Позитивные изменения. Том 1, №1 (2021). Positive changes. Volume 1, Issue 1 (2021)

MY FAVORITE IMPACT CASE

Ksenia Frank: Olga Barabanova and KINESIS. While still working as a volunteer, Olga finds out that wheelchairs for children are very heavy and do not provide sufficient mobility and are not individualized. Having set up the production of children's bicycles (Lisoped), Olga realized that the technology of making wheelchairs is not very much different from bicycles. Today Olga is producing light active wheelchairs in Moscow (the company is included in the register of social entrepreneurs): Kinesis is the first in Russia (and so far the only one) that makes personalized wheelchairs for children from 2 years old, adults and for Paralympians.

"A person who has created a successful business understands how to get what he wants with the help of investments. In business, this desire is measured in money. In impact investments — in social changes," Ekaterina Rybakova, President and co-founder of the Rybakov Foundation, supports the idea.

Summarizing, we can say: the definition scope can be wide — would be it useful. Thus, the founder of the Seven Suns Development Group of Companies, entrepreneur and social investor Alexey Ryzhkov believes that impact investing in principle should be understood as the activities of any companies that are somehow related to the positive impact arising. "I see ‘impact’ as a format that sooner or later everyone has to transit to," he says. Perhaps, different versions of the definition will again converge into a single picture at this ‘transition point’. "Impact Managing is the ability to see these aspects all as a whole. And there is an art to do it and now I see it more in terms of governments, that is, building a system of governance," Jioulnar Asfari says.

HOW THE IMPACT CAN BE MEASURED?

In fact, all market participants, which concerned the topic development, agree on one thing: investments should ‘work’, producing a clear and, if possible, measurable positive impact. It is still the second question — whether it will be possible to return funds invested and even more so to make a profit. The main thing is to achieve a measurable social effect… and be able to evaluate it.

"We decided for ourselves that since we want positive changes, they should affect the quality of people’s lives. And we will rely on feedback, on how people themselves evaluate these changes. Tens of thousands of people participate in our activities. We interview them. And we evaluate our impacts by the way they evaluate the impact of our programs, our projects on their lives," Ekaterina Rybakova says.

Venture investor Ksenia Frank is also confident that quantitative assessment when measuring impact raises many questions and is insufficient by itself. "In the work of the Timchenko Foundation, we do not tie grants only to the achievement of planned metrics (the Foundation introduced a monitoring and evaluation system in 2015). If metrics are too closely tied to funding, they can inadvertently provoke wishful thinking." Ksenia Frank notes that in areas such as social or environmental impact, the purely numerical equivalent of benefits can lead to a shift in focus: "We all know how to count «outputs»: number of classes held, manuals published and people who attended the class. Yet there is something much more difficult to assess and that very few people think about. That is what really has changed in the lives of these people and how stable these changes are."