Social impact: What does it mean and how do we measure it?

In this episode, Hari Menon, who heads the India office of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and Vineet Rai, founder and chairperson of Aavishkaar Group, discuss all things social impact—what it means, how the investing world calculates it, and why we need to expand our definition of what ‘counts’ as impact.

Highlights 

• What social impact means, how we should measure it, and what needs to change in how we approach it.
• Who gets to decide what counts as impact—funders, social impact organisations, or the people they are meant to serve?
• What are the trade-offs between impact, sustainability, and scalability? 
• When it comes to social impact, can investors realistically move away from quantitative metrics in favour of more qualitative ones?

Read more

1. IDR Explains | Impact investing
2. Scaling out, scaling up, scaling deep: Advancing systemic social innovation and the learning processes to support it
3. Is size the right metric to measure impact?
4. Rethinking participatory development in the context of scale
5. The social innovation paradox: Why it’s hard to be both innovative and scalable
6. Are social change and scale mutually exclusive?
7. Lessons in scaling with the government
8. Questioning scale as we know it
9. ‘Who determines what impact matters most?’
10. Building purpose beyond CSR
11. Funders, it’s time we change our relationship with data

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This podcast is a Maed in India production, you can find out more about us https://www.maedinindia.in/

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