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The Leap from Social Sector to Social Enterprise
Almost every day, I engage with professionals who are hoping to land a new type of job in a completely new discipline, region or sector. However, in our experience, you’re likely to be most successful at landing a job if you aim for roles that leverage your strengths and then seek ways to pivot into new areas of responsibility. Here are some tips for transitioning from the development, government or NGO sectors to a social business.
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- Social Enterprise
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The Personal Connection: The Value of In-Person Training for Women Business Owners
As part of his continuing series, Nathan Rauh-Bieri checks back in with participants in the year-long Vital Voices GROW Fellowship. He learned that, in a world growing more "virtual" by the day, there's still plenty of value in entrepreneurs meeting face to face.
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- Education, Social Enterprise
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Sloppy Numbers About Poor Households
Affordability – the ratio between price and household income – matters and gets insufficient attention. While there has been a huge effort to sell quality goods and services at a low price point, there's been relatively little effort to understand incomes and spending patterns in poor households.
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- Social Enterprise
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NexThought Monday: Enough With Impact; Focus on Entrepreneurs
Rather than celebrating better metrics, definitions, research and structures, we as a sector need to focus on the entrepreneurs behind each enterprise, and the motivations behind each entrepreneur.
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- Social Enterprise
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The State of Assessment: Why the ‘assess or not’ debate continues and how we can move beyond it (Part 1 of 2)
Recent debate has focused on whether businesses should assess social, economic and/or environmental impact. How did we get stuck here? In this two-part series, Heather Esper and Yaquta Kanchwala Fatehi of the William Davidson Institute explore the evolution of assessment and how to move beyond the paralysis.
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- Impact Assessment
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It Takes a Village to Build a Business – Lessons Learned From a Fintech Accelerator in Mexico
Accion Venture Lab recently teamed with Village Capital and the MasterCard Center for Inclusive Growth to launch its first-ever business accelerator. Its goal was clear: to find and assemble the 12 best early-stage fintech companies in Mexico, and help them take the leap from betas to scalable businesses. Jackie Hyland discusses lessons learned from the experience in this post.
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- Uncategorized
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Six Questions for Microfinance’s Biggest ‘Haters’
Since January, when six randomized control trials were published stating that microcredit is not a viable poverty alleviation tool, microfinance has been taking a lot of heat in the media. But though she says the backlash is partially the sector’s own fault, BRAC’s Maria May offers six questions she wishes its loudest critics would consider.
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- Impact Assessment
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Too Good to be True?: Is the Global Findex survey overstating growth in financial inclusion?
Since it was published a few weeks ago, the World Bank’s 2014 Global Findex report has made a splash in media around the world. It found that financial inclusion grew from 51 to 62 percent between 2011 and 2014, a shift that represents a total of 700 million people worldwide. But according to Daniel Rozas and David Roodman, there are reasons to be skeptical about this apparently massive growth.
- Categories
- Education, Impact Assessment
