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A Missing Opportunity for Investment: Bringing the Bedroom to the Boardroom
During SOCAP 2012, impact investing funds and social impact bonds were among mechanisms for bringing access to family planning to scale. But the first step is simply naming family planning as an impact investing priority. This requires moving the issue from the margins to the center of social causes.
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- Health Care
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Aligning Strategy to Maximize Impact: Reflections from Columbia’s Social Enterprise Conference 2012
At this year’s Columbia Business School Social Enterprise Conference, Aligning Strategy to Maximize Impact, the themes of technology and business model innovation, partnerships and capital mobilization featured prominently. Almost in direct contrast to last year’s back-to-basics themes of connection, and the network, this year’s conference was decidedly forward looking, covering a smattering of emerging strategies and sectors experiencing rapid redefinition.
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- Social Enterprise
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Clock is Ticking: Friday’s the First NB Case Writing Competition Deadline
Deadlines. We all have them, we all need them, and we’ve got one looming on Friday, Oct. 12. That’s the first deadline for the NextBillion Case Writing Competition highlighting the top innovations in market solutions to poverty and social innovation. But don’t stress, this first hurdle is the smallest.
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- Education
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The World We Want: Business development will play a much larger role in the future Millennium Development Goals
As we near 2015, the world needs to remain focused on securing as much progress as possible on the current set of Millennium Development Goals. UNDP joined forces with Business Fights Poverty, the Business Call to Action, the Overseas Development Institute and the UN Global Compact to explore, from a business perspective, what a future development framework might look like.
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- Uncategorized
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What’s Wrong with ‘Banking the Unbanked’?: Measuring active bank accounts is a better metric for financial inclusion
While the possession of a bank account may be a step toward financial inclusion, it should not be confused with genuine inclusion. A bank account puts people on a path toward financial inclusion, we cannot be at all certain that they are proceeding down the path.
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- Uncategorized
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Sweetening the Deal: Empowering Peruvian Chocolatiers
From Oct. 2011 to July 2012, I worked in Tarapoto, a small Peruvian jungle town in the San Martin province. San Martin was known in the 1980s and ’90s as a hotbed of illicit coca production feeding the drug trade, but years of development efforts have since helped to make legitimate agriculture the engine keying the region’s rapid economic growth.
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- Agriculture
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Accion’s Venture Lab: Open Ideas, Open for Business
Launched in April, the US $10 million seed-stage initiative is focused on for-profit enterprises with new products or business models that expand the range of high-quality financial services for people at the base of the pyramid.
- Categories
- Technology
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A 5 Billion Mobile Workforce
This past month, in Armenia, Kenya, Nepal, South Africa, and Vietnam, the World Bank organized hackathons bringing together over 300 mobile phone technologists and entrepreneurs. The gatherings focused on leveraging the spread of mobile phones to three-quarters of the world to connect excluded populations to the digital economy.
- Categories
- Technology
