NPC’s Impact Assurance Classification

Summary

One of the questions investors often ask is how do you understand whether the impact achieved is enough? If a company or fund claims to be changing the lives of 600,000 farmers per year, or avoiding 10,000 tonnes of CO2 emissions, or saving under-banked consumers $2bn through innovative savings products, what does this data really tell you? If you have targets set at the start of an investment, you can potentially assess impact achieved against those targets. But that isn’t always possible, especially if you are assessing the impact some years after the initial investment was made. And in many cases, particularly for early-stage ventures, those targets can be missed for very good reason as the business develops, and new ideas are tested—some of which fail, while others go on to be successfully scaled.