At Acumen Fund, our focus on metrics has become an integral part of everything we do. Understanding the social impact and financial performance of our investments is critical to informing our portfolio decision-making process and providing support to our investment enterprises. Over the past few years, building on other established approaches, we have worked to develop a methodology for assessing our investments that is practical, understandable and useful to our ongoing work. This concept paper outlines an analytical tool we affectionately refer to as BACO (for best available charitable option) that helps us to understand the social impact and cost-effectiveness of our investment, as compared to other charitable options that address the same issue. It continues to be a work in progress and is not without its limitations, but it does provide a framework for how we think about delivering critical goods and services in health, housing and water to the poor.
Excellent food for thought. I appreciate that your conclusions on BACO were about areas for further thinking rather. This is very important in improving impact studies.
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