GIIN announces collaboration with Singapore-based Centre for Impact Investing and Practices to educate investors and corporations on best practice for impact investing, during the GIIN Impact Forum in Copenhagen.
The Global Impact Investing Network (GIIN) and the Singapore-based Centre for Impact Investing and Practices (CIIP) are collaborating on an initiative to improve the availability and depth of education available to impact investing professionals globally.
The initiative was announced against the backdrop of the GIIN Impact Forum 2023 in Copenhagen, a gathering of more than 1,500 attendees from some 70 countries, where a key theme is how to ensure an impact lens is applied right across the activities of investors and the companies in which they are investing.
GIIN CEO Amit Bouri told journalists on the sidelines of the event that the education initiative would adopt a number of approaches. ”What we’re hoping to do is help to propagate best practices and spread them around the world to really broaden a baseline of skills,” he said.
GIIN has been provided with grant funding by CIIP to develop a foundation impact investing educational program for investment professionals, such as chief investment officers, fund managers, portfolio managers and analysts.
GIIN is also developing an education programme for corporations looking to attract impact capital, with CIIP leading the rollout of this in Asia. It is also working with global partners, including the UK-based CFA Institute, to pilot impact investing accreditation programmes.
CIIP is a non-profit established by the Temasek Trust, the philanthropic arm of the Singapore government’s sovereign wealth investor Temasek.
Bouri said the programme would help instil the fundamentals of impact investing and educate on the best tools to use, especially in regions such as Asia, where the sector is has historically lagged Europe and the US, but where opportunities are growing fast. “Scale with integrity is absolutely critical to our vision for impact investing in the future,” he said.
Dawn Chan, CIIP’s CEO, said that in Asia, impact investment is still often equated with philanthropy rather than financial returns, and there is limited understanding of which metrics to use for impact measurement and how to avoid ‘impact washing’.
“It’s really from the ground up all the way to the nuts and bolts of what do you need to actually put in place,” she said of the initiative. Chan said the part of the initiative tailored for corporations would involve a different approach from that for investors, given the complexity of embedding and reporting impact considerations across a company’s operations and value chain in a way that provides the data that investors will increasingly be looking for.
The programme plans a series of in-person workshops initially, but may move to a hybrid format, involving online sessions later.
