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Boosting the Social Impact of Food Tourism: The Keys to a Collaborative Model
Héctor Gerardo Ibarra talks about social entrepreneurship a lot – sometimes to children as young as second grade. He helps them understand the concept by identifying a specific local problem and a solution involving something they already like doing. The same can be said of Ruta Origen, a social enterprise he co-founded to confront unfair payment of Mexican producers, paired with a solution that involves plenty of traveling and eating. In this post, Gerardo Ibarra details a collaborative impact model that is similarly straightforward, but by no means easy.
- Categories
- Agriculture, Environment, Social Enterprise
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Climate-Proofing Poverty Graduation Programs: A New Study Explores Solutions
Imagine building a business from the ground up – only to see it literally washed away with every drought and flood due to the effects of climate change. These weather-related cycles, which disproportionately impact women, keep millions in poverty and threaten millions more. Nicole Mills with The BOMA Project and Alex Russell with the Feed the Future Innovation Lab detail a new project pairing poverty graduation programs with livestock insurance – and discuss the randomized control trial designed to see if it actually works.
- Categories
- Agriculture, Education, Impact Assessment
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Making Agritech Work for Smallholders: What Tech Companies Can Learn from Development Organizations
Agritech proponents argue that technology is the key to helping the world's 500 million smallholder farmers. Yet despite countless ‘ICT for development’ companies and projects, these solutions often fall short of their intended impacts. This raises an important question: Can the methodologies that have proven successful for many tech startups work for the complex, interrelated challenges faced by smallholders? Wouter Vink of GreenFingers argues that there's a better approach.
- Categories
- Agriculture, Social Enterprise, Technology
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Before the Handshake: How to Make Corporate-Social Enterprise Partnerships Work
At first glance, value chain partnerships between corporations and small enterprises in developing markets appear to benefit both parties: Corporations gain financially while creating social and economic benefits for low-income communities. On closer inspection, however, these partnerships' results can vary. The Clinton Giustra Enterprise Partnership and Intellecap have learned lessons from serving as intermediaries in these relationships. James Jenkin and Lindsay Clinton address the most common questions from organizations hoping to build similar partnerships.
- Categories
- Agriculture, Social Enterprise
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Meat Every Day: How a Rwandan Entrepreneur Aims to Satisfy Africa’s Changing Appetites
Some predict that, by the end of the century, 13 African cities will surpass New York City in population. As African economies grow and their citizens become more urbanized, their standards of living and meat consumption are also likely to increase. This shift will reshape the continent's agriculture industry – and entrepreneurs like Herve Tuyishime are responding. Tuyishime explains how his two interrelated businesses are helping satisfy Africans' growing appetite for meat, and bringing Rwandan farmers into the supply chain.
- Categories
- Agriculture, Social Enterprise
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Cutting Edge Agriculture: How Artificial Intelligence, Satellites and Big Data are Transforming Farmers’ Access to Finance
There are many reasons for the $450 billion global agricultural finance gap. But much of the challenge stems from lenders' inability to monitor farmers' output, estimate their income and assess their risk of default, says Ruchit G Garg of Harvesting Inc. He explores how artificial intelligence and satellites are addressing that data imbalance, helping lenders reach many of the world’s 500 million smallholder farmers for the first time.
- Categories
- Agriculture, Technology, Telecommunications
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Hardware Innovation is … Hard: How These Entrepreneurs Overcame the Challenges
Compared with the creators of app-based products, hardware-focused innovators face a much more difficult and expensive journey, says Villgro CTO Arun Venkatesan. The resources and time required to perfect hardware iterations are larger, the lack of a mature ecosystem is a problem, and the buyer is often distinctly different from the user or beneficiary. Venkatesan profiles four hardware innovators in agriculture and health care, discussing how they worked through these obstacles.
- Categories
- Agriculture, Health Care, Investing, Social Enterprise, Technology
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‘The Dumbest Waste of Time Ever’: How the Development Sector is Failing MSMEs
Low-income business owners often keep poor records and don't always keep close tabs on their profits versus expenses – a side effect of by-necessity entrepreneurship. Global development organizations naturally want to help - yet too many programs offer skills development as one-off training. According to business development consultant Donna Rosa, helping entrepreneurs create business plans only to abandon them to fend for themselves is "the dumbest waste of time ever." She explains why in this thought-provoking post.
- Categories
- Agriculture, Investing
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