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Re-evaluating Impact Evaluation: Why solely focusing on financials is flawed and other key points from a recent workshop
Organizations struggle to develop robust impact evaluations. If poorly designed and executed, an evaluation can result in misleading conclusions and waste precious resources. A recent workshop hosted by the Aspen Network of Development Entrepreneurs focused on outcomes data collection and analysis. Anyone concerned with social impact measurement, will want to check out these key points.
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- Education, Impact Assessment, Investing
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Measuring Impact – Do Non-Profits Do It Better?: Reflections on Dasra’s Philanthropy Week
The number of millionaires in India is growing, and their interest in philanthropy along with the growth of corporate foundations in India means that the social sector will receive an infusion of capital. Born from an era of private sector growth these new funders will likely bring high expectations for scale and impact to the table when assessing social initiatives. Dasra’s Philanthropy Week, is a unique forum in India to compare a number of social enterprises to the standards of these high impact philanthropists.
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- Impact Assessment, Social Enterprise
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Where are the poor? : Lessons to share from BRAC’s poverty ‘graduation program’
In the countries that have some incarnation of the “graduation program” targeting the ultra-poor that BRAC began first experimenting with in the 1990s, communities themselves are also grappling with the question: Where are the poor? It’s a question that large scale aid agencies, impact investors, social enterprises, multinational companies and others ask on a regular basis. So, we thought those stakeholders and others would benefit from learning a bit more about our process.
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- Impact Assessment, Social Enterprise
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Lessons in Growth From Vindhya’s En-ABLED Staff : 90% of the BPO company’s workers are physically disabled
In March 2011, Accion’s Frontier Investments Group and Michael & Susan Dell Foundation invested in Vindhya, which services a customer base of mainly IT and microfinance companies with data management and processing solutions from its state-of-the-art center in Bangalore. Vindhya’s first client was Wipro, one of India’s largest companies, and it’s still a mainstay. What makes Vindhya different, is its differently abled work force.
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- Impact Assessment, Social Enterprise
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The PeaceTXT Proposition: Stopping violence with an SMS
PeaceTXT: a global mash-up of social innovators, software designers and information technologists (to name a few) collaborating on mobile technology’s potential to prevent violence. The collaboration, spearheaded by PopTech, is aiming to create the first broadly available tested methodologies and technical platforms for using mobile phones to disrupt violence and engender more peaceful communities.
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- Impact Assessment, Technology, Telecommunications
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Impact Bonds: Boon or Boondoggle? Before We Hop on the Bandwagon, Let’s Scan the Road Ahead
Although there are many benefits to impact bonds – make no mistake – they are complicated to implement. Because they are new tools and because it is in the interests of all parties involved to reduce risk, only strong programs with proven statistical success are likely to be supported by a social or development impact bond.
- Categories
- Impact Assessment
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NexThought Monday: European Impact Investing – Poised to Grow or Largely Irrelevant?
Last year, Ashoka’s Germany Director, Felix Oldenburg, took on – and took apart – impact investing as we currently know it, challenging it on a few specific points. Now, we share a telephonic debate between Oldenburg and Johannes Weber, founder of Social Venture Fund, the first pan-European social venture capital fund, who contests Oldenburg’s assumptions to push forward the dialogue on our much-discussed, much-anticipated new space of impact investing.
- Categories
- Impact Assessment, Social Enterprise
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NextThought Monday: Helping the BoP Design its Own Way Out of Poverty
Daniel Altman is an economist, writer and teacher with a deep commitment to international development. He’s had a revelation about the power of consumer products to create markets from the inside out, and he’s doing something about it.
Emerging Design Centers (EDCs) is a for-profit enterprise that puts cutting-edge design tools in the hands of the poor.- Categories
- Impact Assessment