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NextThought Monday: From Job-Takers to Changemakers – Nurturing Entrepreneurship, Social Innovation in Higher Ed
A few weeks ago, the Ashoka U Exchange conference brought together 500 students, faculty, and staff as well as social entrepreneurs to connect and nurture collaboration for instilling a culture of entrepreneurship and social innovation in higher education. Ashoka U identifies and selects pioneer campuses and supports establishing campus change teams.
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- Education
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Reflections On Microfinance: Past, Present and Future
Microfinance institutions depended on very low default rates coupled with rapid growth to provide adequate investor returns. Aligning loan officer incentives with repayment rates and customer service may have helped microfinance institutions become more customer centric.
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- Social Enterprise
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- microfinance
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Big Idea: Why Hands-On Regulation of Mobile Money Could Be Dangerous
There’s a very simple imperative driving the tariff structure and every other decision that determines access to mobile money: cost recovery. This is more than a cold-hearted calculation by mobile network operators’ accountants. If rural mobile money agents, who generally operate as independent contractors, cannot profit from this role, there will be no rural agents and no mobile money service.
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- Technology, Telecommunications
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The Big Idea: Taking Mobile Money Forward
The excitement of mobile money has been dampened by an inability of deployments to take hold outside a handful of successful markets. Driving the enthusiasm forward is the opportunity to bridge the gap between one billion people in emerging markets who have mobile phones but no bank account. On Tuesday, McKinsey & Company released a report “Mobile money: Getting to scale in emerging markets” seeking to cut through this excitement and identify critical success factors for implementation.
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- Technology, Telecommunications
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Learning From the Past, Looking Ahead: Highlights From Day 2 of the Harvard Social Enterprise Conference
“We really are at a crossroads,” The Economist’s Matt Bishop observed at the opening of the second day of Harvard’s Social Enterprise Conference. Bishop struck a theme for the day’s speakers: We’ve reached a point in time to rethink how markets work, and how more people can share in the benefits of the global economy.
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- Social Enterprise
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NexThought Monday, Guest Post: Facing the Challenges of BoP Housing in Brazil
Despite a commendable 50 percent reduction in extreme poverty levels since 2003, a cohesive low income housing strategy to eliminate an officially defined deficit of 6.7 million is severely lagging. We believe the Fez Tá Pronto Construction System presents a genuine and very necessary globally applicable paradigm shift.
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- Uncategorized
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How ‘Toil-o-preneurs’ Are Scaling Sanitation Solutions
Nearly 50 percent of India’s urban poor do not have access to clean toilets. With increasing migration to cities like Mumbai and Delhi, the pressure on public sanitation facilities has been immense. Shramik Sanitation Systems (3S), one of the early social enterprises that looked at sanitation in a holistic manner, provides community toilets in urban environments of India.
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- Health Care
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Unlocking Pakistan’s Enterprise Potential
The criticisms of Pakistan’s volatility are not without merit; the roses are more the thorny than plain variety. But I launched my company, Invest2Innovate (i2i) in fall 2011 because because I believe strongly in the potential of untapped markets like Pakistan, 66 percent of the population lives at the bottom of the pyramid, under $2 a day.
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- Social Enterprise