, many promising climate finance solutions emerging on the scene to close key market gaps. The bad news? Interested investors of all shapes and sizes, and emerging innovators of every stripe, often struggle to find each other-and often talk past each other. Different investor expectations, lexicons and geographies need to be clarified-fast-and then linked to action.

We in the climate finance tribe-"we" being institutional investors, public sector officials, international development experts and so on-need to raise our game. With the help of our great advisory team, a dash of humor, a few cartoons and support from the Rockefeller Foundation, let the era of accelerated climate finance clarity and investment begin."

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"The Core Characteristics of Impact Investing define the baseline expectations of what it means to practice impact investing. Providing this level of clarity to the market will help investors understand what constitutes credible impact investing and the Core Characteristics serve as a reference point for investors to identify practical actions they can take to scale their practice with integrity."

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"As governments from El Salvador to Kenya to India enact strict measures to halt the spread of the coronavirus, what can development organizations do to help micro and small businesses survive? Drawing from TechnoServe’s past experience working with entrepreneurs in times of crisis, as well as early learnings from the response to the coronavirus pandemic, we’ve put together this quick guide of ideas for supporting these enterprises."

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"These interactive story dashboards provide information on the lending activities to agricultural SMEs and producer organizations by the Council on Smallholder Agricultural Finance (CSAF). CSAF consists of 13 private lenders that come together on a pre-competitive basis to share learning and develop industry standards to promote the healthy growth of the financial market serving small- and medium-enterprises (SMEs), including associations of smallholder farmers, in the agriculture sector."

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