Community Development Innovation Review

The loud buzz of excitement about Impact Investing is cause for concern, but not only because the enthusiasm is ahead of the practice.

Measuring nonfinancial returns is a cost of doing business for community development financial institutions (CDFIs). Like any other expense, the tracking and reporting of impact must be justified by the contribution it makes to CDFI operational and strategic priorities.

The quality of an “impact investment” should be evaluated by data that both frames the need and tells us what happened in response to an investment. Impact data only tells us whether we’ve been successful. Opportunity data is required to inform whether, where, why and how to best target investment in the first place.

The banking crisis has laid bare something that is often hard to quantify: the social value from homeownership that accrues to people and their communities.

Agricultural businesses in developing countries offer an opportunity for market-based economic development that creates benefits throughout global value chains.

The U.S. nonprofit leaders and the European nonprofit leaders alike discovered that nonprofit housing organizations, no matter how different the policy environment, all share the mission of addressing the needs of homeless families and low-income workers.

When Calvert Social Investment Foundation launched its current programs in 1995, with the mission of helping to end poverty through investment, we began our first foray into investing in microfinance. Through our increasing involvement in the international impact investing industry, we have seen a true scaling of targeted investments to the microfinance sector.

As the world grapples with growing income disparities that leave more than three billion of the planet’s people in poverty, and as the current recession shrinks the pool of public and private resources available to remedy the situation, investors and policymakers across the globe are seeking high-impact, cost-effective strategies and tools to reduce the cavernous income and wealth gap and create bridges out of poverty.

In September 2010, the United Kingdom government partnered with Social Finance, Ltd. to break new ground in financing for the nonprofit sector with its pilot program to reduce recidivism in the Peterborough prison. Dubbed the “Social Impact Bond,” or SIB for short, the instrument links private capital to the success of social programs.

This article analyzes the best evaluation methods in international development, including examples of evaluation toolkits, with the aim of helping community development practitioners apply the methods to projects in the United States.