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Equipping a New Era of Global Development
Sometimes it can feel like NGOs, social businesses and big development aid institutions are in competition with one another to improve the world. But in an increasingly complex world, we should view violent extremist organizations, such as ISIS, as development competitors. This perspective was a running theme – but one of several facing social entrepreneurs and global development leaders at all levels – discussed at Devex World.
- Categories
- Health Care, Impact Assessment
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Mobile Data Has the Answers, But First, We Need to Ask the Right Questions
I’ve realized that when guiding social enterprises, nonprofits and international NGOs to begin using data, it’s helpful to focus on a key, sometimes obvious point: data has to actually answer a critical business or programmatic question. Mobile data collection for the sake of collecting data isn’t enough.
- Categories
- Energy, Impact Assessment, Social Enterprise, Technology
- Tags
- research
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Evaluation that Creates Value for Participants: A Client-Centric Approach
Too often, the process of collecting data to evaluate impact, regardless of the intent, feels extractive to the research participants. Extractive industries are those that obtain natural resources from the earth without provision for the potential negative consequences of extraction. Similarly, some evaluations extract data from disadvantaged communities without providing any benefit in return. How Root Capital has taken a more client-centric approach.
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- Agriculture, Impact Assessment
- Tags
- research
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How Your Company Can Become a Social Innovator
The World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on Social innovation defines social innovation as “the application of innovative, practical, sustainable, market-based approaches to benefit society in general, and low-income or under-served populations in particular." Traditionally associated with social entrepreneurs, this tool is increasingly being adopted by business. This is a trend to be welcomed, supported and replicated as companies – big or small, multinational or national – can contribute to taking the practice of social innovation to a significantly larger scale.
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- Impact Assessment, Social Enterprise
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Consent as Conversation: Lean research in vulnerable settings
Whether research unfolds in Harvard Square or a remote village, in our home communities or in a context with which we are newly familiar, we hope to question our assumptions on agency, power, risk, and vulnerability. In this post, the authors focus on making informed consent a truly meaningful process, particularly when conducting research in vulnerable settings.
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- Education, Impact Assessment
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NexThought Monday – Lean Research: Introducing a Movement for Change
When used as a guiding framework, the principles of lean research have the potential to improve the quality and accuracy of the data gathered by social enterprises and other organizations, increase the usefulness of the data and enable the research process to generate benefits for communities, including improved relationships with local stakeholders and greater access to data for decision-making.
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- Impact Assessment
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Announcing Our New Partnership with ImpactSpace
We have long been on the lookout for a media partner that's creating deep and useful market data for the companies we cover on NextBillion. That's why today we're thrilled to announce a media partnership with our friends at ImpactSpace, a new open data platform created to fill the information gap in impact investing.
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- Impact Assessment, Investing
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NexThought Monday: Impact Investing ‘Skeptics Have Been Defeated’ – Our Q&A With LeapFrog CEO
LeapFrog Investments' portfolio of companies make insurance and financial services their business, and their clientele are those who earn $10 or less a day. With a recent investment from development organization OPIC, LeapFrog has raised more than $1 billion. In an interview with NextBillion, CEO Andrew Kuper details LeapFrog's trajectory, the shakiness of emerging markets, and the challenges of reaching consumers for whom insurance can provide both a safety net and an economic springboard.
- Categories
- Health Care, Impact Assessment, Investing
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