Commonwealth discusses potential future collaboration with international social investors

Social investors highlighted government policy as critical to transforming economies and making a sustainable development impact at a meeting at the Commonwealth Secretariat’s headquarters on 16 June.

More than 50 international social investors from Europe and the United States, attending the meeting, said an enabling environment and the necessary infrastructure for building investment projects were required to transform economies.

In his opening remarks, Commonwealth Assistant Secretary-General, Stephen Cutts, welcomed the investors, referring them to the Communiqué of the recently concluded Ninth Commonwealth Women’s Affairs Ministers Meeting (9WAMM). He spoke on how the Secretariat can add value in this area, building on its roles of advocacy and consensus-building.

Mr Cutts said some specific ideas have been proposed within the Secretariat, including:

a. Bringing together major corporations, investors, philanthropists and aid agencies to consider how their resources can have the greatest development impact.

b. Developing a research programme on investing for social and development impact, including on how investors can make more gender equitable investments.

c. And modelling a Commonwealth blended investment fund (which contains both growth and value stocks, and may specialize in large, medium or small companies), drawing on our development expertise and global links, and working with investment managers and social impact investors.

Speaking at the event, CEO of Virgin Unite, Jean Oelewang, outlined the role of governments in creating not just a basic enabling environment for investors, but in creating the incentives for social investors to scale businesses that contribute positively to economic transformation and to help them share their ideas on a global basis.

She said a focus of Virgin Unite, the foundation established by billionaire entrepreneur Sir Richard Branson, is finding and sharing information on ways to use the 200 Virgin businesses to drive social and environmental change in the world.

The Director of the Shell Foundation, Chris West, said the Secretariat and Commonwealth governments had a role in putting more emphasis on creating coalitions of new partnerships that can provide a conduit between those with business solutions and the various sources of capital available.

Both speakers also touched on the role of governance in the impact investing world – where impact investors look to invest in businesses that produce social or environmental benefit.

Ms Oelwang spoke about the placements at Virgin Unite where seasoned professionals are put into government ministries to provide technical advice on creating enabling environments for investors who want to create systemic change. This approach was helping to build strong businesses in a strong economy and, in turn, brought political benefits, as economically empowered people feel they have a greater stake in the way their countries are run.

Chris West also had some suggestions for development actors interested in financing the systemic transformation of poor economies, including:

- Social investments should be profitable. Investments need to generate a financial return in order to be sustainable;

- scale should be targeted from the outset as it cannot be factored in after;

- and investors, including philanthropists, should invest not only their capital, but also their convening, leveraging and influencing powers to create the necessary scale, impact and transformation.

The presentations and discussion which followed were moderated by the Director of Pathways to Scale at Volans, Alejandro Litovsky, who underscored the importance of an enabling environment to help enterprising ideas lead to social transformation on a global scale.

Secretariat Links:

• Gender