Where Impact Becomes Currency: Unlocking New Pathways for Social Innovation Financing with Common Good Marketplace
A New Frontier: Turning Impact into investable assets:
Common Good Marketplace is rethinking what funding for social enterprises can look like. Instead of relying solely on traditional grants or early stage investment, CGM introduces an outcome based financing model built on transparency, verification, and real world results.
Here’s how it works:
1. Measuring and verifying impact
CGM works with social impact organizations to structure, measure, and assess their outcomes using a standardized framework. This includes reviewing existing data and materials, working sessions with the team, and a structured assessment of strengths, gaps, and readiness for outcome-based funding.
2. Transforming outcomes into investible assets
Following validation and verification, CGM converts results into Verified Impact Assets (VIAs) — standardized units of impact, each representing one year of well-being. These VIAs can then be traded with funders seeking to invest in organizations with credible, verifiable impact.
3. Unlocking New Funding Streams
By turning impact into an investable asset class, CGM opens doors to entirely new sources of funding. Social impact investors and institutions who want to achieve measurable outcomes can directly purchase VIAs, bringing more capital into the social innovation ecosystem and demonstrably advance their sustainability targets.
Our partnership with Common Good Marketplace
Since 2024, Bayer Foundation has been collaborating with Common Good Marketplace (CGM) to advance innovative financing models that enable social enterprises to convert verified impact into investable value. As part of this partnership, we have delivered the first phase of an outcome based funding first project, attracting 14 entrepreneurs from our ecosystem and selecting three to advance to Phase 2 in 2026. This collaboration demonstrates how results driven, performance linked financing can unlock new capital pathways for health and food security innovators.
“With this partnership with Bayer Foundation and its Women Entrepreneur Award winners like Zimbos Abantu, we have the opportunity to not only reshape markets and capital flows to drive human flourishing but to also close the gender financing gap at the same time. This collaboration is indeed ambitious, but this is exactly what’s required to address some of the most pressing issues of our time.”
Greg Spencer, Co-Founder & CEO Common Good Marketplace (CGM)
Why we believe in this model
Outcome-based financing aligns perfectly with Bayer Foundation’s mission to drive social innovation because:
• It rewards real impact, not activity.
• It strengthens trust and credibility for early- and growth-stage innovators.
• It helps de-risk capital, making it easier for promising enterprises to attract follow-on funding.
• It supports evidence-based scaling, a core principle of our Social Innovation Program.
By supporting access to the Common Good Marketplace for selected organizations –such as former Women Entrepreneurs Award winners – we ensure that impact-driven innovators receive technical support to strengthen their impact data, visibility through the Marketplace, and a pathway to issue and transact verified impact.
“We meet extraordinary innovators around the world who deliver tangible improvements in their communities every day. With Common Good Marketplace, we can help them convert those outcomes into investable assets – giving health and food security enterprises the visibility and capital they need to grow.”
Dr. Peng Zhong, Director Social Innovation, Bayer Foundation
Spotlight: Zimbos Abantu – transforming healthcare access in Zimbabwe
Zimbos Abantu, a health enterprise from Zimbabwe and a Bayer Foundation Women Entrepreneurs Award winners, has been onboarded onto Common Good Marketplace.
Zimbos Abantu is strengthening community-based healthcare solutions and addressing systemic barriers in rural health access. Through CGM’s support, the team has:
• undergone a structured impact and funding-readiness assessment,
• validated and verified their outcomes, and
• begun the process of turning these results into tradeable impact assets.
Next to Zimbos Abantu, Farm.io and Silo Africa, from our community of supported Women Entrepreneurs, are now being onboarded to Common Good Marketplace.
“Listing on the Common Good Marketplace platform not only increases Zimbos Abantu’s visibility, it also enhances our ability to secure long-term, sustainable and outcome-based funding to expand our essential health services to underserved communities across Zimbabwe.”
Chiedza Mushawedu, Co-Founder & COO of Zimbos Abantu - Healthcare on Wheels
(Photos from Zimbos Abantu)
