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Industry Emerging from the Rubble in Haiti: How building skills locally through community networks can create sustainable businesses
Throughout the street markets in Port-au-Prince, a growing corps of entrepreneurs – mostly women – is helping the fuel-efficient stove market take root, showing how empowered local businesses, even in the poorest and most difficult-to-navigate environments, can create sustainable enterprises that employ and train local workers.
- Categories
- Education, Health Care
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Social impact measurement for business: Vision is good, (joint) action is better
In a new report, the World Business Council for Sustainable Development is calling on organizations, experts and practitioners to join them in developing a harmonized approach for businesses to measure and value their interactions with society: A Social Capital Protocol.
- Categories
- Impact Assessment, Social Enterprise
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Twitter Top 10: 6-7-2015
Have you read "the biggest story in the history of capitalism"? Do you have any ideas about how to change corporate behavior forever? Can you name "the new venture capital"? We ?have to admit, we had to answer "no" to all these questions. That is, until we visited the Twittersphere this week in search of our Top 10 list.
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- Health Care, Social Enterprise
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Weekly Roundup – Nothing Random About It: ‘Graduation’ programs for the ultra-poor get validation through randomized control trials
Little research has been done into the long-term effectiveness of "graduation" programs to eliminate extreme poverty. But a big three-year study of 21,000 ultra-poor people in six countries appears to validate not only the approach, but also the return on investment.
- Categories
- Education
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Gender Mobility: A deeper dive into female-friendly business, economic programs harnessing cell technology
Women are 21 percent less likely to own a phone than a man in developing nations.The mobile development community is aware of this gender gap and has kickstarted a number of programs to help. Global Envision profiles a few of the mobile providers that are ahead of the game with female-targeted programs.
- Categories
- Technology
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Into Acumen’s Latin American Expansion: Patient capital fund hopes to deploy $8 million in 10 enterprises in Colombia and Peru in five years
Earlier this month, the philanthropic impact investing group Acumen announced it would be expanding to Latin America. We caught up with Acumen’s Latin America Director Virgilio Barco about Acumen’s long-term social sector and portfolio goals, and the state of impact investing across Latin America, which may have gotten a slow start compared to other regions of the world, but seems to be making up ground at a rapid pace.
- Categories
- Agriculture, Social Enterprise
- Tags
- impact investing
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Weekly Roundup: Natural Born Entrepreneurs: Why veterans make great businesspeople – and how the U.S. could help them succeed
As the U.S. salutes its veterans this Memorial Day, one of their under-appreciated contributions to the country is drawing increasing attention: their affinity for entrepreneurship. We discuss the reasons behind this phenomenon and the ways the public and private sectors are supporting it, in this roundup.
- Categories
- Social Enterprise
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The First Commandment of Social Impact Generation: We need a better understanding of the nuances of creating social impact
The first commandment for companies, organizations and investors that aim to generate social impact is: "Thou shalt adopt mechanisms to measure it." Unfortunately, this practice is not yet common. And when it does occur, it often focuses narrowly on counting the total number of units distributed or beneficiaries supported, rather than on understanding the nuances of the benefits being transferred.
- Categories
- Impact Assessment
