Measuring impact

Abrar is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow and Research Fellow at Saïd Business School researching on topics of global environmental change, climate finance and corporate purpose. He is affiliated with Oxford’s Environmental Change Institute (ECI) and is a Fellow of Green Templeton College. Abrar is currently on a prestigious three-year British Academy Fellowship at Oxford, investigating the ways in which dedicated climate funding, such as the Green Climate Fund, and emerging technologies, such as artificial intelligence and distributed ledgers, shape implementation and diffusion of climate action in Pakistan and emerging economies. He was on the core research team for a pioneering Oxford collaboration with EY Global, to understand how and why C-Suite and Boards from large global MNCs are again focused on corporate ‘purpose’ in a turbulent global economy. The findings contribute to a global research initiative on corporate transformation to meet the challenges of the early 21st century.

Alex Nicholls is the first tenured professor in social entrepreneurship appointed at the University of Oxford. He is also a Tutorial Fellow and Member of the Governing Body at Harris Manchester College. In 2004, he was the co-founder of the Skoll Centre for Social Entrepreneurship - for which he helped raise the core funding - as well as the co-founder of the Skoll World Forum on Social Entrepreneurship. He is the Editor in Chief of the Journal of Social Entrepreneurship, which he founded in 2010. Alex is the co-author of a major research book on Fair Trade (with Charlotte Opal, Sage, 2005) and the editor of the first scholarly collection of papers on social entrepreneurship (Oxford University Press, 2006, 2008). In 2015, he published a further co-edited volume on social finance and a new book on social innovation with NESTA. 

In 2019, Alex published a book examining the economic underpinnings of social innovation in the European Union, based upon CRESSI.

Gayle is co-founder and CEO of pfc social impact advisors, an international consultancy offering strategic guidance in leadership development, programme strategy, and impact measures to leading foundations, corporations, impact investors, governments, and intermediaries. She also directs the Oxford Impact Investing Programme and the Social Finance Programme at Saïd Business School. Gayle has two decades of experience as a strategist, philanthropist, and trusted advisor to social investors worldwide. She has managed and assessed more than US$15 billion in philanthropic and social investments to alleviate poverty, mitigate climate change, promote gender and financial inclusion, and build the capacity of new leaders in the field of social finance. She has also advised social investors in more than 45 countries and has taught social investing classes worldwide. 

Karim is a practitioner, educator, and researcher in impact measurement and impact investing. Karim has worked with prominent private, public, and social sector organisations on evaluating the impacts of grant-making and impact investment strategies of individual programmes, complex portfolios and ecosystem-level initiatives in developed and emerging markets. He was the Co-Chair of the Impact Measurement Task Force convened by the Government of Ontario, and a member of the Impact Measurement Working Group of the G8 Social Impact Investment Task Force. Karim was previously Advisor to the Rockefeller Foundation on social impact measurement, and he co-founded the Topical Interest Group on Social Impact Measurement at the American Evaluation Association. Karim was previously co-founder of Purpose Capital (now Rally Assets), where he established and led its Impact Advisory practice. Karim is a senior fellow with the J.W. McConnell Family Foundation, leading capacity development programming for non-profits and charities on impact measurement.