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On International Women’s Day, Highlighting Ideas and Action
On International Women’s Day, we have collected a few examples of women and their important role within the realm of social enterprise to highlight today. Two announcements particularly relevant to the NextBillion audience include the Calvert Foundation’s new campaign (with support from Citi Foundation) to advance women’s economic empowerment globally and the Women Deliver list of the top 50 ideas and solutions for improving girls and women’s lives worldwide.
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- Uncategorized
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- impact investing
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Big Idea: Why Hands-On Regulation of Mobile Money Could Be Dangerous
There’s a very simple imperative driving the tariff structure and every other decision that determines access to mobile money: cost recovery. This is more than a cold-hearted calculation by mobile network operators’ accountants. If rural mobile money agents, who generally operate as independent contractors, cannot profit from this role, there will be no rural agents and no mobile money service.
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- Technology, Telecommunications
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Welcoming the ‘Zeronauts’: Pushing Problems Toward Zero
John Elkington, who coined the phrase "triple bottom line," is jumpstarting a new dialogue. In an upcoming book, The Zeronauts: Breaking the Sustainability Barrier, he details 50 enterprises and their entrepreneurial champions who are all working towards zero: zero pollution, zero poverty, zero pandemics, zero population growth and zero nuclear proliferation.
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- Energy, Environment
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Bridging the ‘Financial Capability Gap’ to Financial Inclusion
Between 500 million and 800 million of the world’s poor have gained access to finance in recent years. But 25 percent or less of these individuals have received any form of financial training to help them make informed decisions about entire financial future. This represents the ‘financial capability gap." It’s the reason why today we are releasing Bridging the Gap: The Business Case for Financial Capability.
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- Education
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NexThought Monday: Combining Commercial Opportunity With Environmental Sustainability
The greatest potential for productivity gains lies in the millions of small-scale farms in Africa, Latin America and Asia. But as the pressure grows to produce more food, unsustainable practices like slash-and-burn agriculture and excessive tilling of cropland threaten ecosystems and contribute to climate change.
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- Agriculture
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In Tune With the SONG Fund: Investing in health in India
Who’s on top of the lightening-pace Indian impact investment space? One major player is the $17 million USD SONG Investment Company. Funded and owned by Google, the Omidyar Network, and the Soros Economic Development Fund, SONG was launched in 2009 to demonstrate that investing in SMEs can not only elicit shareholders returns, but also improve economic opportunities and jobs for the masses in India.
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- Health Care
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- impact investing
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Roundup – 3/3/12: Profiting Off the Poor, the Ends vs. the Means
So this week’s batch of articles primarily has focused on the growth of mobile money, be it in banking or in the form of an e-wallet. It also settled a key debate around profiting off the poor, at least between Vikram Akula, then the founder and CEO of SKS Microfinance, and Grameen Bank Founder Muhammad Yunus.
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- Uncategorized
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- microfinance
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The Big Idea: Taking Mobile Money Forward
The excitement of mobile money has been dampened by an inability of deployments to take hold outside a handful of successful markets. Driving the enthusiasm forward is the opportunity to bridge the gap between one billion people in emerging markets who have mobile phones but no bank account. On Tuesday, McKinsey & Company released a report “Mobile money: Getting to scale in emerging markets” seeking to cut through this excitement and identify critical success factors for implementation.
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- Technology, Telecommunications
