Ideas. Powerful entities. Beings, even. Born of necessity, or curiosity, or determination, or by accident: born of life and living. They are beautiful, and ugly, and they shape the world. The bad ones shape it into something from which to avert our eyes and gnash our teeth, but the good ones, they bring smiles to the human faces of the world. Author Napoleon Hill said, ‘Ideas are the beginning points of all fortunes.’ I’d but alter those words to speak of good ideas and fortunes for greater humanity.

 

Nexii is a good idea. It is an idea about good.

 

On Monday 21 May the SAWIP Class of 2012 hosted Tamzin Ratcliffe, the founder of Nexii, and Alfred Johnson, an intern with the project. The pair presented the initiative, which officially launches in September this year, and fielded questions about its inception and the support it enjoys at this pre-launching phase.

 

You are wondering what Nexii is. I wondered too. An apt description of the initiative is found, of course, on its website: ‘Nexii aims to make impact investing a reality at scale by providing the meeting place for investments that are primarily social or environmental in purpose and intention and by supporting the intermediaries who serve impact investors, intermediaries and high impact investment initiatives.’ To my mind, the Nexii platform—for that is what it is—marries the idea of business for profit with that of social good—concepts which have traditionally been seen as diametrically opposed to each other. In this regard Nexii should be seen as a facilitator of this connection, an enabler of good.

 

In a world fast becoming one where economic and financial involvement is a prerequisite for success and personal and community upliftment, I think that the thinking behind this project is laudable. Nexii represents a drive to create a platform where businesses can become an active part of creating positive change to ordinary human beings. Technically, it is a stock exchange geared towards investment with social aims. Nexii sets criteria that NGOs need to meet in order to be listed on the exchange, insuring their repute. It also provides rules for engagement that protect the NGOs from pressure from the businesses who invest in them or from having the carpet swiped from beneath them.

 

NGOs struggle, we know this. Many of them do great work, innovative work that reaches the core of many of the problems that are faced by the communities in which they operate. Dr Rhoda Kadalie, the Executive Director of the Impumelelo Innovations Award Trust, speaks of the need for government to partner with NGOs to upscale the impactful work that they do. I agree with her, but I also thing that the private sector bears such a responsibility, especially in a country of such inequality as South Africa. In that light, I support the Nexii project’s commitment to providing a reputable place for social good projects and businesses to meet and collaborate.

I must be honest, now at the end of this piece, as I wasn’t at its beginning, I don’t fully understand everything that Nexii does. I’ll probably have to read three or four times before I can grasp the concepts of social impact bonds and other such socio-financial instruments. But I can say this: that the space most certainly is being opened up for a redefinition of the way we do business and the way that affects our interactions as human beings. This space is being driven by thinking people; people with hearts full of ideas and ideas with heart.

 

When we infuse humanist notions—ideas of ubuntu—into those aspects of our lives to which they are most foreign, a real magnification occurs of our capacity to realise good.