Articles by Nilima Achwal
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Wednesday
May 1
2013Sankalp Unconvention Summit 2013: The Global Hotspot for Innovation
Though the ecosystem is fairly developed in India, with innumerable incubators, investors, and facilitators, it is the entrepreneurs who continue to push the boundaries of innovation in India, capitalizing on the country’s rapid growth and optimism, and fighting head-on with the harsh realities of rural distribution, need-finding and scaling in a country where consumer tastes change every 100 kilometers, and institutional bureaucracy and corruption.
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- Uncategorized
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Monday
March 11
2013Indian Philanthropy Forum 2013 Focuses on Adolescent Girls, USAID
The 4th annual Indian Philanthropy Forum by Dasra, as usual, brought together philanthropists and investors to discuss trending social issues in India today and brainstorm effective ways of engagement with the social and social enterprise sectors. This year a salient theme emerged through every session: the empowerment of adolescent girls.
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Monday
February 4
2013Building India’s Social Enterprise Ecosystem – Where it Matters
While the dozens of conferences, competitions, incubators, impact investors, and online platforms have ushered in a new wave of dedicated social entrepreneurs, they still only reach urban-educated entrepreneurs. For these entrepreneurs, the connection to rural India can be as unfamiliar as a foreign country. Recently, different platforms have begun to reach out beyond the busy metropolises.
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Thursday
December 13
2012From Blueprint to Scale: Turning Research into Action
The Mumbai launch of Monitor’s sharply insightful From Blueprint to Scale: The Case for Philanthropy in Impact Investing marked the last stop on its world tour. India – the home of Monitor Inclusive Markets and several of the case studies explored in the report – was an apt landing point for the panelists to reflect on the insights garnered from across the globe that will help them to further develop and put into action the ideas from the report.
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Monday
July 9
2012NexThought Monday: European Impact Investing – Poised to Grow or Largely Irrelevant?
Last year, Ashoka’s Germany Director, Felix Oldenburg, took on – and took apart – impact investing as we currently know it, challenging it on a few specific points. Now, we share a telephonic debate between Oldenburg and Johannes Weber, founder of Social Venture Fund, the first pan-European social venture capital fund, who contests Oldenburg’s assumptions to push forward the dialogue on our much-discussed, much-anticipated new space of impact investing.
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- Impact Assessment
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Saturday
June 23
2012Weekly Roundup: Planting the SEED
Social enterprises face a number of extreme challenges that are difficult to surmount in the first few years, at the center of which is the challenge of creating viable, scalable business models around their social innovations. That’s why Villgro, a social enterprise incubator in Chennai, India, has created an intensive training program geared to speed up the business model refinement process for entrepreneurs who have not yet raised external investment, with the aim of helping them to raise their first rounds of funding.
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- NextBillion Originals
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Friday
March 30
2012The Power to Give Strategically: Indian Philanthropy Forum by Dasra
The opulent Taj Mahal Palace hotel in Mumbai set the stage for high-net-worth individuals, socially-conscious investors and foundations, and corporate leaders to discuss the state of strategic giving in India. According to keynote speaker Matthew Bishop of The Economist, a “good billionaire” is increasingly becoming defined as one who, Bill Gates-style, thinks twice before simply writing a check.
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Wednesday
March 14
2012MobiPrize: Moving Minds, Moving the Urban Poor
If you are a social entrepreneur who has an innovative and replicable solution to local and global transportation challenges, you are eligible to win the MobiPrize: US $5,000 and a trip to Rio+20 (the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development, June 20-22, in Rio de Janeiro) and top-notch mentorship sessions with global experts in sectors relevant to transportation, livable and sustainable communities, business and social enterprise.
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- Technology
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- transportation
