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Impact Investing Comes of Age: ImpactAlpha Rounds up Nine Stories Shaping the Marketplace
Impact investments represent some of the greatest wealth generating opportunities of our time, from the trillions needed to build a clean global energy grid, to the opportunities in delivering essential services to the emerging middle class. Here are nine recent developments that highlight the sector's growing significance, part of ImpactAlpha's ongoing collaboration with NextBillion.
- Categories
- Investing, Social Enterprise
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Svadha: ‘The First Step for Households Is to Get a Dignified Toilet and Use It’
Svadha, a sanitation business founded in India in 2013, trains entrepreneurs to sell and help install sanitation and hygiene products, and then support them after the sale. The approach is working: In the past six month the company has doubled its revenue and the number of entrepreneurs in its network, to more than 200.
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- Health Care
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Borrowing and Saving – Not Two Sides of the Same Coin
From a mathematical point of view, borrowing and saving are mirror images. In both cases many small payments allow for one or more large payouts. Only the sequence differs. But after traveling to India and Kenya as part of a research project, we were struck by vast differences in the way people make borrowing and savings decisions - and these have profound implications for financial service providers.
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- Uncategorized
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Weekly Roundup: The Death of a Salesman, a Megaphone for Mom, and a Target on BlackRock
Divestment activists in the gay community turn their sights on BlackRock, a tragic suicide reveals trouble in India's health care industry, and a new study shows the value of constructive nagging in this week's Roundup.
- Categories
- Health Care, Investing, Social Enterprise
- Tags
- impact investing
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Last Week for $200 SOCAP Discounts
If you’re an impact investor or social entrepreneur in need of a dose of inspiration, you won't want to miss SOCAP16, Sept. 13-16 at Fort Mason in San Francisco. This ninth annual event, the world’s largest conference dedicated to increasing the flow of capital toward social good, is expected to attract more than 2,500 change-makers from around the world.
- Categories
- Social Enterprise
- Tags
- impact investing
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How to Help Low-Income People Save for Retirement: Make it Personal
Can personalized information about their pension payouts help lower-income individuals boost the size of their pensions? To find out, Innovations for Poverty Action placed eight publicly accessible computer modules in Chilean government offices, offering information on individuals' retirement savings from the national database. Here's what they found.
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- Investing
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Outsourcing Transport and Logistics in Global Health
Routine maintenance required to keep cars, trucks and motorcycles moving simply does not happen in Africa, shortening the lifespan of the vehicles that are essential to delivering health commodities to the most remote communities. That means many institutions are declining to fund the capital expenditure required to purchase vehicles, parts or storage facilities – and governments and donors alike are identifying new ways to improve health supply chains and the transport systems they rely on.
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- Health Care, Transportation
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A Roadmap that Bypasses the Public Health Care System
A year ago, uber Diagnostics commercially launched Cardiotrack, a handheld ECG monitor. Since then, the company has learned some hard lessons about inefficiencies in India's public health sector. In response, it started a program to provide ambulances with health diagnostics devices, plus a separate home health care service designed to generate jobs.
- Categories
- Health Care, Social Enterprise
