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Can you trade what you can’t touch?
It is certainly more meaningful to invest for impact than to play life monopoly.
Just last month, founder of Singapore-based Impact Investment Exchange (IIX) and IIX foundation, Durreen Shahnaz, has been awarded with the 2017 Oslo Business for Peace Award.
Spearheading the world’s first stock exchange dedicated to social enterprises, Impact Exchange (IE) evaluates sustainable value beyond coins and notes.To date, they generated more than $20 million in social value and have positively impacted nearly 12 million lives.
Perhaps this weighing scale is more appropriate for the world today, even as one might argue about the ethics of equating a tangible value on human life.
Something needs to start for the focus to shift right? If there is no clear aim for impact enterprises to justify why they do what they do, wouldn’t it be harder for our priorities to include social and environmental concerns in the longer run?
Can you trade what you can’t touch?
Perhaps you will only be able to see what you invested in at the end of the race, for what you eventually touch is life itself.
This is where education and training programs receive their rightful portion of significance. This is where we can actually invest to empower. This is where innovation and design put on a whole new coat of purpose.
How can the technology of driverless cars help to generate social impact? Can we use AI for good? How can virtual reality help the elderly to exercise and spend their time in a safe environment? How do e-kiosks improve user interfaces and help PwDs in their daily lives?
Innovation is great but costly at the same time. There is a need to gather a stronger will, and it makes it necessary for us to draft out a clearer blueprint, for a convincing and attractive project pitched to investors out there.
When we attune to the needs of a specific community and invest in their quality of living, what we eventually touch will be life itself.