FAST is a member-driven organization representing a global community of financial institutions and small and medium enterprises (SMEs, including producer organizations dedicated to bringing sustainable products and sustainable finance to market. FAST develops resources and activities aimed at increasing the number of producers in developing nations that successfully access quality finance. The FAST Shared Impact Assessment and Measurement Toolbox (SIAMT) is a common framework for investors, financial institutions, and SMEs to monitor and report the social, financial, and environmental performance generated from financing activities in sustainable agriculture value chains.
IRIS and FAST are both focused on improving the credibility and consistency of social and environmental performance measurement and reporting among impact investors.
To this end, the IRIS initiative and FAST collaborated in 2011 to develop a standardized set of performance metrics for investments in sustainable agriculture SMEs. Developed through a consultative process involving more than 60 experts in sustainable finance, agriculture, and impact assessment from around the world, the resulting metrics are included in both IRIS and the FAST SIAMT. FAST and the IRIS initiative consider the reporting of this information as critical to helping ensure the effectiveness and responsible growth of lending to and investment in sustainable SMEs and value chains.
The IRIS initiative and FAST continue to collaborate, with an increased focus on data collection and analysis. FAST will be working with its members to collect data for a prioritized subset of these co-developed performance metrics and the results will contribute to market analysis of agriculture-focused impact investment.