**2.4 A multi-stakeholder approach of sustainability and social investment**

In this process, the role of the private sector and its social investments in the community microhydropower systems has been progressively growing in the country and becoming a significant component of the implementation of the projects. Likewise, this interaction among civil society organizations, community members, government officials, and private entities has strengthened the Corporate Social Responsibility policy of several national companies and is becoming central to their social and business agenda.

*Sustainability and Social Investment: Community Microhydropower Systems in the Dominican… DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.105995*


**Table 1.**

*Basic indicators to measure the nonmonetary success of social investment.*

Among them, the action of the Popular Group (Grupo Popular) stands out. It is one of the main financial groups of the Dominican Republic, which has been increasing its action in these initiatives through the Popular Foundation (Fundación Popular), the entity responsible for its social investment agenda, coming across an effective scheme to contribute to integral interventions, overcoming the limitations of specific projects outside of a strategic framework.

Each community microhydro project is financed through concessional investments, basically different types of nonrefundable investments such as seed capital, grants, and donations. Nevertheless, this has not stopped private investors, such as Grupo Popular, to step in and assign a social investment budget to fuel the energy transition and community development. The framework private firms are using to assess the impact of their investments that are not monetary and rely on the idea of community development and sustainability.

To this day, we can estimate that the total investment made in the implementation of microhydro projects under this scheme exceeds 17 million dollars. The social investment from the private sector is around 5% of it, with a significant increase in its participation during the last 10 years. There is still plenty of opportunity for social investors to increase their participation in these projects.

The participation of the private sector in these projects is an alternative to reduce the risks associated with their implementation. Moreover, multi-stakeholder approaches can fuel a virtuous circle of local development based on social investment and sustainability.

Access to basic services, like electricity, is an essential assumption for development. Nevertheless, sustainability is rather strictly linked to social and environmental processes and dynamics that can be promoted among human groups and their territories. According to this perspective, each project can lighten a path to implement coordinated multi-stakeholder processes, aimed to reach wider sustainability goals.

From this point of view, empowerment of people and local organized groups should become a guiding principle for each of the stakeholders who take part in the process, from private entities to government officials. There should be a common effort to strengthen personal and community self-esteem: during the process, people, individually and as a part of a human group, should internalize that they can reach previously planned goals.

These interventions contribute to educating people to freedom, providing them the opportunity to acquire knowledge and instruments that allow them to make decisions and contribute to the development of the social group they belong to. Confidence, especially inside the community, is a key issue: the intervention should help to overcome the common situation where people show more confidence toward outsiders than toward their peers.

Another important triggering factor is the promotion of solidarity among and within stakeholders. The principle according to which maximizing individual benefit would maximize the collective one has revealed all its limitations, especially when it is applied without a vision of social well-being and sustainability, transcending the idea of only seeking economic benefit. The most successful and sustainable societies are those who adopt synergic strategies and invest in their own development. This includes mechanisms of mutual support, which allow people and communities to overcome individual and collective challenges, generating a sense of belonging to the social group and the environment where they live. Solidarity is a key element to increase the positive impacts of social investments, since it promotes a spiral of continuous improvement.

From this point of view, this model of intervention contributes to improving cost-effectiveness, promoting appropriate distribution of the tasks and available resources, avoiding duplicity, and facilitating the elaboration and implementation of middle- and long-term plans.

#### **2.5 Next steps in social investment in the Dominican Republic**

According to the experience gained in multiple projects, the development and social investment models must reintroduce the concept of sustainability along with ethics and nonmonetary objectives and indicators. Community development is a complex and slow process, where empowerment is a key to achieving goals.

Social investment in the country has fulfilled a role of filling in the gap of financing projects on a nonrefundable basis. Most of the projects need nonrefundable investments, since the return of investment, measured only in financial terms, would render most of the projects unfeasible for a traditional financial model. However, if there was a way to incorporate social and environmental positive impacts and sustainable development in the framework of financing decisions of other institutions, it would be possible to expand the impact of social investments.

There is also a need to go further in the models of community microhydropower systems in order to create mechanisms to provide monetary returns in order to diversify the source of social investments. It is also possible to take advantage of the existing network of community microhydropower systems and their current savings networks.

There is the example of the community of Angostura, where the first project was implemented through a combination of social investment, donations by international cooperation, and seed capital. Afterward, the local economy was reshaped, and an ecotourism project was developed, as well as a simple but complete self-managed system of monthly payments to a community fund. With these resources, Angostura was able to participate in covering the costs of an expansion of the microhydropower generation, providing more than 10,000 dollars from its community fund.
