10/22/2024 | News release | Archived content
Amounts of impact capital under management. Regional and sector focus. Headquarters location. This is some of the information included in the recent list of 100+ impact investors published by the Financial Times and the Global Impact Investing Network (GIIN).
Beyond this snapshot, it's important to understand how the investments made by these impact investors are performing. Are they achieving the expected social, economic, or environmental impact, and if not, why?
Reporting on impact performance-both what's working and what isn't-is critical for continuing to bolster the credibility of the growing impact investing industry. Investors can learn from these results and use impact data to inform decision-making.
At IDB Invest, we do this through our annual Development Effectiveness Overview (DEO).
Let's recap the main takeaways from the 2024 DEO around three main questions:
1. How is our active portfolio performing?
2. Did completed projects achieve their intended impact?
Once a project matures or exits our portfolio, we do a final evaluation to assess its overall impact performance. Of the 45 projects evaluated in 2023, 69% were rated positively, as validated by the IDB Group's independent Office of Evaluation and Oversight.
This is above our annual corporate target of 65%. More importantly, the results captured by these evaluations translate into on-the-ground benefits for women-led SMEs in accessing credit, for small farmers in increasing productivity, and for avoiding carbon emissions, among others.
The DEO also analyzes historical evaluation trends, putting performance over time into perspective.
3. What's driving impact performance by sector?
For the first time in the DEO, we take a deep dive into the impact performance of our operations by sectorand region. We look at both mature operations in the active portfolio and final evaluations conducted from 2016 to 2023.
Here's a taste of the trends we've found for sectors.
Data for Greater Impact
As we move forward with our new IDB Invest+ business model aiming to achieve even greater impact and scale in Latin America and the Caribbean, understanding what's driving impact-and acting on this knowledge to continually improve-is more critical than ever.
This is not just to inform our decision-making but also of other impact investors seeking opportunities in the region.