Social Impact Investing (SII) has not only been theorized and designed, but also started and tested. The first country to use them was the United Kingdom, in which in 2010 the Government developed the first YES B (Social Impact Bonds), then followed by United States, especially from the city of New York (2012).
Here, for example, the investor was Goldman Sachs with debt capital of more than nine million dollars, while Bloomberg Philanthropies has made available over seven million euros in a grant to be used as a guarantee fund to partially cover the Goldman Sachs loan.
Not only. The British Prime Minister Cameron – a member of a Conservative government – has worked to obtain a derogation from the legislation on state aid at European level for the purpose of allocating a loan of 400 million pounds, aimed at capitalizing the Big Society Capital, a sort of bank designed to raise resources and provide financial services to organizations in the social sector, whose financial coverage was ensured by the withdrawal of dormant accounts with banks and credit institutions that had been inactive for at least 15 years.
THE Social Impact Bonds they are not the only social impact investment instrument: there are also the so-called Pay-for-success (PfS), where the financial return depends on the success of the project. In any case, these tools are based on the need to address a social problem with preventive actions, which are difficult to implement for a PA without money, using the resulting savings for public coffers as a guarantee fund for private investments.
The British government is so convinced of the validity of the SII that, in 2013, it promoted the establishment of the Social Impact Investment Task Force established by the G8 with the aim of promoting the development of social impact investments and harmonizing their growth in the G8 countries. The Task Force consists of Advisory Boards (ADB) national and from Workinggroups (WG) thematic, which interacted with the OECD to support the drafting of a specific Report on the topic.
