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Moving Beyond Access for Meaningful Financial Inclusion: Targeting investments to improve financial capability
Who are the relevant stakeholders to help bridge this financial capability gap? We are looking to explore these and related questions through 10 or more new research projects that we initiate at Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA) over the next two years, with support from the Citi Foundation.
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- Education
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How Microfinance Institutions Can Manage Default Risk AND Build Financial Inclusion
High client growth and low default rates are typical benchmarks for gauging the success of MFIs. But the two measures can be counterproductive for MFIs looking to achieve real social impact through financial inclusion. Achieving low default rates and higher client growth rates together is only possible when the client’s cash flows are more than adequate to cover the average loan size.
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- Uncategorized
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WDI Facilitates Rockefeller Fdn. Convening
WDI is coordinating and facilitating an Aug. 28 convening with the Rockefeller Foundation staff and other partner grantees working, along with the Institute, on the impact enterprise project.
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- Uncategorized
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Ten Years in Social Entrepreneurship: The 19 innovators who presented at GSBI represent broader entrepreneurship trends
The social entrepreneurship concept and community have grown tremendously in the last decade. Santa Clara University’s Global Social Benefit Incubator (GSBI) celebrated 10 years of working with over 150 social entrepreneurs to build financially sustainable ventures that scale. Last week,19 social entrepreneurs in our tenth cohort delivered their business plan presentations. Individually and collectively, they reflect broader trends in social entrepreneurship.
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- Uncategorized
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TechnoServe Launches Program to Boost Development of Central American and African Businesses
Some 560 SMEs will be able to develop their businesses through a new entrepreneurship development program, “Impulsa Tu Empresa (Boost Your Business), that TechnoServe plans to implement in Nicaragua, Honduras, Guatemala and Burkina Faso in Africa. The program, supported by the Argidius Foundation, is designed to give mentoring and business training for entrepreneurs.
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- Agriculture, Education
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ANDE Goes Global: The network has added four new global team members
To begin to address the need for more local collaboration, we started to pilot Regional Chapters in early 2010 by asking members where they should be – and encouraging them to work with us to design and launch chapters in regions where there were high concentrations of ANDE members who wanted to work together in a more intentional way. This led to the launch of chapters in Brazil, Central America/Mexico, East Africa and South Africa in 2010, followed by India in 2011. We have recently increased our team to include four new global team members.
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- Investing
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Shape Up and Scale Up: The Value of Mentors for Guiding Impact Entrepreneurs (Part 2)
We interviewed several business accelerators – Unreasonable Institute, TechnoServe, New Ventures Mexico and New Ventures India to learn more about the structure of their programs and key lessons learned in providing mentor services. For part two, we spoke directly with mentors and entrepreneurs who have been involved in these programs to learn why they do it and what makes mentor programs successful.
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- Uncategorized
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Game On: What We’ve Learned from Catalysts for Change
For three days in April, more than 1,600 people took part in such a conversation through an innovative, engaged foresight public game called Catalysts for Change. For 48 hours, the global community collaborated on ideas to tackle one of the most pressing questions of our time: What new paths out of poverty can we discover together?
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