‘You can’t change what you can’t measure’

By EIIP Director Ceri Goddard

EIIP Roundtable’s on equality impact measurement identified a need for more guidance in the here and now and a radical shift of emphasis in future practice.

Changing impact management and measurement (IMM) practice so it is better able to set and measure authentic equality impact goals has been a priority of EIIP since our foundation in 2018. At that time major limitations in existing IMM in this regard were identified in our baseline research as a key barrier to more effective EII.

Since then, EIIP’s EII training and EII toolkit for investors as well as wider action such as BSC development of its outcomes matrix in the UK has gone some way to addressing this. However, with much IMM work still engaging with inequality in only a limited way, in late 2021 EIIP convened a group of UK and international experts and pioneers from both investing impact measurement and equality and human rights monitoring to consider initial scoping, undertaken with our EII associate Dr Jess Daggers, to help shape future plans for this workstream. 

The group had a wide-ranging discussion that looked both at the extent that EIIP could further support current IMM practice and frameworks to be adapted or used to capture inequality impact, and what else is likely to be needed. It identified needs and opportunities in three broad areas. Firstly, a lack of case studies or guidance for IMM practitioners on integrating equality concerns; secondly a range of opportunities to test or pilot EIMM in developing fund or programmes; and finally the still-shifting practice and debates in IMM more broadly.

In this context our forward plans for this area of EIIP have three main elements:

• Producing a set of practical case studies of Equality Impact Investors using IMM to capture equality impact – to illustrate what such frameworks can look like.

• Developing, including through piloting in different contexts such as in funds or programmes with different place-based or impact focuses, further guidance for EII practitioners.

• A twin-track of approach of EIIP engaging in opportunities to adapt existing key mainstream IMM frameworks where these arise but also, over the longer term, using the pilots and other innovative work to inform a new generation of IMM frameworks better designed to consider inequality in the first place.

EIIP will be continuing to convene and support co-ordination and learning between participants at this last gathering and our pre-existing EIIP Taskforce IMM sub-group.

If you like to be involved, please do get in touch.