Our Invisible Green Collars

Imagine our beloved city of Mumbai if our hundred thousand 'ragpickers' suddenly vanished! Our neighborhoods would be awash in waste, well in excess of what the municipal authorities can manage. Our massive recycling industries, such as in Dharavi, would lose a chunk of their raw materials. Our city's harmful greenhouse gas emissions would continue to balloon. Our products made from recycled products would become more expensive. And most unfortunate of all, our poorest and most vulnerable members of urban India would lose their one and only opportunity to earn a meager 100 rupees a day.

IRIS to the (Triple Bottom Line) rescue

Between 2004, when I initially grew interested (through Net Impact, CA) in impact investment and the blended-value/SROI models developed by the likes of Jed Emerson and Sara Olsen, and today, there have been several attempts to mainstream the connect between social entrepreneurs and their financial sponsors. Enabling philanthropists and capital markets to engage social innovators on a healthier footing, and build overall capacity in this sector, has been a challenge. I am therefore encouraged now to find that a number of SVCs/social impact investors have built tools to support their due diligence activities, measure and benchmark their investees, and report against a standard of social and environmental indicators. It would seem like the notion of the 'triple bottom line' is now here to stay and a recognized 'must' in order to scale the impact investment sector.