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Dump the ‘Stupid’ Prizes – and Increase the Rest: Why we need more social enterprise competitions.
Recently, my friend and long-time mentor Kevin Starr wrote an article entitled “Dump the Prizes,” published in Stanford Social Innovation Review. I was initially concerned, because in addition to my day job at the nonprofit One Acre Fund, I am on the board of D-Prize. However, after considering his arguments, I came to the opposite conclusion: We need more prize competitions.
- Categories
- Education
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Introducing NB’s New Health Care Editor
I’m excited to announce the newest member of the NextBillion team. Veteran journalist Kyle Poplin has joined NextBillion as the new editor of NB Health Care.
- Categories
- Health Care
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FEATURED EVENT: Mobile Money: Technology to Transform Transactions
What if anybody with a phone could send and receive money? What if mobile money agent services could be crowd-sourced? And what if every mobile phone came with a full suite of financial services? These aspirations, and the challenges that accompany them, will be the focus of Mobile Money: Technology to Transform Transactions, a two-day conference on Sept. 19th and 20th, in the San Francisco Bay Area.
- Categories
- Technology
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Why Silicon Valley Needs a Link to the Developing World: Capacity development experiments and social enterprise scaling factors
Last week, a dozen social entrepreneurs convened on the Santa Clara University campus in the heart of Silicon Valley for the “in-residence” component of the GSBI Accelerator, a 10-month capacity development program that aims to prepare more advanced social enterprises for scaling their impact.
- Categories
- Uncategorized
- Tags
- incubators
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Good Ideas Meet Elbow Grease: Evidence Action committed to taking evidence-based programs and services to large scale
Evidence Action begins from the premise that achieving scale across sectors and contexts is a solvable challenge, and that it can lead to gains in expertise and experience. The private sector has demonstrated this to be the case.
- Categories
- Agriculture, Health Care
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Supporting Female Entrepreneurs : Together and A Loan
With more than 2 million youth members among its ranks, DoSomething is one of the largest organizations in the United States devoted to young people and social change, mobilizing activists to take on important social issues through innovative campaigns. Their latest effort, called 25,000 Women, harnesses Kiva’s microlending platform to support female entrepreneurs in El Salvador, Kenya, Mongolia, Pakistan and the Philippines.
- Categories
- Technology
- Tags
- microfinance
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The Power of Insurance: Why Haiti’s future depends on planning for the worst
People don’t think the poor need insurance, as if poverty implies they have nothing to protect. But the goal of insurance is to make sure people can survive hardships, and the poor are those who are most exposed. The challenge Haiti faces is building a safety net for rural people whose certificate of deposit is their cow, whose demand deposit is their goat, and whose cash is a chicken.
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- Uncategorized
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Bringing Payments Out of the Shadows: New data on how South Asian and Indonesian households pay and make money transfers
Payments are the glue of the economic system, and any inefficiency there ripples through the rest of the economy. Yet despite the fact that digital payments and remittances are critical for the poor to be able to access markets and formal financial services, there is very little data collected on the development of the payment market. But now, new research from South Asia and Indonesia is helping to shine a light on the subject.
- Categories
- Education
- Tags
- research
