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A Roadmap to Food Security: Linking Geodata with Financial Inclusion to Support Smallholders
Smallholder farmers produce a staggering 70 percent of the world’s food, making them essential to food security. Geodata applications have been shown to improve these farmers’ yields and even boost their financial access – one of the main obstacles to increasing production. To help tap into these benefits, NpM’s Innovator’s Challenge brought together 17 tech companies with geodata-based solutions for smallholder financial inclusion. NpM director Josien Sluijs discusses the winning companies, and the broader potential of geodata-based innovation.
- Categories
- Agriculture, Finance, Social Enterprise, Technology
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Data That Does the Work: What Acumen Has Learned About Enterprise Feedback Loops
When it comes to the litany of obstacles keeping enterprises from growing, capital – or lack of it – tends to get the most attention. But access to data from customers, operations and staff may be a close second. The key to addressing data deserts is helping companies build a data-informed culture from the start, writes Chris Bullard, who leads post-investment and value creation strategy for Acumen. Bullard draws lessons from the impact investor’s Lean Data initiative.
- Categories
- Impact Assessment, Investing, Social Enterprise
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Boycott Myanmar: An Open Letter to the Microfinance Community
In response to global events, microfinance has quickly ramped up its focus on refugees. But when those refugees are the Rohingya – the Muslim minority being expelled from Myanmar (and the world’s latest victims of genocide) – this new focus raises some difficult questions, says Daniel Rozas. Why isn’t anyone in the sector talking about the unspeakable atrocities being conducted and condoned in one of the fastest-growing microfinance markets in the world? “There is no way around it: When we work in Myanmar, we are complicit in ethnic cleansing,” Rozas says, in a bold call for a country-wide boycott.
- Categories
- Finance
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Electrifying Transportation: Can This Innovative Financing Model Make Electric Buses a Global Reality?
Electrifying transportation at scale is critical to fighting climate change and urban pollution. And with their affordable battery costs and lower fuel and maintenance expenses, transit buses present an excellent business case for electrification. So what is preventing the rapid deployment of electric buses worldwide? Clean Energy Works founder Holmes Hummel discusses the main barrier to adoption – and an innovative financing solution that could turn things around.
- Categories
- Energy, Environment, Investing, Transportation
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NB Quick Takes: Polman’s Out at Unilever – Let the Legacy Debate Begin!
In case you hadn't heard: Paul Polman is retiring as CEO of Unilever at the end of the year. Perhaps no other executive has been as closely associated with corporate social responsibility as Polman, who put social impact at the forefront of his agenda. That's not to say all of his initiatives were successful, nor were they without detractors – his retirement is sparking lots of discussion about his approach and its effectiveness at Unilever, not to mention its influence across the business world. We've gathered some early Twitter reactions in this post.
- Categories
- Social Enterprise, Uncategorized
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The Donor-Funded Dilemma: What’s Stopping Emerging Countries from Developing Private Markets for Contraceptives?
In sub-Saharan Africa, the private sector provides family planning solutions to almost 40 percent of women. But that isn’t the case in Malawi, a country that’s long been dominated by donor-funded commodities. Erika Beidelman and Andrea Bare at the William Davidson Institute explore Malawi's family planning landscape, highlighting five factors that may be limiting the private sector’s involvement – issues that may apply to other countries with histories of donor-funded healthcare.
- Categories
- Health Care
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Authentic Storytelling Can Boost a Social Enterprise’s Development – This Tool Can Help
When promoting their businesses, most social entrepreneurs naturally focus on talking about their successes. But though their instinct is often to minimize or ignore their enterprise's setbacks, this can actually be a mistake, says Barbara Börner, a consultant for social entrepreneurs and nonprofit organizations. She explores how telling the stories behind these challenges can raise awareness of a social business among potential investors, customers and other stakeholders – and she shares a free tool that can help entrepreneurs develop more effective storytelling skills.
- Categories
- Social Enterprise
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Inexpensive Impact: The Case for Frugal Innovations
Over 4 billion people around the world lack necessities like food, water, energy, health care and housing. This represents not only a major social challenge but a major market, as low-income consumers have an annual purchasing capacity of US $5 trillion. Rajat Chabba and Sheena Raikundalia at Intellecap explore how entrepreneurs are developing innovative, frugal products to meet these customers’ needs – and why an ecosystem approach is needed to help them scale their solutions.
- Categories
- Technology
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