Wokai Blog: Triple Bottom Line: Wokai China Microfinance Blog

Casey

I had an interesting conversation yesterday with Richard Roque. Richard is in the process of starting a fund that will focus on triple bottom line investments in China. While double bottom line investments are the new trend in microfinance, providing both an financial and social return to the investor, before our talk, I had never heard of the triple bottom line, or 3BL (People, Planet, Profit). After wikipedia-ing triple bottom line, I found that the idea extends back to 1994 and is based off of the basic premise of organizations gauging performance on a combination of financial, social, and environmental impact. It's a pretty utopian concept and, if achievable on a mass scale throughout different industries, could be a solution to the majority of the problems that society faces today.

Richard found that 3BL enterprises are virtually non-existent in China, so he decided create the market on his own. Richard's fund will be looking to transplant models of organizations that successfully achieved triple bottom line performance and seed entrepreneurs that want to partner to implement the model in China. As a part of his initiative, he is also working on building a China social venture ecosystem by introducing sinaworld.cn.

It will be interesting to see how current 3BL models transfer over to China. Can organizations perform equally as well on all three levels anywhere in the world? How will China's external environment and market effect the chance of success for a 3BL organization here?

One interesting model of this that I've seen in China was developed by the Global Environmental Institute (GEI). In 2004, GEI China started its Environmental and sustainable agriculture initiative by creating cooperatives in Yunnan, Guangxi, and Tibet that used greenhouse and biofuel technology to grow organic crops. To solve the issues that these organic producers faced when they went to market with not only higher quality, but also higher price, organic products, GEI created it's own supply chains to bring these products from China's Southwestern provinces (among the poorest provinces in China) to Shanghai's upscale markets.