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NextThought Monday: Market, Government and Finding Synergies Between the Two
It’s easy to let advocacy - the process of scaling a solution through policy change - slip into the distance and focus on the market-based approach to scale. Social change has swung toward the market-based approach to scale and largely lost sight of the other method, which involves those sometimes taboo words: institutions, lobbying, and policy.
- Categories
- Environment
- Tags
- scale
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Creating Demand With Social Marketing: ColaLife’s Approach
Too often ventures forget they need endeavor to create demand for the products they offer in BoP markets. ColaLife is a rare example, as it thought this through this early in the design phase. Fitting into the unused spaced between crated bottles, ColaLife’s "AidPods" contain Anti-Diarrhea Kits (ADKs) for home use by mothers and caregivers.
- Categories
- Health Care, Social Enterprise
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What Global Development Needs to Make an iPhone? Start With Storytelling
Esther Duflo. Abhijit Bhanerjee. Dean Karlan. These are household names in global development thanks to their leadership for more evidence-based project design and implementation. Here’s another name: Marc Maxson, a consultant with GlobalGiving who helped create and implement its Storytelling Project, which goes beyond eliminating selection bias.
- Categories
- Impact Assessment, Social Enterprise
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The Pyramid Within the Pyramid: Segmenting the BoP Affordable Housing Market
A new arrival to a slum and a rickshaw driver living in a slum both are defined as BoP. But the differences between them are as vast as night and day. How can they all be treated the same when it comes to delivering products and services? Since Ashoka launched the Housing for All initiative in 2008, it’s clear the BoP market is far more complex.
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- Uncategorized
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Finding Value in Waste
As the number one exporter of Brazil nuts, Bolivia cultivates approximately 20,000 tons a year. Only 0.8 percent of the Brazil nuts are exported with their shell; the rest are cracked and their nutshells are discarded as waste. But the founders of PelletBol, developed a method to compress the Brazil nutshells into pellets as a source of biofuel.
- Categories
- Health Care
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Housing for All Series: Sizing Up the Affordable Housing Deficit
The second article of the month-long series on Housing for All in partnership with Ashoka, examines the magnitude of the challenge, and its implications for higher education and certification for construction trades at all levels and skill fields: including technology, alternative building materials, and better planning/infrastructure needs.
- Categories
- Uncategorized
- Tags
- housing
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Social Entrepreneurship Coming Full Circle, at Columbia’s Social Enterprise Conference
This year’s Columbia Social Enterprise Conference, on the topic of "Social Innovation in a Networked WorId," left me almost certain that the social entrepreneurship movement is currently witnessing such a full circle moment on several fronts, most notably, when it comes to our collective understanding of what a "networked world" means.
- Categories
- Social Enterprise
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Technology Plus Humanity – An Equation for Social Collaboration
At the 2011 Columbia Social Enterprise Conference panel last week, 3 social enterprise managers pondered technology’s role in the social sector today and how it advances philanthropy. A theme throughout the panel was the importance of incorporating the human experience into the technology, a potential key to unlocking a surge in donor activity.
- Categories
- Social Enterprise, Technology
