TerraSocio: new methodology helps evaluate socio environmental impact

Sustainability is also about ensuring that peoples and communities have their needs met and improve their quality of life. For impact investment projects, this is one of the goals, coupled with environmental goals. Having monitoring and evaluation tools that take into account socio environmental characteristics is essential to ensure that sustainable projects also measure their human impact properly.

In 2023, the Alliance and the Soros Economic Development Fund (SEDF) collaborated to develop a tailor-made methodology for evaluating the socioeconomic impact. This tool, called TerraSocio, seeks to generate information that can be used by projects, donors, investors and other stakeholders to make long- and short-term strategic decisions, identify areas for expanding project work and other needs or expectations beneficiaries have.

TerraSocio is comprised of two parts: the Socio Environmental Development Index (SDI), and Complementary Information. It uses quantitative and qualitative methods to capture data on demographics, nutrition, health, housing, environment, production, and future
aspirations. The complementary information can be tailored to each project’s needs, and focus on demographics, gender roles, access to basic services and agricultural practices. Data is initially gathered through a survey focusing on the eight themes described in the image below.