An assessment of impact investing

I have a new working paper with V Ananthangeswaran and Mahesh Yagnaraman here. 

The innovation and venture capital (VC) worlds work on the belief that there are plug-and-play ideas which can meaningfully address persistent and intractable development challenges. Further, they believe that these innovations can arise from the most unexpected places through entrepreneurial brilliance and all that investors need to do is be on the look-out for such innovations. This belief stems from the success of some technology innovations of the last two decades which have been disruptive of existing markets and transformed our lives. Unfortunately, this has little basis in reality. 

As a thought experiment, just try to think of such plug-and-play innovations that have addressed persistent development challenges at scale in the last 20 years which have come through the VC approach to financing. What comes to our mind are products - e.g. pharmaceutical drugs or a high yield variety seed – that large companies are best placed to provide. Successful commercialisation of innovations like telemedicine, digital literacy and skilling, biometric attendance monitoring in schools/hospitals, credit-worthiness assessments for poor/SMEs, agriculture extension using ICT, labour market matching for low-skill jobs, data acquisition and management systems for utilities/SMEs/government systems, market access for SMEs, informal market aggregation, early warning systems on natural disasters/pests etc. have proved elusive despite countless efforts. In all these cases, all the technologies to address them have been around for years.

The big problems of the world - poverty, gender inequality, poor learning outcomes, malnutrition, traffic congestion, cleanliness and sanitation, low agriculture productivity, pervasive informal markets, unaffordable housing, low productivity SMEs, credit constraints among poor and SMEs, maternal and child health problems, access to clean water (say, low-cost borewells) and electricity, cost-effective menstrual hygiene products, etc. – are unlikely to have flick-of-the-switch solutions. They require persistent effort over a long time. We need solid enterprises and companies than those built on the vapour-ware of ephemeral growth and valuations. 

In this paper, we have proposed a simple process innovation to the term sheet that forces the impact investor to commit to creating social and economic impact meaningfully rather than lazily or perfunctorily. We have outlined a twin-test of qualification for impact investments. One is the likelihood of the impact enterprise not funded by commercial investors and the other is measurable social impact generation. We have also offered an illustrative categorisation of such investments. We propose a framework for measuring impact using the concepts of retention and intensity.