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NextBillion - An Initiative of the William Davidson Institute at the University of Michigan

Contributor.

Heather Esper

Heather Esper
William Davidson Institute

Heather Esper is Director of Performance Measurement and Impact at the William Davidson Institute at the University of Michigan. She has over 18 years of experience conducting impact assessments of businesses and entrepreneur support organizations across Africa, Latin America and Asia. She specializes in applying a system thinking lens in designing and implementing customized monitoring, evaluation, and learning solutions to understand, assess, and enhance the economic, social, and environmental performance and outcomes of organizations and businesses. This includes co-creating theories of change, identifying key performance indicators, developing learning agendas, and capturing learnings across portfolios to inform strategy, improve operations and attract new funding.

 

Articles by Heather Esper

  • Thursday
    May 13
    2010

    Heather Esper

    Large Scale Initiatives to Improve Health of the BoP

    The Africa Health Fund focuses on increasing access to health related services and goods for Africans, specially the poor, while providing investors with long-term financial returns. While the Advance Market Commitments provides funding to stimulate the development and manufacturing of vaccines for developing countries.

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  • Thursday
    May 6
    2010

    Heather Esper

    MacArthur Foundation Announces Development of New MDP Programs

    This the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation announced that it will be giving $5.6 million to ten universities in eight different countries to create Master’s in Development Practice (MDP) programs.

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  • Monday
    March 22
    2010

    Heather Esper

    iBoP Asia Conference

    In early March, I attended the iBoP Asia conference FRONTIERS: Charting the Future of S&T Innovations for the Base of the Pyramid in Southeast Asia. Individuals from all sectors met in Jakarta, Indonesia on March 3rd to share and discuss science and technology innovations for the BoP in Southeast Asia.

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  • Friday
    February 26
    2010

    Heather Esper

    Developing a Rigorous Methodology to Assess Impact

    As more BoP ventures begin to think about measuring impact, many have questions around how to do so. This post explores some important issues to think through when developing a rigorous methodology to assess impact.

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  • Monday
    February 15
    2010

    Heather Esper

    Anecdotes, Outputs and Outcomes

    Most experts seem to agree that it makes intuitive sense to measure outcomes. So why aren’t more organizations measuring outcomes? Based on observations and conversations we’ve had with numerous organizations, I’ve come up with three different reasons that highlight the underlying constraints.

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  • Sunday
    February 7
    2010

    Heather Esper

    WDI Workshop on Collecting Outcome Data at the Project Level

    At WDI’s BoP Initiative, we have developed a robust, straightforward and low-cost process to collect outcome data at the project level. Our upcoming workshop (Feb 17-19) will focus on teaching organizations how to think through key components in order to develop a sound methodology to collect outcome data using the BoP Impact Assessment Framework.

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