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When ‘Patient Capital’ isn’t Patient Enough: How Mismatched Funder Timelines in PAYGo Solar are Holding Back Energy Access in Africa
The energy access conversation in Africa is usually framed around deployment, with success defined by connection targets, cost reduction and rural reach. But Kolawole Osinowo at the FATE Institute argues that these goals don't address a binding constraint for companies working at the last mile: the time it takes for households to repay the solar assets they bought via PAYGo financing. As he explains, the PAYGo model spreads out payments for the benefit of the consumer, but it adds the cost of waiting to the provider’s balance sheet — and that cost later spreads to the company’s investors. And though much of the capital that supports energy access presents itself as patient, willing to wait for these PAYGo assets to be repaid, in practice, these investors often behave otherwise. He discusses the impacts of this mismatch, and explores how capital can be structured for better alignment with PAYGo timelines.
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Taking First-Loss Guarantees Further: Four Problems That Keep Social Enterprises Stuck, and How Entrepreneurship Support Organizations Can Address Them
Grants and equity dominate the conversation in impact finance, but according to Srinivas Ramanujam at Villgro, debt is often the most practical tool for social enterprises that are too large for a grant, but too small and early-stage for most equity investors. And since lenders face real and perceived risks around these companies' creditworthiness, first-loss guarantees can help make debt capital more accessible. However, he explains that a guarantee alone is not a silver bullet, and that the harder work involves solving the problems that keep enterprises stuck. He explores how Villgro has addressed four of these key challenges, highlighting takeaways for entrepreneurship support organizations and other intermediaries.
- Categories
- Investing, Social Enterprise
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The Flawed Assumptions Behind AI for Agriculture: What Artificial Intelligence Can — And Can’t — Do for African Farmers
There is a dominant mental model of AI for agriculture. According to Sheena Raikundalia at Kuza, the pitch goes something like this: “What if every farmer had a personal AI advisor telling them what to grow, when to plant and how much fertilizer or other inputs to apply?” That model is sleek, frictionless, and built on the assumption that farmers are operating alone with the algorithm, receiving personalized recommendations and optimizing their decisions accordingly. But as she argues, optimizing agriculture in Africa is not primarily an information problem: It is a trust problem, a market access problem, a collective action problem and a financing problem — and addressing those challenges requires a human connection. She explores Kuza's experiences offering an AI chatbot to Kenyan farmers, and shares lessons on how best to leverage both human and digital resources to support smallholders in Africa.
- Categories
- Agriculture, Technology
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Making Waste Pay: The Keys to Sustaining Paying Customers in Solid Waste Management
Despite growing discourse around the revenue potential of waste to wealth — i.e., reimagining waste as a valuable resource — profitability in municipal solid waste management remains low in India and other low- and middle-income countries. As Vishwanath Varma, Archana Masih, Diksha Rana and Ashish Kapil at Waste Warriors Society argue, this challenge has led to a growing focus on collecting user fees from households — yet that goal is easier said than done. They share analysis based on Waste Warriors Society’s user fee records and customer surveys, which reveals key insights on how to retain paying customers in solid waste management and other user fee-based models of social entrepreneurship.
- Categories
- Social Enterprise, WASH
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The Three Ingredients of Impact AI: Research from India Offers Guidance for AI for Social Good in Emerging Markets
The conversation around “AI for social good” has moved beyond hype and potential and into a high-stakes implementation phase, as a growing number of real-world use cases have emerged. Kalpa Impact conducted analysis of 97 startups and 13 non-profits deploying AI for social good at population-scale in India, seeking to understand who is building these tools, where they are being deployed and whether there is evidence of impact. Sushant Kumar and Ananya Mukherjee at Kalpa Impact share insights from this analysis, highlighting three key ingredients that can enable the successful deployment of impact AI in India and other emerging markets.
- Categories
- Technology
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The Blind Spot in the EU’s New Deforestation Regulations: Laws and Satellites Don’t Save Forests — People Do
The European Union Deforestation Regulation (EUDR) represents an ambitious legislative effort to protect our planet’s remaining forests. But Priscillia Moulin at MosaiX highlights a potential flaw in the regulations: To meet the EUDR's data requirements and prove that their supply chains are deforestation-free, major commodity buyers are turning to remote sensing and satellite AI — and if these technologies detect any tree-cover loss, the path of least resistance is often to permanently exclude that supplier. She argues that this creates the illusion of compliance while pushing vulnerable small farmers into the grey market, as satellite algorithms can identify changes in forest cover but cannot determine intent or causality, or assess other complex realities on the ground. She proposes three ways companies can comply with the EUDR without freezing smallholders out of the EU's premium, regulated markets.
- Categories
- Agriculture, Environment
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What Drives Positive Outcomes in Gender-Lens Investing? DFI Portfolio Evaluations Reveal Four Key Factors
Few developments in the impact investing space have been as striking as the rise of gender-lens investing, as recent years have seen development finance institutions (DFIs) and others mobilize a growing amount of capital for gender equality. Katie Turner, and Jenny Holden at Kore Global share a first-of-its-kind synthesis of portfolio evaluations involving several DFIs, providing evidence on the outcomes and impact of their gender-lens investments at scale. They explore what these findings suggest about how and why some investments achieve deeper and more meaningful gender outcomes than others.
- Categories
- Investing
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Mastering the Art of Stewardship: Why Building Operational Sovereignty — Not Simply Navigating Funding Cuts — Will Define Africa’s Healthcare Future
In response to drastic cuts in global health financing, African governments are increasingly seeking greater health sovereignty — i.e., the ability to manage their health systems without structural dependence on external actors. But according to Scott Dubin at Logistics Marketplace, limited fiscal space is complicating their efforts to replace the often-fragmented and overlapping support structures that have long been provided by multilateral health funds, international NGOs and other outside entities. He explores how Africa's movement toward health sovereignty is revealing deeper capacity gaps in the continent's health systems, and proposes seven practical ways governments can effectively steward the markets and systems that support public health delivery.
- Categories
- Health Care
