#BUILDINGBACKBETTER THROUGH RECOVERY
As we celebrate IIX’s 12th anniversary, we would like to share how we are building a new era of growth through three pillars: Relief, Recovery, and Resilience.
Businesses must not just survive the pandemic, but recover and have a lifeline to pivot their businesses so they’re able to adapt and thrive in the new norm. In addition to providing catalytic capital, capacity building and tools to adapt are necessary to ensure the capital is put to good use and help SMEs navigate through the challenging environment. To overcome the disadvantages faced by SMEs, it is pertinent for stakeholders to provide handholding support and lend women entrepreneurs a platform to relaunch and access national and international markets. Leveraging insights garnered from working with women entrepreneurs, IIX developed tailored toolkits and platforms across the growth stages of an enterprise that help them rebuild, pivot, and strengthen their business operations for a new business and economic environment.
Creating Impact: IIX Values
To create new value and impact in turbulent times, businesses need support listening to their customers and end beneficiaries, insights, and tools to help them adapt their businesses and integrate impact strategies. Leveraging on IIX’s decade of experience with impact measurement, in September 2020, IIX officially launched IIX Values™ — the world’s first data-driven impact verification solution for every type of organization. Grounded in over 60,000 data points from more than 360 companies working across 46 countries, IIX Values identifies, measures, and verifies the social and environmental value created by every company, while giving customers the power to verify the positive impacts brought about in their lives.
Why do we need data-driven impact measurement? Verifying impact remains a challenge for sustainable businesses and investors. Existing ‘verification’ solutions are based on self-reporting, call center survey methods, or a review of investor documentation, which remain blind to the real impact that may or may not be happening on the ground.
Measuring impact is not new. Listening to women is still radical. IIX Values takes impact assessments to the next level by listening to women and underserved communities. The platform empowers underserved women to verify a company’s impact results—and their feedback directly influences the organization’s impact and risk scores. This gives underserved women’s voices a ‘value’ that carries financial weight in the market.
Accessing Capital and Markets with IIX Impact Partners
Across Asia, investors’ high-risk perception, challenges in deal origination, and limited exposure to WSMEs hinder the ability of private-sector capital to reach women entrepreneurs. Moreover, early-stage enterprises require investment readiness support to attract the investment needed to scale but lack the upfront capital to pay for such services.
Established in 2011, Impact Partners is Asia’s first and most successful crowdfunding platform for sustainable investing that connects pre-screened, investment-ready enterprises to IIX’s network of 1,200 accredited investors, representing over US$12B in assets under management (AUM).
Impact Partners increases the efficiency and effectiveness of the capital raise process by exposing investors to investment-ready opportunities, providing wrap-around investment support including due diligence, and the opportunity for co-investments. Impact Partners has pivoted during the pandemic to address some key market challenges.
For the past decade, IIX has been bridging this gap through Impact Partners, Asia’s largest and most successful crowdfunding platform for impact investing to provide bespoke support to SMEs. Impact Partners has been connecting WSMEs to the market and simultaneously providing technical assistance support for them to raise capital.
Bangladesh
IIX has been a part of building the market for impact investing in Bangladesh for over a decade now, and we have directly facilitated over US$5 million in private sector funding into the country through our Impact Partners crowdfunding platform and our IIX Growth Fund. Across our work in Bangladesh, we have impacted over 2M underserved lives and contributed to sustainable development in key sectors such as clean energy, agriculture, healthcare, and education
Through the IIX Foundation, we feel honored to be able to support local organizations in Bangladesh like SUROVI, providing over 120 underserved women with access to 17,280 hours of computer literacy training, improving their confidence to access new and better-paying employment opportunities and build better lives for their families. Many of the women in the programs are over the age of 40 and this program has given them the courage and confidence to change their lives and make a better future for themselves and their families.