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Rethinking What it Means to Start a Business: Why Systemic Venture Building Matters for Africa’s Food Future
Africa’s entrepreneurs are often seen as risky investments not due to any limitations of their own businesses, but because of the risks in the systems around them. As a result, as Dieuwertje Nelissen, Eveline Jansen and Rachael Kirui at Enviu argue, it's important for development stakeholders to move beyond de-risking individual businesses and to put greater effort into strengthening and de-risking the systems that support them. They explore this systemic approach in the context of African agriculture, sharing a venture-building model that can help entrepreneurs reduce early-stage risk and scale sustainable impact.
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- Agriculture, Investing, Social Enterprise
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Scaling Through Consortiums: Five Lessons We’ve Learned About Growing Impact Collectively
For impact-focused organizations, consortiums are rarely the easy path to scale. They tend to be slower, more complex and harder to manage than working with a single partner. But according to Emma Colenbrander at Spring Impact, consortiums can also produce solutions that are broader in perspective, stronger in legitimacy and more resilient in practice. She explores these benefits and shares five lessons for maximizing the impact of this sort of collaborative effort.
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- Social Enterprise
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NextBillion at 20: Reflecting on Growth, Change and Global Impact
NextBillion is celebrating its 20th anniversary this year, at a time of immense global change and uncertainty. But a few things haven’t changed: Entrepreneurship continues to be a key factor in solving the world’s most urgent challenges. Investments in emerging markets continue to catalyze innovation. And access to accurate sources of information remains essential to unlocking business growth and impact. NextBillion is currently spotlighting guest articles that captured some of the key conversations and challenges that have shaped impact-focused business in emerging markets over the past two decades — and that continue to shape these sectors today. We're featuring the environment sector this week: Check out these insights below.
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- Social Enterprise
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Public Good vs. Profitable Exits: Why Public Innovation Agencies Must Stop Copying Venture Capital
A new class of venture capitalist is emerging, but they aren’t Wall Street financiers or Silicon Valley tech bros. As Emre Eren Korkmaz at the University of Oxford argues, they are public innovation agencies that are shifting their funding approach: Instead of supporting high-risk research and innovations aimed at delivering societal benefit, they have begun to adopt the logic of venture capital, favoring commercially viable projects that are more likely to secure follow-on private funding. He explores the downsides to this shift, arguing that the world needs these institutions to do what private capital cannot or will not: supporting innovation for the public good, not just for profitable exits.
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- Investing, Social Enterprise, Technology
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Time is a Social Innovator’s Most Precious Resource: Why Are So Many Funders Wasting It?
For social entrepreneurs and civil society innovators, time is a perpetually scarce resource. But according to Tanner Methvin at Impact Amplifier, in his decades of engagement with these innovators and their funders, he has often been shocked by how wasteful some of the funding world is with the ecosystem’s time. He argues that many funders don't fully understand the time demands imposed by their cumbersome systems for applying for grants or investments, or responding to requests for proposals. He explores these inefficiencies, and proposes a better way for funders to support the social innovation community.
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- Investing, Social Enterprise
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Are Impact Investors Really Listening?: Why Capturing Stakeholder Insights is Key to Impactful Investment Strategies
Collecting data is easy for impact investors; acting on it is harder. As Taanya Khare at Acumen explains, most impact investment firms turn data-driven insights into action through intentional spaces like investment committees or portfolio review sessions. But she argues that listening is about more than surveys or feedback loops — it requires investors to sit down with company teams to make sense of customer insights, identify blind spots and co-create better solutions and impact strategies. She shares what Acumen has learned from embedding listening and impact management into every stage of its investment process.
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- Investing, Social Enterprise
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Consultants at a Crossroads in Global Development: New Research Reveals their Challenges — And Highlights Strategies for Navigating the Current Disruption
The dismantling of USAID earlier this year has had many ripple effects, including over 238,000 global jobs lost at the agency and its implementing partners. But according to development consultants Alethia Wong and Lorenz Wild, the plight of independent consultants working in global development — who are often not represented in workforce statistics — hasn't received much attention. To better understand these impacts on the consulting ecosystem, they launched a survey of independent consultants earlier this year: They share the results in this article, exploring how development consultants are pivoting to earn income and how contracting companies can support them — and sharing advice from job recruiters for consultants looking for full-time roles.
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- Social Enterprise
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The ABCs of Catalytic Sunsetting: How Foundations and Other Philanthropic Funders Can Exit Boldly — And Leave a Bigger Legacy
What if the best way to ensure your philanthropic legacy … was to close your doors? As Nancy Swanson-Roberts at Linked Foundation and Kusi Hornberger at Dalberg Capital argue, the world’s most pressing problems demand urgent, bold action that incremental giving over generations often can't enable. They explain why philanthropic organizations like Linked Foundation are deliberately spending down their assets within a defined timeframe to catalyze systemic change — an approach they call “catalytic sunsetting" — and share three strategies that can help any funder exit with purpose and power.
- Categories
- Investing, Social Enterprise
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