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Aflatoun: Child Savings International is laying the groundwork to roll out its SROI-based impact assessment framework, which it is calling “AQIS” (Aflatoun’s Quality assurance and Impact Assessment System), and held the first meeting of its Impact Advisory Committee a couple weeks ago.

The meeting was hosted by Greg Dees at Duke, chaired by John Elkington, and included committee members with tremendous experience and skill, including our SROI Guide co-author, Peter Scholten.
The attached outcomes report from the meeting summarizes the discussion and agreed next steps as Aflatoun prepares to roll out a system for measuring its impact as it scales its model to a targeted 100 countries. An excerpt of the key takeaways:

• At the heart of the discussion was the balance between “doing it” and “studying it”, and between scale and quality. The committee has given concrete input to find this balance
• The committee suggested to combine several approaches, including SROI, qualitative research and randomized evaluation, aiming to create a symbiotic strategy
• This combined strategy aims to answer both at organizational and external demands
• The committee has discussed strategic organizational partnerships for a sustainable process of AQIS. Members agree that it is a process of constant learning.

Aflatoun works with schools and other partners to teach the world’s poorest children the discipline of saving, and to build their sense of themselves as capable and responsible citizens of their communities.  Stay tuned for more as they begin rolling this out!

Last week the Prince of Wales launched an   Accounting for Sustainability Initiative, which calls for the Chartered Accountants of the UK to figure out how to measure the value of the earth and its resources. The ultimate goal I suspect, although it has not been explicitly stated as such thus far, is that generally accepted accounting principals should eventually come to incorporate this information.
The site contains a report documenting the rationale and some early case studies, and one can subscribe to be kept updated. They seem to intend to keep the community of subscribers at large updated.  I wonder if the site will also be used to facilitate some two-way dialog so the business community at large can be involved in defining a practical approach.
HRH has tremendous convening power and it was on full display at the launch event.  In attendance were outgoing PM Tony Blair, BP’s Sir John Browne, the Bishop of London (who mentioned his efforts around an environmental investment strategy for the Church), and a panel with no fewer than a dozen heads of the UK’s most well-known and admired business, media and political entities.  The caliber was the UK equivalent of what we saw at the Initiative for Global Development kickoff in Washington, D.C. last June, of which little has since been heard other than fundraising requests.   I am more optimistic however that the Prince’s initiative will yield substance, knowing who is behind it.

I am delighted to see AMD’s new marketing campaign using the latest SROI analysis techniques to express the full range of value their energy efficient servers deliver!
They do it using the whole range of information types: sheer dollars (over $1bn and, on their dynamic billboard, counting up like a lottery prize amount), colorful, qualitative description (poster on a bus stop stall, “you could’ve chilled all the oaky, buttery Chardonnay in Napa” with the energy savings)… I’m rooting to see them name the amount of emissions that could have been avoided!

I just got back from the first national summit of the Initiative for Global Development, which was formed after 9/11 “to make the elimination of global poverty a [US] national priority.” The initiative showed truly phenomenal convening power (in order of appearance: Madeline Albright, Colin Powell, John Shalikashvili, George W. Bush, Jim Lehrer, Jim Wolfensohn, Mary Robinson, Ted Turner, Carly Fiorina and Jeffrey Sachs to name only a few) and while I came wondering whether the very high powered business and government people who were convened there would be aware of or would recognize the value of the social entrepreneurial and investing innovation going on out there in the xigi community, given its inherent unconventionality and their inherent conventionality, I left feeling tentatively optimistic. While many there probably do not see this as an emerging capital market yet, many of them definitely have their sleeves rolled up in pieces of it, and through IGD there is an opportunity for the larger group to begin to see the more systemic picture and the roles they can play in relation to it and each other. But, I also left still feeling concerned that there’s a lot of room for unintended negative consequences, since this group has a lot of horsepower, but the execution still lacks any systemic way of either assessing what good and bad is actually getting accomplished, or systematically incorporating the voices of the people the whole initiative intends to help.
What was affirmed from every speaker, not least of whom was Bush himself (at some length no less, and with evident passion), was the notion that it is both a business imperative, a national security priority and a moral necessity to “get on with it.”I thought Wolfensohn and Turner said it best. Wolfensohn painted the situation in big, eloquent brushstrokes which I won’t do justice to now but which went something like: in the next 40 years we’re moving from a world of 6 billion to 9 billion people, and one where Brazil, China and India replace the European countries among the G8, and the growth in the middle class is going to be in the 100s of millions if not billions but almost all of that will be in non-western regions. There’s both an opportunity for continued business growth of our economy here if these peoples’ wealth increases, and an opportunity to avoid the backlash now that they can see on the internet and cable what they have and don’t have relative to us. Not only this, but America has lost moral standing in the world– people don’t dislike us, but they think Americans are selfish. There is an opportunity, Wolfensohn said, to redefine what this country stands for– to restore the nation’s soul. We can think about what is good for business, and what’s good for our kids… and if we do nothing, our kids will have to deal with the consequences of that.
Or, as Turner put it: “let’s stop doing dumb things, and start doing smart things.”
Like I learned a long time ago from Shorebank’s founders (who weren’t at this meeting but who should be next time), the old-fashioned way of doing business used to be that you couldn’t do business in a place where people couldn’t afford to buy your products, or where your products harmed them, so you had to invest in creating the conditions for people that enabled them to do business with you. That kind of business seemed to get lost when the market grew to be international, but now that the world is shrinking again– fast– this gathering tried to remind us that the old-fashioned ethic is true once again.