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How Technology Can Provide Microentrepreneurs With Simple – and Much-Needed – Rules of Thumb
Microentrepreneurs have the potential to be a growth engine for developing countries, but they often lack business and financial management training. A recent project suggests that behavioral design has the power to unlock the potential of these microentrepreneurs, markedly improving their financial practices and business outcomes and leading to the financial well-being of their families.
- Categories
- Education
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Where Aggregators – and Open APIs – Fit Into Financial Inclusion
The introduction of a truly Open API is an exciting prospect for individuals and institutions interested in financial inclusion – digital financial providers, economists, technologists and developers alike. Building a successful business model, however, requires that the Open API is technically sound and that the financial inclusion community is included and encouraged to collaborate on innovative solutions.
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- Finance, Technology
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‘Doing Good By Doing Deals’: How Law Students Help Social Entrepreneurs Help Small Farmers
The International Transactions Clinic at the University of Michigan Law School works with social entrepreneurs who are inventing new ways to strengthen agriculture in rural Africa, improving agricultural inputs, developing sustainable practices and building supply chains. They all operate in a legal no-man’s land between existing nonprofit and for-profit regimes, which means that both the social entrepreneurs and their legal counsel need to be especially enterprising.
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- Agriculture, Social Enterprise
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Weekly Roundup: Jill Stein’s SRI Controversy; Culture Change as Opportunity; Mobile Money’s Hungry
The hubbub about Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein's insufficiently green investments might seem like a tempest in a teapot ... but it could signal an important shift; changing attitudes and rising disposable incomes in Kenya are opening possibilities for insurance firms; and research shows mobile money's driving a price revolution in international remittances. That, and more, in this week's Roundup.
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- Energy, Health Care, Investing, Technology
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Peer Mentorships Helping Colombia Write Its Next Chapter
Peer learning provides mutually beneficial relationships that advance the knowledge and well-being of all participants. In the second post in our series on the Graduation model of alleviating poverty, Fundación Capital explores the power of local peer mentors in supporting the income-generation projects of individuals affected by the violence in Colombia.
- Categories
- Education
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New Report: Small Merchants Offer Big Financial Inclusion Opportunities
Increasing micro and small merchants’ use of cashless payment systems will require broad participation and innovation from the financial sector, regulators, governments and the private sector. But the impact will be transformative for millions of small merchants, their customers and the broader economies in which they operate.
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- Uncategorized
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How Social Enterprises and Impact Investors Can Move the Needle to Achieve the SDGs
Betting on social entrepreneurship to accelerate the implementation of the SDGs makes sense from an impact and a financial return perspective, but the sector requires both financial and non-financial support. To put it simply, entrepreneurs need to unlock three doors: finance, market and talent.
- Categories
- Investing
- Tags
- data, impact bonds, impact investing, innovation, scale
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Pausing the Data Revolution to Ask a Few Questions
The people that many open-data proponents want to empower – for example, small farmers in Africa – don't have access to data that reflects on-the-ground realities, and lack the wherewithal to demand information that meets their needs. That led the authors to develop four key themes to help prioritize efforts to collect various open datasets to maximize the social good.
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- Technology
