Social Impact and Inequality

“As long as poverty, injustice and gross inequality persist in our
world, none of us can truly rest.” Nelson Mandela

Inequality is a difficult topic to understand and tackle but it seems to be increasing in a relative sense and surely has to be addressed by all those working for a fairer society – that includes those pushing for a wider and more effective social economy.

According to the OECD, the average income of the richest 10% of the population is about nine times that of the poorest 10% across the OECD, up from seven times 25 years ago. (OECD).

There has always been income inequality but as the world becomes more and more interconnected, the divisions between those that ‘have’ and those that ‘have-not’ is increasingly widening.  And this has a knock-on effect where the disparities in income translate into disparities in wealth – raising the question, who owns our world?

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UN’s Sustainable Development Goals ….an answer to social impact reporting?

One of the ‘holy grails’ of impact reporting is a single set of universal measures that can be consistently applied, regardless of an organisations’ activities, size, community, type, and so on.

Finding the ‘holy grail’ has proved rather elusive since early forays into impact reporting by the co-operative movement that date back to the mid-19^th century, although we have seen some harmonisation in recent years around the principles through which we should at least approach our reporting (most visibly and materially through the work of the national Inspiring Impact initiative[1]).