The Rockefeller Foundation, together with partner Asia Community Ventures, have announced recipients of the Impact Economy Innovations Fund in East and Southeast Asia, a $400,000 grant program to allow some of the impact economy’s leaders to accelerate market driven solutions (in other words to develop the impact investing and social enterprise field) for development challenges.
The fund was launched March of this year in Hong Kong. In total, 40 proposals were submitted from 8 countries.
AKSI UI Foundation will work on the capacity building of early-stage social entrepreneurs with a $123,000 grant. The field is still very nascent in Indonesia, as Social Enterprise Buzz has found, so this grant will strengthen the pipeline of viable impact enterprises. In addition, through mentoring and training, the hope is to build a support network for social enterprises consisting of professionals, intermediary organizations and investors. AKSI UI Foundation will work with a number of partners inside and outside the region, including UnLtd UK.
ChangeFusion will use their $99,450 to gauge the financing needs, in particular from a debt perspective, of Southeast Asia’s social enterprises through a comprehensive market assessment. The project will focus on Indonesia, Thailand and Vietnam, but it is expected that the debt-based impact financing solutions identified will have region-wide applicability.
While metrics to measure impact such as IRIS and GIIRS exist, the key barriers to adopting these metrics include low availability of appropriate tools to capture data and the relatively high cost of measurement. So with an $80,028 grant, Kopernik will conduct a comprehensive survey of low-cost, technology-based social impact measurement tools and produce a catalog for practitioners in the impact economy. The nonprofit says it has already started the survey and will publish the catalogue online and in print in 2014.
Finally, the Spark Center for Social Entrepreneurship Development, like the AKSI UI Foundation, will provide capacity building and investment readiness support to social enterprises with their $97,614 grant. They work in Vietnam and will connect the country’s social enterprises with emerging incubators in the region. Through a number of capacity building activities, they aim to develop enterprises to help them scale their impact.