Leveraging Billions into Impact Investing

29 January 2013

In a recent television interview, l'AGEFI journalist, Nicolette de Joncaire, met with Arthur Wood – WSFF convener and founding partner Total Impact Advisors – to discuss the inefficiencies of traditional social capital markets and how the emergence of new legal and investment structures promises to bring greater scale and collaboration to the sector.

"This issue is not about money. It is about taking the tools that we understand in modern capitalism and applying them to this sector." - Arthur Wood

The Pioneer Gap: impact investing's Achilles heel?

7 January 2013

Here's a revealing new report from the Stanford Social Innovation Review. The authors echo what we have been saying at WSFF for some time now.

"One of the most striking findings of our research is that few impact investors are willing to invest in companies targeting the poor, and even fewer are willing to invest at the early stages of the creation of these businesses, a problem that we call the Pioneer Gap....The reason this happens is twofold. The first is ideological, the belief that by definition anything that uses investing tools must hit market rates of return—without a clear definition of which market those returns are based on.

New WHO study confirms high economic returns to sanitation

7 January 2013

A new WHO study confirms high economic returns to sanitation, and provides country-by-country analysis. On the other hand, expenditure data in the WASH sector remains weak. You can download a PDF version of the study here.