The AGILE tool explained like I’m five

When one wants to invest or donate to an impact project, one almost always faces the same two questions:

1. Is there real impact?
   Or is it just greenwashing, impact-washing, or “fake”? And if impact does exist, is it only a one-time, “direct and simple” effect, or rather a transformative impact, meaning one that can sustainably change a system (education, health, climate, inclusion…).
2. What economic model is behind it?
   - If I invest, does the project create enough value to compensate the people involved and to generate a financial return?
   - If I donate, is the project strong enough to last, to become autonomous, and not to depend indefinitely on subsidies?

The problem is that traditional evaluation tools (ESG, SDG, taxonomies, institutional grids, etc., and especially the in-depth but heavy and complex analytical frameworks of impact incubators) are often overly complicated. They require mobilizing specialized experts, very complex indicators, and sometimes several weeks of work for a single project. The result: neither investors, nor philanthropists, nor grassroots project leaders manage to find their way, and a large part of the available funds remain blocked.

It was to address this deadlock that, during the Geneva Forum workshops, the Geneva Foundation for the Future launched a collective simplification effort by bringing together all the professions of impact finance, both investment and philanthropy. The idea during the interactive exercises was: if we had to retain only one criterion, representative of 80% of the results produced by complex tools, which one would it be? By repeating this exercise with panels of experts and practitioners (finance, NGOs, universities, incubators), not one but five families of five recurring criteria each were identified, covering almost all evaluation needs.

By combining them, these five very simple families of criteria reach 94 to 99% representativeness, thus making it possible to launch major evaluation work with full confidence, and they became the pillars of the AGILE tool:

• Alignment (with values, SDG/ESG, and local realities),
• Governance (transparent, participatory, responsible),
• Intention (is impact truly the core of the project? what level of impact are we talking about?),
• Leadership (capacity to mobilize and sustain over time),
• Efficiency (optimal use of resources, economic viability, scaling-up).

Taken together, these five criteria form a simple “common grammar”, agile and usable on a daily basis. They make it possible to reliably answer the two main initial questions:

• Is there an impact, and of what type?
• Does the model hold up, in the long run, for investing or donating?

The AGILE tool is not meant to replace existing taxonomies (ESG, SDG, EU Green Taxonomy…), but rather to serve as a simplified interface and shared framework, making evaluation accessible to all stakeholders – from family offices to local NGOs – and able to connect afterwards to legal and institutional references.

Find the White Paper and the AGILE tool at this link.

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