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Mapping the Path to Full Financial Inclusion
When attempting to solve a complex development challenge, we often jump from creating ambitious goals to making plans, without first identifying who we need to reach with our goals, where those people reside, and what challenge and opportunities they face. That’s why one of the underappreciated keys to meeting a development goal is to draw a map - and why maps provide the theme for this year's State of the Microcredit Summit Campaign Report: Mapping Pathways out of Poverty.
- Categories
- Finance
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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.
- Categories
- Agriculture, Impact Assessment
- Tags
- research
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Weekly Roundup: Uber, DriveU, Ola and the Greedy Sharing Economy in India
In a typically eventful week in social enterprise, the "social business" buzzword grew more obsolete, and we got a reminder of the many players eager to get their slice of the “sharing economy” - especially in India. Our editors discuss these developments in this roundup.
- Categories
- Investing, Social Enterprise, Technology, Transportation
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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.
- Categories
- 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.
- Categories
- Education, Impact Assessment
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Necessity Breeds Lifesaving Invention – and a Hub to Launch More Innovation
Dr. Dayo Olakulehin, a young doctor in Lagos, Nigeria, fell asleep while manually ventilating a 5-year-old boy with breathing difficulties. That led him to invent D-Box, a cheap, portable, rechargeable ventilator – and then he helped develop a company to launch the device and other medical innovations in Africa.
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- Health Care, Social Enterprise
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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.
- Categories
- Impact Assessment
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Young Women Social Entrepreneurs Inspire Optimism in Sierra Leone
The Miller Center for Social Entrepreneurship's Global Social Benefit Institute works with passionate social entrepreneurs, whose work ranges from using drones to do last-mile distribution of medicines, to working with high school kids to help them solve problems they see in their communities. Pamela Roussos, senior director at the Miller Center, shares two women-led enterprises from their Sierra Leone workshop that stood out as especially inspiring.
- Categories
- Social Enterprise
- Tags
- academia
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