Investing for Change: Why the AlTi Global Social Progress Index Helps Align Investments With Purpose

We are proud to partner with Social Progress Imperative to publish the 2025 edition of the AlTi Global Social Progress Index. The insights it reveals for impact-seeking investors are truly invaluable, explains Michael Tiedemann, CEO of AlTi.

From sustainability to health, from human rights to gender equity, and more – our world is facing many pressing social challenges. At the same time, as the largest wealth transfer in history unfolds, a growing number of ultra-high-net-worth (UHNW) individuals are seeking to direct their investments in ways that will bring about meaningful and lasting change.

The opportunities for private capital to help create a better world have, therefore, never been greater.

But it is vital for investors to understand where and how to focus their resources to deliver maximum impact. For that reason, we are proud to announce our new partnership with the Social Progress Imperative (SPI) and the publication of the AlTi Global Social Progress Index. This connects us to an invaluable source of global data and insights, all of which help to guide investors aiming to make a genuine difference in ways that align to their own values and purpose.

A Powerful Resource for Decision-Makers

The Social Progress Index was launched in 2013, under the academic guidance of Professor Michael Porter of Harvard Business School. Its purpose is to deliver comprehensive, data-driven evidence that demonstrates how people around the world are really living, and who is being left behind. It is now an essential tool for investors, policymakers, businesses, and private citizens, enabling us all to benchmark success and track progress from year to year and aiding prioritization by identifying specific areas of strength and weakness.

We believe the depth, breadth, and rigor of the index is unparalleled. Its latest iteration tracks and compares the performance of 170 countries across multiple key drivers of social progress. It combines 57 social- and environmental-outcome indicators to calculate an overall score for each nation, as well as considering the data of a further 26 countries.

The key indicators of social progress that the index focuses on to establish each country’s score – all of which are inextricably interlinked – are:

• Basic needs, comprising nutrition and medical care, water and sanitation, housing, and safety
• Foundations of wellbeing, comprising basic education, information and communications, health, and environmental quality
• Opportunity, comprising rights and voice, freedom and choice, inclusivity of society, and advanced education.

Crucially, these are all non-economic measures, which is precisely what makes the index unique as well as invaluable. Although the data demonstrates that social progress is undoubtedly connected to economic factors, such as GDP per capita, the SPI sets great store by isolating the indicators of progress in this way, so their relationship to economic factors can be clearly evaluated and analyzed.

Revealing Key Insights and Opportunities

We are convinced that there is no better time than now to embark on our partnership with the SPI, as the latest results from the new report indicate that, after a decade of steady progress, the world has entered a period of social-progress stagnation in the past three years. The index shows clearly that the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals are off track, which holds true across almost every geography, whether that is in the wealthiest nations of the global West or the poorest regions of the world.

In the face of such dispiriting data, however, we believe there are clear reasons for optimism, not least due to the great opportunity for positive impact driven by carefully targeted private-capital investments.

Yet, without such a rich source of data shining a light on global social progress, it would be hard for investors to understand where and how to allocate their capital to help deliver change in the most effective ways – whether they are interested in achieving market or near-market rates of return, catalytic investing, pure philanthropy, or any other approach.

Some key insights from the latest index demonstrate this. Here are just a couple of examples of the opportunities it reveals:

• The circular economy: The index shows us that, since 2011, only Europe has made progress in reducing resource usage through waste recovery, meaning that there are some clear opportunities for investment in other regions, such as North America, where the situation has actually deteriorated since 2017.
  
• Health: As the cost of healthcare spirals upwards in developed countries, indicators of health-system effectiveness and equity have declined in many countries, not least the UK, Canada, France, and the United States (although there has been a slight uptick in the US since 2023). There are therefore multiple opportunities for investment, such as spurring innovation in preventative medicine to help people live more healthily for longer, and/or developing new models and technologies for healthcare delivery that are more cost effective than existing solutions.