Key points
- We work as part of select collaborative initiatives to deepen our understanding and to make a positive contribution to our industry
- The Deep Transitions Project aims to support investors in driving positive systems change through interdisciplinary research and innovative experiments
- CGAP's Financial Inclusion 2.0 initiative focuses on maximising impact and minimising harm in financial services, with our involvement enhancing our investment decisions
- Fairwork evaluates gig economy companies using principles that promote fair pay, conditions, contracts, management and representation
As with any investment, your capital is at risk.
The following are just some of the organisations that the Positive Change Team has engaged with in 2024. Others include those we have reported on in the past, such as the James Hutton Institute’s Climate Positive farming project and the Baillie Gifford Chair in the Ethics of Data and Artificial Intelligence at Edinburgh University. We continue to build a network of organisations that support the Positive Change’s Team’s research and engagement efforts.
Research initiatives
Deep Transitions Project
Since 2020, we collaborated with and funded the Deep Transitions Project. It is an innovative interdisciplinary research project that strives to understand how the unsustainable systems our societies are built on emerged and how they can be unmade. Its Deep Transitions Lab (DTL) aims to support investors in channelling capital and influence in a way that enables positive systems change. In 2024, we worked on an experiment with the DTL team to understand how we might incorporate elements of Deep Transitions theory into our impact analysis framework.
In September 2024, we joined DTL’s growing community at its first formal conference in
Barcelona. The conference united academics, policymakers, and investors from various asset classes, highlighting the multi-disciplinary collaboration required to achieve fundamental systems change. We presented our experiments alongside the DTL team. These included work on climate risk scenarios and the systems changes required in digital technologies and mining to make them more sustainable. This was particularly helpful for our thinking about Epiroc, a new holding in 2024 which we believe is well-placed to enable low emissions equipment adoption across the mining industry. We continue to incorporate elements of Deep Transitions theory into our work and explore how it can help us become better impact investors.
CGAP – Financial Inclusion 2.0
The Consultative Group to Assist the Poor (CGAP) is a research organisation housed within the World Bank. CGAP’s world-leading researchers have been at the forefront of understanding the dynamics of financial inclusion for many years and have advised companies and regulators on how to maximise impact and minimise harm in this area. We have been speaking with researchers at the organisation for several years to help with our impact analysis and engagements with companies.
In 2024, we formalised our involvement with CGAP in two ways. First, at CGAP’s annual meeting in June 2024, we formally became a Strategic Partner as part of CGAP’s first private sector cohort. We also chose to become members of its eleven-strong Champions Group, a strategic advisory board of leading organisations working on financial inclusion worldwide. The Champions Group aims to advise on CGAP’s strategy. It runs various projects to move the understanding of financial inclusion beyond usage and access to valuing its usefulness, which will help decision-makers worldwide make better choices.
We believe that our involvement with CGAP will help inform our investment decisions and help us engage with financial service providers on areas such as consumer protection, risk management and access. This is relevant to several companies in our portfolio, such as MercadoLibre, Nu Holdings and Bank Rakyat Indonesia.
Fairwork
Fairwork is a project coordinated by the Oxford Internet Institute and the WZB Berlin Social Science Center, focusing on how digital trends affect the labour force. It has evaluated many companies operating in the gig economy using the Fairwork Principles. A framework that considers key areas of importance for companies operating in the gig economy: Fair Pay, Fair Conditions, Fair Contracts, Fair Management, and Fair Representation.
We hosted Fairwork in our offices for a seminar to learn more about how companies can be evaluated using these Principles and hear about Fairwork’s latest research, which considers worker rights in the AI value chain. Fairwork’s research provides a differentiated insight into companies operating in the gig economy, such as Grab in the Positive Change portfolio, and we plan to continue our informal relationship with Fairwork to understand how we can best encourage companies to adopt best practices.
Industry Initiatives
Community of Practice on impact investing in public markets, Impact Investing Institute
The inaugural meeting of the Community of Practice (CoP) on impact investing in public markets took place in 2024, convened by the Impact Investing Institute in the UK. There are circa 15 asset managers and asset owners involved in this CoP, which aims to promote impact investing in listedmarkets through promoting best practice and considering opportunities to enable consistency and comparability in impact reporting. At the first meeting in November, much of the discussion surrounded the Financial Conduct Authority’s Sustainability Impact Label; at the time, our UK fund was one of only a few funds that had achieved the label and we shared insights into the process with the group.
GIIN Listed Equity Working Group
Following our involvement in previous phases of the Global Impact Investing Network’s (GIIN) Listed Equities Working Group, which resulted in the Guidance for Pursuing Impact in Listed Equities being published in 2023, we have joined the group again in its new phase. The proposed focus areas include developing guidance for designing theories of change, characterising investor contributions, and using impact performance indicators. As a member of the GIIN, at the GIIN Impact Forum in Amsterdam, we joined over 1,500 delegates who convened to promote the impact investing industry and its effectiveness at driving positive change. Many topics were covered in the sessions and seminars, including systems change investing, health system efficiency and outcomes measurement, all of which are relevant to the Positive Change portfolio.
Baillie Gifford associations and memberships
In addition to the organisations which Positive Change is involved in, Baillie Gifford is a member and/or signatory to the following initiatives:
- UN Principles for Responsible Investment;
- UN Global Compact;
- Emerging Markets Investor Alliance;
- Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures;
- UK Centre for Greening Finance and Investment;
- UK Stewardship Code;
- Farm Animal Investment Risk and Return;
- Taskforce for Climate-related Financial Disclosure;
- Investor Stewardship Group;
- Focusing Capital on the Long Term;
- Institutional Investors Group on Climate Change;
- the Investor Forum; International Corporate Governance Network;
- Extractive Industries Transparency Index;
- Carbon Disclosure Project; Asian Corporate Governance Association;
- Japan Stewardship Code;
- the Council of Institutional Investors;
- European Fund and Asset Management Association Stewardship Code.