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Impact Entrepreneurship During the Polycrisis: An Interview with Laurie Lane-Zucker
The impact sector has proven that business can do good. But how can it make those impacts last, as the polycrisis puts communities, ecosystems and business models at increasing risk around the world? Those are some of the questions at the heart of a new book, “The Impact Entrepreneur Breakthrough: A Field Manual for the Regenerative Economy,” by Laurie Lane-Zucker, the founder and CEO of Impact Entrepreneur. In this interview, he shares guidance from the book — and from his decades of work as a pioneering voice in the impact space — on how the sector can navigate the growing complexity of the global challenges it faces today.
- Categories
- Social Enterprise
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Digital Public Infrastructure Is Supposed To Be Interoperable: Why Does the Standardization End When Something Goes Wrong?
Digital public infrastructure (DPI) is becoming more common in emerging markets, as a growing number of governments are building population-scale digital systems for identity, payments and data exchange. And as DPI increasingly crosses national borders, involving multiple governments, processes and contractors, the need for interoperability in these systems is growing. According to David Porteous at Integral: Governance Solutions, Maria Luciano, Deepti George at Yutadhi, and Sahana Arun Kumar at Amarante Consulting, this growing reach and complexity mean that redress — i.e., citizens’ ability to challenge errors in DPI systems and obtain remedy — should also be interoperable. They share insights from a research project that examined grievance redress mechanisms for 15 DPI systems in Brazil, India, South Africa, Benin and Ethiopia, exploring how they can move toward greater standardization.
- Categories
- Technology
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Is the World Bank to Blame for the Cambodian Microfinance Crisis?
For the past five years, Cambodia’s microfinance sector has been experiencing a major over-indebtedness crisis. And as inclusive finance consultant Daniel Rozas explains, despite multiple warnings that the sector was overheating, IFC, the World Bank’s private investment arm, poured fuel on the flames by investing in the largest and fastest-growing of the country's leading microfinance institutions. Making matters worse, after an investigation by IFC’s own ombudsman concluded that clients had been harmed due to its failure to monitor the social risks created by its investments, its board dismissed those findings. He explores how the industry went off the rails in Cambodia, and argues that IFC not only worsened the crisis, it helped undermine the sector’s own efforts to avert it.
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Right-Sizing IMM: Five Ways Impact Measurement and Management Can Work for Enterprises — Not Just Investors
Impact measurement and management (IMM) systems too often reward compliance over impact, extracting more than they’ve given back. According to Julia Mensink at Acumen and Heather Esper at the William Davidson Institute, impact data tends to be focused mainly on satisfying investors’ requirements, not informing investees' decisions — and gathering it often ends up consuming enterprises' time and resources and constraining their ability to create the impact they’re expected to measure. They share learnings from a gathering of IMM experts earlier this year, highlighting several ways investors, investees and IMM professionals can right-size these practices, aligning them with enterprises' actual decisions and integrating them into their core operations.
- Categories
- Investing, Social Enterprise
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Parked Capital is a Missed Opportunity: Why Donor-Advised Funds Should be Funding Climate Businesses Now
If philanthropic capital is waiting for a rainy day to address climate change, it’s already pouring. But according to Adam Fraser at Terraset, instead of supporting solutions to this challenge, a significant source of funding is either lying dormant — or actively contributing to the problem. As he explains, Donor-Advised Funds (DAFs) are sitting on over $327 billion in capital: money that was already gifted to a charitable entity and earmarked for the public good. That money is invested in the market, growing tax-free, and sometimes even financing high-emission sectors like the fossil fuel industry, while innovative startups struggle to fund carbon removal and other climate solutions. He explores the sort of impact this funding could make if it were mobilized, and argues that the time to deploy it is now.
- Categories
- Energy, Environment, Investing
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Can India Transition to Solar Without Leaving Farmers Behind? Lessons from Rajasthan’s First Farmer-Owned Agri-PV Pilot
Earlier this year, Rajasthan’s first farmer-owned Agri-PV plant was inaugurated under the Indian government’s PM-KUSUM program. As Laxmi Sharma and Subhodeep Basu at the Indian Council for Research on International Economic Relations (ICRIER) explain, Agri-PV involves installing elevated, ground-mounted PV panels so farmers can generate electricity and additional income while cultivating the land underneath. They share learnings from ICRIER's work supporting the early implementation of this model in India, where the key challenges have involved not technical design and engineering questions, but the difficulties of coordinating people, processes and institutions — and establishing and maintaining farmer trust.
- Categories
- Agriculture, Energy, Environment
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Reimagining the Digital Architecture of Global Development: How Big Tech Can Bring the Sector into the Modern Age
The global development sector has grown into a sprawling ecosystem, including powerful multilaterals and millions of community-level NGOs worldwide. In the process, as social innovation advisor Rajat Ray explains, it has repeatedly reinvented its tools and techniques to handle the growing scale and depth of its work. But he argues that the reductions in traditional aid, the growing strain of modern operational demands and the emergence of advanced technologies like AI have brought the sector to a defining inflection point. He explores how its legacy tools and processes are falling short, and calls for a complete reimagining of the digital architecture that underpins global development, driven by multilateral leaders and Big Tech.
- Categories
- Technology
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Scaling Without Breaking: A Practical Tool for Strengthening Health-Focused Digital Wholesalers in LMICs
Patients across low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) often use private providers for healthcare products and services, making these frontline settings a valuable pathway for increasing the availability of quality medicines and improving health outcomes in these markets. François Lepicard, Alice Magand and Guillaume Massot at Hystra, and Laura Collet at Sanofi share learnings from the Sanofi Impact Fund, supported by the Hystra team, which invests in digitally enabled wholesalers that help stock last-mile providers with medicines and other health products. They highlight the common challenges these businesses are facing, exploring how funders can help overcome them, and sharing a tool that outlines key priorities and performance targets across the digital wholesaler business model in the health sector.
- Categories
- Health Care, Investing
