Sinzer Blog

Many social entrepreneurs, youth workers, or professionals working in the Third sector, aim to establish an increase in the self-confidence of their participants or clients. An increase in self-confidence can help to diminish anxiety to fail, which in turn can have a positive influence on someone’s quality of life.

Impact investing with the purpose of contributing to the Sustainable Development Goals is still in its infancy. One of the main obstacles in this field, is how to measure the impact that these investments create. In order to help the sector achieve some standardization, the Sustainable Finance Platform – chaired by the Dutch Central Bank (DNB) – formed a Working Group on SDG impact measurement.

Inclusive Businesses have been part of the ‘development toolkit’ for more than a decade now. The term Inclusive Business (IB) was coined by the World Business Council for Sustainable Development in 2005, which defined IB’s as “a private sector approach to providing goods, services, and livelihoods on a commercially viable basis, either at scale or scalable, to people at the base of the pyramid by making them part of the value chain of companies’ core business as suppliers, distributors, retailers, or customers”.

Doing business sustainably and fairly is becoming commonplace in the board rooms of many organisations. Social enterprises are at the forefront of this development, by developing sustainable business concepts that place the attainment of social impact over maximisation of financial return. At the same time, governments are facing so-called 'wicked problems' that require new ways of solving problems , such as unemployment, poverty and climate change. In order to bring these public and private entities together, the Social Impact Factory was initiated in 2015: a platform aimed at connecting and inspiring organisations to become more socially involved and to accelerate change towards a society where doing business fairly, sustainably and socially inclusive is the standard. Social impact measurement, the Factory feels, is a vital element in this process.