Before we move into a new year full of new opportunity and more impact, we would like to first of all say goodbye to 2017 and remember our achievements over the last 12 months.
Inclusion [Social Ratings] started the year with a staff retreat in Barcelona. The Director of Inclusion [Africa] joined the Barcelona Team to define the strategic areas of work for 2017.
Also in early 2017, we launched our new website having worked with a sustainability communications company Altus Impact to give us a new look and feel with refreshed content and stronger messaging. This together with the new communications plan lead by Daniela Israel-Wilson has helped us to not only further boost our visibility within the social impact space, but also enhance our digital engagement across our stakeholders and networks, and to improve our knowledge sharing capacities. A new knowledge product we introduced this year was our Country Series Reports, kicked off with a report dedicated to Nicaragua. You can access the report here.
Furthermore, we established a strong collaboration with Lend with Care, an international NGO headquartered in London, where we executed a social ratings assessment for two of its partners in Africa and Asia. Both ratings are available free to download at Inclusion’s web page. You can access the Thrive Microfinance (Zimbabwe) and CCSF (Cambodia) ratings reports here and here, respectively.
Our subsidiary organization, Inclusion [Africa], also performed SPI4 audits for seven MFI institutions in Tchad, Burkina Faso, Benin, Togo and Mali.
Regarding the maintenance and establishment of new partnerships, this year we had the opportunity to establish new partners in Asia, and in particular Malaysia with our friends from MaGIC (Malaysian Global Innovation and Creativity Centre) and AIM (Agensi Inovasi Malaysia), two players that are steadily shaping the new social economy ecosystem in the country and the region.
Inclusion has also strengthened its internal structure in Europe, Africa and Latin America. Ms Ana de Miguel, Director for Europe, relocated permanently to Inclusion’s main office in Barcelona and we welcomed two new members to our team, Santiago Arnaudin, joining us as technical advisor in San Jose, Costa Rica to support our activities in the Latin American Region and Daniel Dassou, joining us as a junior analyst in Benin to support the activities of Inclusion [Africa].
Looking forward to an exciting 2018, we hope to consolidate our relationships with our key social performance partners and to continue promoting and expanding social inclusion through our client network across the world.