Guest Articles

Friday
October 30
2015

NextBillion Editor

Weekly Roundup 10-30-15: A New NextBillion is Coming Next Week

We hope you can forgive this very abbreviated weekly roundup. See, we’re sort of in the middle of something: A new website.

Yes, next week we’re launching a redesigned and reimagined NextBillion.net. We’re excited about the possibilities and potential for the new site, which we will unveil in the coming days.

We’ll have much more to say about how you can use, interact with and contribute to NextBillion next week. Between then and now, we’re making sure the bugs have vacated the online premises and all of our contributors’ posts have made the journey from the old site to the new.

In the meantime, here are a few brief thoughts on the week’s social enterprise and investing developments.

 

 

A Crowdfunding Breakthrough – What Will it Mean for Social Enterprise?

On Friday morning, after a three-year delay, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission approved equity crowdfunding rules allowing small businesses to sell shares to the general public. This opportunity was previously limited to wealthy investors, and there are still some limits (tied to annual income and net worth) on how much regular folks can invest. But once they officially go into effect next year, the new rules promise to open the door to a potentially vast new funding opportunity for small businesses – and social enterprises are no exception. Expect to hear much more about this in the months ahead.

 

FI2020 Week Prepares to Launch

Our friends at Accion, along with a wide array of partners from across the financial world, are gearing up to launch FI2020 Week on Monday. The week will promote global conversations focused on bringing quality financial inclusion to more people, especially excluded groups, through multi-stakeholder events hosted by partner organizations, aimed at identifying “the most significant action steps to advance financial inclusion in their own contexts.” Check out the FI2020 website fordetails of events both on and offline, and follow #FI2020 on Twitter for the latest updates.

 

Quotable

“… it takes the entrepreneur to see how to shift that status quo. Think of Larry Page and Sergey Brin. There’s this Internet full of information, and yet there’s no ability for the ordinary person to search out and retrieve what she or he wants to know.

They develop a search engine, Google. The rest is history, right? The difference is that the social entrepreneur also understands that this equilibrium, this status quo, is affecting some marginalized population in some very significant way, and that population very rarely has the power or the means to effect the transition on its own. Enter the social entrepreneur.”

That’s Sally Sally Osberg, president and CEO of the Skoll Foundation in an interview with the PBS News Hour on her new book, “Getting Beyond Better: How Social Entrepreneurship Works” which she co-authored with Roger L. Martin. Check out the full video interview here.

 

Reforming toward better business

The World Bank’s 13th Doing Business report is out, ranking 189 economies for “ease of doing business.” For the record, Singapore’s No. 1 and Eritrea’s last (but with an improved rating from the previous report). The Mail & Guardian Africa provides some quick glimpses into the 340-page report, i.e. that “85 developing economies, the majority of which are in Africa, implemented 169 business reforms during the past year, compared with 154 reforms the previous year”; and that Uganda, Kenya, Mauritania, Senegal and Benin showed the most improvement.

 

Image credit: marco18678 via Flickr

Categories
Social Enterprise
Tags
financial inclusion, impact investing, social enterprise