As an impact-led organisation, we have set three strategic development impact objectives that respond to the opportunities and challenges we see in the countries we serve: to make investments that are productive, sustainable, and inclusive.
We manage our activities around delivering those strategic objectives, and seek to maximise them throughout the investment lifecycle. It starts with the way we set strategies to invest in sectors and regions, then in finding investment opportunities and deciding what to invest in, through to structuring our investments and managing our portfolio, and finally to responsible exits and evaluations.
Our approach to impact management is grounded in the Operating Principles for Impact Management (OPIM), of which we are a founding signatory. At the heart of our approach sits our overarching Impact Framework, which draws on the five dimensions of impact defined by the Impact Management Project. This framework shapes how we assess the expected impact of individual investments, as summarised in our Impact Dashboards, when taking investment decisions; how we assess the difference we are making as an investor; and how we monitor and manage their impact performance after investment.
For our 2022-2026 strategy period, we have developed an Impact Score as a tool for ‘managing strategic impact on a portfolio basis’, which is the second principle of the OPIM. The Impact Score is designed to recognise and incentivise investments that are likely to contribute most to our three strategic impact objectives. It complements our more detailed assessments of the expected impact of individual investments, by providing a quantitative metric that can be aggregated and used to monitor and analyse strategic impact performance across the portfolio. It is calculated using a subset of the information found in the Impact Dashboards and monitoring plans. These Impact Dashboards remain the primary tool we use to make individual investment decisions.
The Impact Score replaces our Development Impact Grid which we have used since 2012, as one of the key performance indicators reported to our shareholder, the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO). As a performance indicator, its design favours objectivity and simplicity. This publication outlines the Impact Score’s design in more detail and sets out how the score for each investment we make will be calculated.
