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What the IMF Mandate Means for the Poor: The organization says it’s focused on narrowing the income gap – but will this affect policy?
The International Monetary Fund is known for its multi-billion dollar bailouts of struggling countries, but the organization now says narrowing the income gap between the very poor and the very rich is a key tenet of its mission. How income inequality fits into aid packages is yet to be seen, says Isaac Otto, but it is beginning to enter into the equation.
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- Impact Assessment
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India’s Startup Focus Needs to Include Social Enterprises: How the 2014 budget can improve the ecosystem
The initial Indian budget, recently tabled by Finance Minister Arun Jaitley, has focused on startups and entrepreneurs by setting aside INR 10,000 Crores (USD $1.6 billion) in various initiatives. But it’s also essential that social enterprises and their specific funding requirements are considered.
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- Social Enterprise
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NexThought Monday: Expanding the Universe of Impact Investing: How international NGOs can access investor capital to increase their impact on a large scale
Impact investments started out as mostly start-up or early-stage investments in small but promising companies that aim for a measurable social impact. But what’s next? Zurich Insurance Group and Population Services International explore how impact investing could work for a larger universe of private investors and international NGOs.
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- Impact Assessment
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Rebuilding Haiti with Mobile Phones: How mobile data collection and management is facilitating relief efforts
Grameen Foundation originally designed TaroWorks to facilitate analysis of data gathered on mobile phones to help track poverty levels. But as Alex Counts describes it, it has evolved into a mobile-based field-force management tool used by a growing number of humanitarian groups and social enterprises - including an organization that’s using it to facilitate relief efforts in Haiti.
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- Technology, Telecommunications
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Healthy Foods and New Jobs, Part 2: Infrastructure matters
On the way to introducing a food cart vendor business in Benin, West Africa, MamaCarts has encountered all sorts of problems with sanitation, incorporation and the government. But there’s a positive spin on these infrastructure gaps: Alternative solutions do exist and people circumnavigate these difficulties on a daily basis.
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- Agriculture, Education, Health Care, Social Enterprise
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Making Impact Easier: How impact investing can put capital providers and seekers on the road to more investible deals
A growing number of financial institutions are embracing impact investing, but much work remains to be done to build a robust market. Impact Economy’s new report explores how major financial advisors and institutions could align their investments, build viable pipelines of investible deals, and make impact both commercially viable and socially transformative.
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- Impact Assessment
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Facilitating New Markets: Philanthropies are uniquely suited to fostering market-based solutions to poverty
Monitor Deloitte’s recently released Beyond the Pioneer report includes a call for organizations to step up as “industry facilitators” to help overcome key challenges to scaling market-based solutions to social problems. Based on its experience in India, the Michael & Susan Dell Foundation describes several ways philanthropies can play that role.
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- Impact Assessment
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Healthy Foods and New Jobs, Part 1: MamaCarts learns valuable lessons while launching food cart delivery service from scratch
MamaCarts began by pitching an idea at a business plan competition and culminated with receiving a 2013 Rockefeller Foundation Centennial Innovation Challenge Award. That’s all there is to starting a food cart delivery service in Benin, West Africa, right? Wrong.
- Categories
- Agriculture, Education, Health Care, Social Enterprise
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