Announcing a New Initiative to Incubate a Task Force on Inequality-related Financial Disclosures (TIFD)

Rights CoLab, the Predistribution Initiative, the Southern Centre for Inequality Studies (University of Witwatersrand), and Red Argentina de Cooperacion Internacional (RACI), together with a diverse coalition of partner and supporting organizations, are co-creating a Task Force on Inequality-related Financial Disclosures (TIFD). Inspired by the successful uptake of the Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures (TCFD), TIFD is conceived as an explicit systemic risk management framework that can reduce inequality created by the private sector.

TIFD will provide guidance, thresholds, targets, and metrics for companies and investors to measure and manage their impacts on inequality, as well as inequality’s impacts on company and investor performance.  Civil society organizations, regulators, and investors can use TIFD to evaluate the private sector’s performance and hold corporations to account.

An essential feature of TIFD is the development of a governance structure that will enable legitimate representatives of the most vulnerable individuals and communities to participate as co-creators on equal footing.

The project began in mid-2020 with a series of conversations and small and large group meetings involving representatives of civil society organizations that are dedicated to improving investor uptake on social issuues and are at the vanguard of identifying solutions to inequality. Drawing from these conversations, we created a TIFD FAQ Beta Version.  In 2021, we turned our attention to making sure that civil society organizations from the Global South as well as legitimate representatives of the most vulnerable  in the Global North are part of the conversation so that they can critically interrogate the concept of TIFD and ensure its relevance and accountability to its mission. Towards this end and with the firm belief that a just governance structure must be the bedrock of any genuine attempt to right inequality, a significant task of the TIFD Project in 2021 is developing a Conceptual Framework for TIFD based upon an inclusive and equitable governance structure.

To learn more about TIFD and how to get involved, visit the TIFD website.