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Scaling Without Breaking: A Practical Tool for Strengthening Health-Focused Digital Wholesalers in LMICs
Patients across low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) often use private providers for healthcare products and services, making these frontline settings a valuable pathway for increasing the availability of quality medicines and improving health outcomes in these markets. François Lepicard, Alice Magand and Guillaume Massot at Hystra, and Laura Collet at Sanofi share learnings from the Sanofi Impact Fund, supported by the Hystra team, which invests in digitally enabled wholesalers that help stock last-mile providers with medicines and other health products. They highlight the common challenges these businesses are facing, exploring how funders can help overcome them, and sharing a tool that outlines key priorities and performance targets across the digital wholesaler business model in the health sector.
- Categories
- Health Care, Investing
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Missing the Exit: The Growing Need for New Exit Pathways in Agriculture Investing
Exits make the wheel of impact investing go around, enabling companies to sustain and grow their operations, while also allowing investors to recycle returned capital into other impactful solutions. But as Coco Lim at Acumen explains, right now that wheel is not turning — particularly in agriculture, which has the lowest ratio of exits to deals of any sector in Africa. She argues that this situation puts impact investors at a crossroads: They can stay the course and hope that big exits are around the corner, or they can build the necessary exit pathways themselves. She discusses the challenges of achieving exits in smallholder-focused agriculture, highlighting the limitations of current investing models and exploring some exit strategies that offer untapped opportunities for impact investors and businesses.
- Categories
- Agriculture, Investing
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From Nano to Investable: Why Formalising MSMEs Hasn’t Led to Scale, and What India Can Do About It
India has achieved something remarkable over the past decade: Millions of once-informal micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs) have been formalized, and it is now easier to start and register a business, and access credit and government programs and markets. But according to Pranshu Chhabra, Rudra Midhun Kumar and Chiropriya Dasgupta at Quiver, over 99% of these enterprises remain at the "micro" level, and the overwhelming majority of them are classified as “nano,” a subset of the lowest level of the MSME classification. They argue that while India has become very good at bringing enterprises into the formal system, it is struggling to help them move into their next stage of growth: becoming large enough to attract formal investment. They explore this challenge, explaining why the transition from nano to investable cannot be solved by capital alone.
- Categories
- Investing
- Tags
- governance, MSMEs, public policy, scale
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Moving Beyond Grants: How NGOs Can Diversify Toward Earned Revenue, and How Funders Can Support That Transition
The development sector has reached an increasingly firm consensus that it needs to depend less on grants as the aid landscape evolves, and strategies to generate earned revenue have emerged as a key solution for NGOs seeking to remain financially sustainable. But as Toon Driesen at the Enabel Innovation Hub and Alex Losneanu and Pritika Kasliwal at Brink explain, commercializing innovative solutions to complex societal issues typically costs money before it makes money, and early funding support often falls away before a business model can scale. They share research that reveals what NGOs must do differently to execute the transition to an earned revenue model, and explore how funders can help them implement these changes.
- Categories
- Investing, Social Enterprise
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Families in the Global South Aren’t Beta Testers: How Parenting Technology is Falling Short, and What Funders Can Do About It
After over a decade running in-person and app-based services for children and parents in Bangladesh, Zillul Karim at ToguMogu and Light of Hope argues that parenting technology is failing families in the Global South. He highlights three structural blind spots in the parenting technology sector, exploring their consequences for children and parents, and proposes some ways funders, governments and development organizations can move the industry toward higher standards.
- Categories
- Education, Technology
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The Risks of Saying No to AI in Global Development: How Organisations Can Move Past Restrictions to Provide Responsible Guidance
In many global development and social impact organisations, the use cases of artificial intelligence are not based on formal policies or other top-down guidance. Instead, according to Loksan Harley at Homelands AI, staff at these organisations are using publicly available AI tools to perform ad hoc workarounds, often with little sense of how outputs should be checked, where their own human judgement must be used, and what types of training data should never be uploaded. Meanwhile, some leaders are embracing staff experimentation in the absence of an organisational policy and simply hoping the question resolves itself, while others are restricting or even banning the use of these tools. He argues that saying no to AI keeps staff's use of this technology invisible — the one condition under which none of its risks can be managed — and proposes a more responsible and realistic approach to AI adoption.
- Categories
- Technology
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The Hidden Cost of Digitization for Women Entrepreneurs: Recent Research Reveals Gender Differences in the Impacts of Fraud — And Highlights Some Solutions
Rising rates of financial fraud in emerging economies threaten to undermine the promise of digitization for women entrepreneurs. As Tanvi Jaluka at CARE and Lauren Perlik at Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA) explain, fraud is among the well-documented barriers women face in accessing digital financial tools and services. But there has been a lack of data on the unique risks women experience once they have already gained this access or adopted these tools. To better understand these impacts, CARE and IPA have combined their data from multiple survey projects to answer a few key questions: Is there a specific story for women around digital risk and fraud? Are they more vulnerable? And what can we do to improve their resilience?
- Categories
- Finance, Technology
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Financing AI Transformation in LMICs: What Multilateral Development Banks Must Do Differently
Multilateral development banks have spent the last decade building the foundations of digital economies across low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), and the broadband networks, digital ID systems and other priorities they've financed are helping to make AI deployments in these markets possible. But as Kunal Walia at Dalberg Advisors explains, this funding often goes toward piloting individual use cases, expanding digital infrastructure or creating an enabling environment, rather than uniting these different components into holistic AI systems that aim to scale. He argues that multilateral development banks must rethink their approach to ensure that the infrastructure they've helped build can actually enable AI transformation.
- Categories
- Investing, Technology
