Global Impact Investing Network

Impact investing needs shared measures. Someone has to build and keep them. In the workbook's account of the global tools, that someone is the Global Impact Investing Network, or GIIN.

GIIN is not a regulator and not an exchange. It is a network of the investing community itself.

Its role here is one thing, and the workbook is specific about it. GIIN offers the IRIS+ system.

Why offer it? The workbook gives three reasons and a purpose. IRIS+ supports the practice of impact investing. And it promotes transparency, credibility and accountability in how impact data is used for decision making across the impact investment industry.

That last phrase matters. GIIN's concern is not reporting for its own sake. It is whether an investor can actually rely on impact data when deciding where money goes.

Through IRIS+, GIIN also carries the Impact Management Project's five dimensions into practical use, and maps its metrics to the Sustainable Development Goals.

What the workbook attributes to GIIN (Chapter 6, section 6.2.2A). One sentence carries the whole of it: GIIN offers the IRIS+ system to support the practice of impact investing and promote transparency, credibility, and accountability in the use of impact data for decision making across the impact investment industry.

Unpacking that sentence gives four distinct jobs:

What flows from GIIN to a user. Through IRIS+, GIIN provides generally accepted definitions of impact categories and impact themes, identifies common goals and core metrics sets by theme, and publishes a wider catalogue of metrics. Because most impact investors focus on the SDGs for their social interventions, the core metric sets and the catalogue are aligned to the SDGs. Measurement runs through the Impact Management Project's five dimensions, with impact risk described using one of 10 risk factors.

Where GIIN sits in the Indian picture. The workbook places GIIN under "Framework introduced by Global Investing Community", alongside GIIRS, and separately from frameworks introduced by the Government of India (the 9 NGRBC principles) and by a multilateral agency (the UN Global Compact's 10 principles). An Indian social enterprise is not required by SEBI to use IRIS+. It becomes relevant when a foreign or domestic impact investor asks for it, or when a Social Impact Fund wants portfolio-level comparability that the SSE's own formats do not provide.

What the workbook does not give. Unlike GIIRS (6,000 companies) and the UN Global Compact (over 9,500 companies, 3,000 non-business signatories, 160-plus countries), the workbook attaches no membership count, founding year or country count to GIIN. So there is no GIIN figure to learn, and any number offered for GIIN in an exam option is one the workbook does not support.

Illustrative fund and figures.

Prithvi Social Impact Fund, a SEBI-registered Social Impact Fund, raises ₹150,00,00,000. Of that, ₹60,00,00,000 comes from a European development finance institution.

The Indian side of its reporting is set by SEBI: each investee that registered on or raised funds through the SSE feeds into a single overall Annual Impact Report for the fund. The European investor asks for something else on top — reporting against GIIN's IRIS+ core metrics for its two themes.

Across the financial inclusion investees the fund reports 2,40,000 active borrowers, an average loan of ₹32,000, and 38% first-time formal borrowers. Under the IMP's CONTRIBUTION dimension it must also state what would likely have happened anyway: it estimates that about a fifth of those borrowers would have reached a bank or an NBFC within two years regardless, and says so.

Two reports, two purposes. The AIR satisfies Indian regulation. The IRIS+ reporting lets the European investor place Prithvi's ₹150 crore beside its other holdings in Kenya and Indonesia on one set of definitions. Neither replaces the other, and GIIN's role is only in the second.

Chapter 6 (10% weightage), section 6.2.2A, names GIIN as the body that offers IRIS+ and gives its stated aims. Chapter 7's second sample question puts GIIRS, GRI, UNGC and IRIS+ side by side, so the association between GIIN and IRIS+ is what makes that question quick.

Expect a matching-style question: which body offers IRIS+ (GIIN), and what IRIS+ promotes in the use of impact data (transparency, credibility and accountability for decision making). The high-yield revision is a four-row table pairing each Chapter 6 tool with the body behind it.

• GIIN is the network; IRIS+ is its system. A question asking "which system" wants IRIS+; a question asking "which body" wants GIIN.
• GIIN and GIIRS are different things with almost the same name. GIIN is the Global Impact Investing Network. GIIRS is the Global Impact Investing Rating System. The workbook does not present GIIRS as GIIN's product.
• Transparency, credibility and accountability — in the use of impact data for decision making. The purpose clause is about decisions, not disclosure for its own sake.
• GIIN did not create the five dimensions. Those are the Impact Management Project's, used by IRIS+.
• The workbook gives GIIN no size figure. No members, no year, no countries. The 6,000 belongs to GIIRS and the 9,500 to the UN Global Compact.
• GIIN is not a regulator and not a standard-setter for the SSE. SEBI sets the SSE's reporting requirements; ICAI issues the Social Impact Assessment Standards. Using IRIS+ is an investor-driven choice.
• GIIN means something entirely different in the AIF papers. Series XIX-B's GIIN is the Global Intermediary Identification Number — the registration a fund obtains from the US IRS to meet its FATCA obligations. Nothing to do with impact investing. If a question puts GIIN next to FATCA or a Reporting Financial Institution, it is that number, not this network.