-
Gender Roles in Green and Inclusive Business – Replicating Old Patterns or Breaking New Ground?
The green economy has the potential to empower women – but risks replicating old gender patterns of the ‘brown’ economy, says a new DCED / GIZ study. How does the case look for social entrepreneurship and impact investing?
- Categories
- Agriculture, Education, Environment, Social Enterprise
-
Achieving Sustainable Energy for All Hinges on International Cooperation and Leadership
This year was designated the International Year of Sustainable Energy for All by the UN General Assembly to raise awareness and promote the three objectives: clean energy access, energy efficiency, and renewable energy. 2012 is also the year of the Rio+20 UN Conference on Sustainable Development, to be held in late June. The moment is ripe for action, and lofty goals have been set, but where to begin?
- Categories
- Energy, Environment
-
Tools of the Trade: Building a Robust Deal Pipeline of Impact Companies in Emerging Economies – Part 3
What are the biggest lessons learned when it comes to finding high-quality companies in emerging markets? I posed this final question to our virtual panel of impact investing leaders who recommended teaming up with other investors to providing appropriate financing, making sure to select companies with a core social/environmental mission, embracing creativity, and embedding capacity building into the process.
- Categories
- Environment, Social Enterprise
- Tags
- impact investing
-
Housing Series: Sustainable Communities Generating Sustainable Habitats
We began Echale a Tu Casa over 25 years ago as a nonprofit to help low-income Mexican families improve home safety, health and hygiene conditions. Realizing that philanthropy would not permit us to have much of an impact on these living conditions, we created a social enterprise built on an integrated system of savings, credit and subsidies.
- Categories
- Environment, Health Care, WASH
-
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
-
The Doughnut Hole in Sustainable Finance
Despite the recent upsurge in attention to "social," "impact," and "clean tech" investing, there is still a structural gap ? a doughnut hole ? in sustainable finance. But this also means that there is a huge opportunity for visionary financiers to invent the new investment categories and asset classes needed to fill this gap.
- Categories
- Environment, Technology
-
SOCAP11: Waste Management that Works
Parag Gupta, founder and CEO of Waste Ventures recently told me that urban India produces a mound of garbage that weighs twice as much as the Empire State Building every week. In that big pile of trash, Gupta and his team identified a glowing opportunity for economic, social, and environmental impact.
- Categories
- Environment, Health Care
-
Serving the Trillion Dollar BoP Energy Market
Not everyone wants to spend their weekend in a conference room discussing challenges like benchmarking low-cost solar home lighting systems, finding the right business model, and raising the seed capital. But for the 11 social entrepreneurs gathered with experts and the CSTS Clean Energy Sector team, there’s no place else we would have rather been.
- Categories
- Energy, Environment
Subscribe to Our Weekly Newsletter, "NextBillion Notes"
Published each Wednesday, our e-newsletter features NextBillion's latest original articles, along with a selection of news, jobs, bizdev opportunities and events from our recent coverage — and regular conference ticket giveaways.
We respect your privacy. Your information is safe and will never be shared.
Don't miss out. Subscribe today.