State Oil Fund of the Republic of Azerbaijan (SOFAZ) hosts an international Conference titled “Impact Investing: Opportunities and challenges for institutional investors” in partnership with IFC and with the support of EBRD on September 26, 2019, in Baku. Organized within the celebration framework of the 20th anniversary of SOFAZ, the conference aims to pinpoint the most recent developments in the impact market and investment environment, and the possible challenges and opportunities.

Over the last decade, impact investing has gained increasing interest and traction within the financial sector. Impact investing enables institutional investors to generate measurable positive social and environmental impacts alongside a risk-adjusted return.

The Conference consists of 6 sessions, which aim to solidify the definition of impact investing among institutional investors, potential future scale of impact investing, including evolving markets and products in this area, measurement and reporting tools, the role of sound government policy framework in the future of this industry, as well as climate change transitions.

CEO of SOFAZ Shahmar Movsumov highlighted the significance of impact investing and commented: “As a long term investor, we strongly believe both value creation and sustainability have to be the major cornerstones of our investment strategies and in this regard impact investing has a great potential to achieve both of these objectives. We believe this conference will be an important milestone in increasing awareness among the long-term institutional investors.”

Hans Peter Lankes, IFC’s Vice President of Economics and Private Sector Development, said: “For over 60 years, IFC has been an impact investor. And we are leading an effort, together with our partners in the industry, to improve the credibility and transparency of the impact investment market. We are delighted to see that a growing number of investors and companies are now looking to align their business models and investment strategies to achieve positive outcomes for society. The State Oil Fund of Azerbaijan was the first investor from an emerging market to invest in funds managed by the IFC Asset Management Company. We would like to express our thanks to SOFAZ for its commitment to our shared mission.”

The conference brings together more than 200 participants – members of leading SWFs, pension funds, multilateral agencies and industry practitioners, government bodies, private sector and a number of universities.