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Selling Without Selling Out: How to Avoid Harmful Sales Tactics in Financial Inclusion
You are probably bombarded with offers for useless products on a daily basis, with little consequence other than mild annoyance. But what if you were living at the BoP and the product being offered were at best useless, and at worst likely to undermine your economic future? That's the case for many financial services clients in emerging markets, says Barbara Magnoni of EA Consultants. She explores responsible sales tactics that providers can use to avoid doing more harm than good.
- Categories
- Finance
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Seeing Beyond Silos: A More Holistic Approach to Supporting Social Entrepreneurs
If it takes a village to raise a child, then it takes an entire ecosystem to shepherd a social enterprise from inception to scale. But that ecosystem too often is splintered with investors, accelerators and other advisors sorting themselves into silos. Alex Pan and Mark Correnti, with the Miller Center for Social Entrepreneurship, advocate for a "structured collaboration," with accelerators taking the lead as honest brokers.
- Categories
- Impact Assessment, Investing, Social Enterprise
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Helping Low-Income Patients Breathe Easier: Three Solutions to Oxygen Market Failures
For a child with severe pneumonia—and every other patient struggling for breath—access to oxygen is a matter of life or death. And even though oxygen is just as important to hospitals and clinics as electricity and water, market failures stand between oxygen and the people who need it. While medicines and vaccines are its primary focus, the global NGO PATH recently zeroed in on how to improve oxygen supplies in low- and middle-income countries.
- Categories
- Health Care
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From Haiti to China: 5 Pilots Begin to Reveal Digital Credit’s Uneven Impact
Demand for digital credit is growing in emerging markets, sparking opportunities for providers – and critical questions about its impact on low-income borrowers. CEGA's Digital Credit Observatory awarded five short-term pilot grants to studies in Haiti, the Dominican Republic, India and China, which provided some intriguing answers. Alexandra Wall, Natasha Beale and Carson Christiano of CEGA explore some of the studies' takeaways.
- Categories
- Finance, Impact Assessment
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How to Address the Power Imbalance in Impact Investing? Shut Up and Listen
It started with a USD 22 million investment in a farm in Ghana’s Afram Plains District. The investment was designed to reduce hunger, create jobs and provide economic opportunities for 80,000 smallholder farmers. That's not how it turned out. Gayle Peterson of Oxford's Impact Investing Programme and her colleagues explore a real-world case of impact investing gone wrong.
- Categories
- Impact Assessment, Investing
- Tags
- impact investing, research
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Announcing the Most Influential NextBillion Posts of 2017
As we welcome 2018, we'd like to pay a final tribute to the top posts of 2017. In their own way, each of these insightful pieces introduced a novel concept, approach or argument that captured our readers' attention – and in some cases, provoked their ire. Here are the winners of 2017's Most Influential Post Contest.
- Categories
- Agriculture, Energy, Finance, Investing
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What was the Most Influential NextBillion Post of 2017? Vote for Your Favorite
“Fast away the old year passes.” That lyric from “Deck the Halls” always hits home this time of year – and in 2017, it resonates particularly strongly. Across the social sectors, the year often felt like a race against time (or against competing societal forces) and many of our most popular posts reflect that sense of urgency. Here are the most influential posts from the last twelve months, one from each month, in our sixth annual holiday contest. Vote early, vote often.
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Hobbyist Makers vs. Global Manufacturers: Is 3D Printing Really the Solution to the Prosthetics Gap?
Be they startups or tinkerers, 3D printing innovators are trying to fill in the gaps in traditional health care, particularly in resource-constricted countries where prosthetic devices are scarce. For those who struggle through life without a limb, 3D printing offers hope. But are hobbyist makers and their 3D printers really the stopgap the limb-loss community needs? Certified prosthetist Jason Bender wades into the debate.
- Categories
- Health Care, Technology
