Evènements Secteur d'activité • Finance - Assurance - Banque
[Replay] Impact investment – unlocking conscious capital in the UAE
Speakers
- Dr. Noah Raford, Chief Operating Officer, Dubai Future Foundation
- Sabrin Rahman , Managing Director - Head of Sustainability for Europe, the MENA and Turkey - HSBC
- Najla Ahmed Al-Midfa, CEO - Sharjah Entrepreneurship Center
- Moderated by Sonia Weymuller, Founding Partner VentureSouq
Key Takeaways
Defining impact investing or conscious investing might differ from one to another, but generally speaking we understand it as expecting a minimum of return on our capital. Impact investing also gathers businesses that have a mission to solve an economic, social or environmental problem, their business model being built around solving that challenge.
Those emerging spaces into investing need regulatory support as well from the government side. From the private side, we see a tendency to hire VP of ESG (environmental, social and governance) for example. In the startup ecosystem, what is commonly done is selecting startups who are helping solve some of the world’s problems by helping them scale up through different introductions to investors. These entrepreneurs need also to be educated about ESG.
However dialogue between the public sector and the private sector needs improvement even if better now than it used to be.
Focus on investment in the region currently goes towards underserved sectors from a capital injection standpoint – ag tech, food tech and health tech amongst them.
In terms of KPIs used to measure the impact, there no standardization. However some tolls like for example Iris Plus can help with that. Diversity or its percentage can be another KPI which leads to the following point.
Regarding diversity in this small world of investment, we see more and more females sitting at the venture table on the other side as investors. But more money needs to go also towards female founders as numbers are still low around the worlds even if the UAE may do better. A helping trait is that women tend to care more about social and environmental causes.
