Commentary

Peter Burgess

Africa: The Tony Elumelu Foundation Announces Commitment to Impact Investing and GIIRS Ratings & Analytics at The Clinton Global Initiative

PRESS RELEASE September 20, 2011

Today, in conjunction with B-Lab’s announcement of the launch of GIIRS Ratings & Analytics at the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI), The Tony Elumelu Foundation (TEF) announced at the Clinton Global Initiative Annual Meeting its commitment as one of 15 GIIRS Pioneer Investors who declare as part of their impact investing strategy an investment preference for GIIRS-rated funds and companies. Pioneer Investors will also use GIIRS Ratings to measure the impact of their impact investment portfolios.

Since its inception in 2010, TEF has been a champion of the concept of mobilising capital to generate robust financial returns and advance social wealth from serving Africa’s emerging markets. The Foundation’s inaugural impact investment deal in Mtanga Farms Limited, a mixed arable farming operation in the Southern Highlands of Tanzania touches the everyday lives of hundreds of thousands of low-income people in the rural areas of the country by improving farmers’ access to inputs, technology and markets. The Foundation is well recognised in its dedication to the economic transformation of Africa by enhancing the competitiveness and growth through the African private sector.

TEF Founder Tony O. Elumelu, MFR said, “Those of us pioneering the impact investing field in Africa are setting a new standard for both philanthropy and investing within Africa.” “We seek to drive African economic growth from within by catalysing private funds into efforts that have substantial development impact.” “GIIRS is an important and necessary tool to help additional investors get engaged with impact investing because of the opportunity it provides to benchmark and measure the social and environmental impact of an investment as clearly as the financial return.”

Dr. Wiebe Boer, CEO of TEF said, “Some of the greatest opportunities for business growth, prosperity and impact are in Africa.” “We expect to solve intractable problems and help transform disparate efforts into more efficient and powerful marketplaces by bringing advances from one part of the continent to the other.”

GIIRS Impact Ratings provide investors for the first time with a comprehensive, comparable, and third party verified assessment of companies’ and funds’ social and environmental impact. The GIIRS Analytics platform gives investors uniquely powerful tools to analyse aggregated, verified and comparable data on the social and environmental impact of companies and funds across geography, sector, organizational maturity, and size. The GIIRS launch follows a successful global beta test with more than 200 companies across 30 countries from 25 leading impact investing funds (the GIIRS Pioneer Companies and Funds, respectively).

The GIIRS Pioneer Investors are a diverse group of global private equity investors and credit providers, including mainstream global financial institutions, foundations, family offices, leaders in social finance, and a multilateral development bank. In addition to The Tony Elumelu Foundation, they include: Annie E Casey Foundation, Armonia LLC, Calvert Foundation, Farm Capital Services LLC, Gatsby Charitable Foundation, Impact Investing Foundation, Inter-American Development Bank, J.P.Morgan, KL Felicitas Foundation, Kellogg Foundation, Prudential Financial, Rockefeller Foundation, RSF Social Finance, Skoll Foundation, and The Tony Elumelu Foundation. GIIRS expects to announce additional GIIRS Pioneer Investors in the coming months.

Commenting on the partnership, Andrew Kassoy, co-founder of B-Lab, the non-profit organization powering GIIRS stated, “The Tony Elumelu Foundation is leading the transformation of impact investing in Africa. We are pleased and honoured to add their voice and perspective to those of the Pioneer Investors.”

With the support of GIIRS Pioneer Investors and Funders, in five years GIIRS aims to provide Impact Ratings for more than 2,500 companies and over 350 funds, and to provide over 150 institutional and high net worth investors with the ability to benchmark social and environmental impact for the first time the same way financial performance is benchmarked today.

By providing credible, comparable and verified impact ratings and creating a robust analytics platform, GIIRS provides the needed capital markets infrastructure to drive $1 trillion toward impact investments in 10 years.

About The Tony Elumelu Foundation

The Tony Elumelu Foundation is an Africa-based and African-funded not-for-profit institution, dedicated to the promotion and celebration of excellence in business leadership and entrepreneurship across Africa.

About B Lab and GIIRS

B Lab is a US-based non-profit dedicated to building a new sector of the economy that uses the power of business to solve social and environmental problems.

GIIRS is a comprehensive and transparent system for assessing the social and environmental impact of developed and emerging market companies and funds with a ratings and analytics approach analogous to Morningstar investment rankings and Capital IQ financial analytics. It seeks to spark the impact investment movement by providing a tool that is intended to change investor behaviour and unlock the potential of this new asset class.

Established in 2005 by President Bill Clinton, the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) convenes global leaders to devise and implement innovative solutions to some of the world’s most pressing challenges.