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MobiPrize: Moving Minds, Moving the Urban Poor
If you are a social entrepreneur who has an innovative and replicable solution to local and global transportation challenges, you are eligible to win the MobiPrize: US $5,000 and a trip to Rio+20 (the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development, June 20-22, in Rio de Janeiro) and top-notch mentorship sessions with global experts in sectors relevant to transportation, livable and sustainable communities, business and social enterprise.
- Categories
- Technology, Transportation
- Tags
- transportation
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So You Want to Start a Social Enterprise? 10 Legal Questions Founders Should Ask Themselves and Their Partners First
As a corporate lawyer working at the intersection of start-up space and social enterprise sectors, I often find myself assisting co-founders in structuring relationships. The conversations are inherently complex; so here 10 questions I would advise founders and partners ask one another before launching a social enterprise.
- Categories
- Social Enterprise
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A Wish for Sharing: Why Social Entrepreneurs Don’t Need A Bottled Genie to Gain
More often than not, entrepreneurs who share the same mission – ending energy poverty, hesitate to share resources, even if we all benefit. What are we afraid of? Is it the fear that all our hard work simply paved the way for someone else to get credit for lifting a billion villagers out of energy poverty? Or maybe it’s the bucks we were planning to make while perusing our lofty goal?
- Categories
- Energy, Social Enterprise
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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.
- Categories
- 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.
- Categories
- Social Enterprise
- Tags
- 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.
- Categories
- 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.
- Categories
- 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.
- Categories
- Social Enterprise
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