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Analyzing Menstrual Health and Hygiene Through a Market-Based Lens: A New Report Assesses the Landscape in the Global South
Around the world, roughly 1.8 billion people menstruate — and over 300 million are menstruating on any given day. Yet as Lucie Klarsfeld, Jeanne Charbit and Louise Berthault at Hystra explain, menstrual health and hygiene (MHH) is an overlooked topic in global development, and there's a lack of research about the market for menstrual products in the Global South. They share findings from a new Hystra report that addresses this knowledge gap by assessing the market for MHH solutions in eight emerging economies.
- Categories
- WASH
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Scale vs. Systems Change: Three Ways Impact-Led Organisations Can Achieve Both
The social impact sector is increasingly recognizing that scaling a solution does not always result in lasting change. According to Emma Colenbrander at Spring Impact, Nell Lemaistre at 100x Impact Accelerator, and Kasthuri Soni and Sharmi Surianarain at Harambee, this realization may seem to force businesses and organizations to choose between scaling their own work and attempting to change the broader system. But they explore how these two goals can actually be pursued simultaneously — if organizations leverage the right kind of funding, mindsets and support.
- Categories
- Social Enterprise
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Innovations in Last-Mile Delivery: How Automation Can Revolutionize the Industry in Africa
Last-mile delivery is the crucial link that connects businesses to customers in Africa’s rapidly growing economies. As Samuel Odeloye at Motions and Demilade Onajobi at RoadPreppers Technologies explain, it powers major industries like retail, e-commerce and manufacturing — but it's plagued by inefficiencies that are slowly killing the competitiveness of these businesses. They explore how Motions uses automation to address these issues — an approach they believe can transform last-mile delivery in Africa.
- Categories
- Technology, Telecommunications, Transportation
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Accelerating Systems Change: An Innovative Accelerator Shows How Funders Can Amplify Social Enterprises’ Impact by Transforming Their Funding Model
There’s a growing belief that lasting solutions to today's complex challenges will require fundamental changes to the systems that underlie these issues. According to Celia Sanchez-Valladares Barahona, Stella Printezi and Lucía Tornero at Ashoka, social entrepreneurs are well-placed to accelerate systems change, but the funding models they rely on may end up prolonging the issues they're trying to solve. They explain how funders can transform these increasingly outdated models to better support long-term, systemic change, as illustrated by an accelerator co-created by Ashoka and IKEA Social Entrepreneurship.
- Categories
- Investing, Social Enterprise
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Applying a Gender Lens to Agribusiness: A Pathway to Economic Empowerment for Women
Women farmers in emerging markets face many gender-specific challenges when they attempt to participate equally in agricultural supply chains, employment opportunities and distribution networks. As Cait Nordehn and Bwile Musonda at TechnoServe explain, agribusinesses are well-positioned to address these challenges — if these firms can improve the gender inclusivity of their sourcing, operations and distribution. They discuss TechnoServe’s experiences deploying its Gender-Responsive Diagnostic tool with agribusinesses to identify opportunities for greater gender inclusion.
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- Agriculture
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A DIY Approach to M&E: Four Tips to Overcome the Complexities of Monitoring and Evaluation
Most social enterprises and non-profits recognize that high-quality data and evidence can help them improve performance, attract more funding, and understand — and eventually increase — their impact. Yet as Mia Jeong and Linh Vo at IDinsight point out, these organizations often face financial constraints in creating and sustaining effective monitoring and evaluation (M&E) systems. They share some simple but effective ways to create these systems on a limited budget, by taking a do-it-yourself (DIY) approach to monitoring and evaluation.
- Categories
- Impact Assessment, Social Enterprise
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The New Face of Emerging Market Outsourcing: Why African Talent is Primed to Reshape Global Business Processes
The global labor market has been transformed by the COVID-19 pandemic’s normalization of remote work and the resulting “great resignation,” in which high-skilled employees in developed markets have left stagnant positions in favor of more flexible, engaging jobs. As Orinola Gbadebo-Smith at Hugo Technologies explains, this has resulted in a talent shortage in sectors like business services and information technology, leading corporations to outsource increasingly more complex tasks to developing countries where workers have acquired the skills to perform them. He explores why young workers in Africa are particularly well-placed to capitalize on this shift.
- Categories
- Technology
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A Blueprint for Closing the SDG Financing Gap: How to Raise $290 Billion in 12 Months to Tackle the World’s Biggest Problems
As of 2020, the annual SDG financing gap for developing countries stood at $4.2 trillion — up from $2.5 trillion pre-pandemic. And according to Chris Clubb at Convergence Blended Finance, though private capital is crucial to closing this gap, the $240 billion in annual public development finance only mobilizes around $44 billion in private investment, which covers just 1% of these countries' climate and SDG investment needs. He explores the core elements of Convergence's Action Plan for Climate and SDG Investment Mobilization, which shows how a small amount of public and philanthropic funding can catalyze private investment to more than double total climate and SDG financing in developing economies.
- Categories
- Environment, Investing
