Podcast Episode 20
#020: Shifting Power in Investment Practice: The Costs of Doing Business
As the fields of gender lens and impact investing mature, the need to advance the way we do analysis and set benchmarks for better practice has become ever more pronounced. We’ve seen a growing number of standard setters, from governments to investors, willing to use their power to ask for more from their investments, but not quite sure where to start. Meanwhile, progress towards critical social change outcomes remains painfully slow, with little certainty around attribution or indication of how we might actually get there.
The work of Criterion Institute is fundamentally about challenging power dynamics in finance as part of the work of social change. Today, we’re going to focus on how standard setters such as governments and other asset owners might disrupt power, privilege and bias within a very specific area of investment practice: how investors manage cost factors, and what is deemed an acceptable cost of doing business. This and other standards were developed as part of the work that Criterion has done over the last several years, alongside many friends and funders including Global Affairs Canada, 2X Global, UNICEF, MEDA and ANDE.
Episode Highlights:
Relevant Links:
The Blueprints demonstrate how a variety of social change organizations can design strategies that use systems of finance as tools to create positive social change.
These roadmaps lay out insights for how finance can be used to address gender-based violence in a range of sectors, asset classes, geographies, and investor types.
The TOOLKIT is designed to support your journey as you explore how finance can be used as a tool to create social change.
1K Churches was launched in 2012 to galvanize a movement in the faith-based community and engage US churches to invest in the local economy.
These gender-based violence due diligence tools analyze existing due diligence categories – including political, regulatory, operational, and reputational risks – and show how they can be affected by gender-based violence.
Gender-based violence is ubiquitous. More than 1 in 3 women worldwide experiences physical or sexual violence, and millions of men, boys, and gender-diverse individuals are affected by physical, sexual, and emotional abuse daily.