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Making Waste Pay: The Keys to Sustaining Paying Customers in Solid Waste Management
Despite growing discourse around the revenue potential of waste to wealth — i.e., reimagining waste as a valuable resource — profitability in municipal solid waste management remains low in India and other low- and middle-income countries. As Vishwanath Varma, Archana Masih, Diksha Rana and Ashish Kapil at Waste Warriors Society argue, this challenge has led to a growing focus on collecting user fees from households — yet that goal is easier said than done. They share analysis based on Waste Warriors Society’s user fee records and customer surveys, which reveals key insights on how to retain paying customers in solid waste management and other user fee-based models of social entrepreneurship.
- Categories
- Social Enterprise, WASH
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Flipping the Script on Investor Feedback: A New Survey Gives Entrepreneurs a Platform to Assess — And Influence — Their Impact Investors’ Practices
There have been a number of critiques of impact investing in recent months, targeting several common investor practices. Yet as Yaquta Fatehi at the William Davidson Institute (WDI) points out, these appraisals rarely come from entrepreneurs, who often receive feedback from investors, but typically lack the ability to respond in kind. She shares a new research initiative by Acumen and WDI called "Founders in Focus: The State of Impact Capital" that aims to change this dynamic: Instead of focusing on what entrepreneurs need to do differently to attract investment, it invites founders to capture their experiences with investors — both the good and the bad — in a structured manner that can spark actual change in the investing ecosystem. The survey is open to founders and C-suite executives across Africa, Asia and Latin America who have raised capital in 2024-2025: Respond by June 26 to add your views.
- Categories
- Investing, Social Enterprise
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How to Support Rural Social Enterprises: Three Key Learnings from a Field Visit in Malaysia
While global media coverage of the social enterprise sector often focuses on countries like India and Kenya, Malaysia remains relatively underrepresented in these conversations. Yet as Sreevas Sahasranamam at the University of Glasgow explains, the country has developed rich models of social innovation deeply rooted in indigenous knowledge systems, ecological stewardship and local resilience. He shares three key learnings from five community-led ventures, each of which demonstrates how practitioners and policymakers can best support rural social enterprises — not only in Malaysia, but globally.
- Categories
- Social Enterprise
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High Expectations Require New Approaches: What Africa’s Social Innovators Need to Scale — And Why Support Systems Must Evolve
Social entrepreneurs are tackling some of Africa's biggest development challenges. Yet many struggle to scale beyond their initial promise, despite heightened expectations to deliver both jobs and social impact. And as Amabelle Nwakanma, Akolade Oladipupo, Abdullahi Ibrahim and Chukwuemeka Okeke at LEAP Africa explain, though accelerators, incubators and fellowships have proliferated across the continent to support these innovators, it's unclear if these programs are actually aligned with their current needs. They share insights from a study LEAP Africa conducted, with support from the William Davidson Institute, to better understand where current enterprise support models succeed, and where they fall short.
- Categories
- Investing, Social Enterprise
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When Competitors Collaborate: How Eight Impact-First Investors Came Together to Confront the Valley of Death
The “Valley of Death” — the gap between early-stage capital and the scale-ready financing that social enterprises need to grow — is a perennial challenge in development finance. But according to Brigit Helms at Miller Center for Global Impact, investors rarely slow down enough to unpack why it persists, and what role they can play in closing it. She discusses the initial findings of a unique collaborative study conducted by eight leading impact investors — organizations that are both peers and competitors — who each contributed individual fund data to identify the cost of maintaining their impact-first models. As Helms argues, this expense is not an inefficiency to optimize away, but rather the true cost of closing the Valley of Death.
- Categories
- Investing, Social Enterprise
- Tags
- impact investing, research
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Three Questions for Five African Businesses: Insights from Sankalp Africa Summit’s ‘Enterprise Showcase’
The recent Sankalp Africa Summit featured an “Enterprise Showcase” where up-and-coming African businesses shared information about their work and missions. NextBillion interviewed five of these entrepreneurs and company representatives, asking each of them three questions: What are the main challenges you’re facing in running your business? What kind of support would help you overcome these challenges? And what’s one thing you wish funders understood about your business needs? Their responses reveal some of the innovative approaches and key issues that are emerging in Africa’s vibrant ecosystem of small and medium-sized enterprises.
- Categories
- Agriculture, Energy, Environment, Social Enterprise, Transportation, WASH
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When Uncertainty Becomes Structural: Entrepreneurship Support Organisations as Ecosystem Infrastructure in a New Fiscal Reality
Over the past year, the global development sector has changed at a speed and scale that would have seemed unlikely even two years ago. According to long-time development consultants Stephen Hunt and Nelson Okwonna, as funding dries up and uncertainty becomes structural, entrepreneurship support organizations (ESOs) are increasingly providing the collective functions that were once financed, governed and sustained through donor- and publicly funded programs. They discuss the implications of this shift for ESOs and entrepreneurs, exploring what it reveals about the key needs of entrepreneurship ecosystems — and about how ESOs must evolve to meet those needs.
- Categories
- Social Enterprise
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The Impact Sector is Confusing Satisfaction with Impact: Rethinking the Growing Reliance on Perception Surveys
Measurement standards in the impact sector have shifted toward perception surveys — i.e., forms that ask individuals to rate their personal experience with a program or organization — to quantify success. But as Juan Taborda Burgos, Jorge Bouchot and Miranda Hansen at Root Capital argue, perception-based metrics can mask a program’s ineffectiveness, potentially leading organizations to scale interventions that do not work. They share insights from a recent Root Capital report that reveal the downsides of relying solely on perception data, and offer four actionable principles that can help leaders navigate the pressure to demonstrate impact — while avoiding costly mistakes.
- Categories
- Agriculture, Investing, Social Enterprise
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