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‘Deep Pockets’ vs. ‘Long Pockets’ in DPI: What Instant Payments and Open Finance Tell Us About Sustainable Funding for Digital Public Infrastructure
Digital public infrastructure (DPI) is gaining traction in emerging markets around the world. But as David Porteous at Integral: Governance Solutions and Rafe Mazer at Fair Finance Consulting explain, while the financial cost of building DPI may be modest, operating it at scale requires ongoing costs to be allocated across the ecosystem over time, making DPI sustainability fundamentally a governance issue centered on pricing policies. They explore how two of the three broadly accepted categories of DPI, instant payment systems and open finance, can develop credible mechanisms to finance long-term costs — while maintaining incentives for participants and trust among users.
- Categories
- Finance, Technology
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The Keys to Successful Blue Bonds: How Peru’s Strong Local Lending Systems Are Expanding Water and Sanitation Access
For millions of Peruvian families, one barrier stands between them and safe water and sanitation at home: access to affordable financing. Yet as Rocio Cavazos at Water.org explains, the financial institutions serving these communities face their own barrier: limited access to lower-cost capital. She discusses Water.org's efforts to support Peru’s two successful blue bond issuances, exploring how these bonds can allow lenders to offer more affordable loans for water and sanitation solutions — and sharing lessons from Peru's experience that can be applied by blue bonds in other markets.
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- Environment, Finance, Investing, WASH
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Selling the Outcome, Not Just the Appliance: What the Clean Cooling Sector Can Learn from Clean Cooking
The demand for cooling solutions will more than triple by 2050 — and based on current technologies and strategies, this increase will almost double cooling-related greenhouse gas emissions, worsening the very crisis that's driving this growth. Colm Fay, Ekta Jhaveri and Rajat Chabba at the William Davidson Institute (WDI) explore how sustainable cooling solutions could meet this rising demand, while cutting emissions by nearly two-thirds. To achieve that ambitious goal, they argue that the clean cooling sector should leverage the experience of the off-grid solar and clean cooking industries. They share insights from a new WDI report that highlights what clean cooling can learn from both the successes — and the flawed assumptions — of these sectors.
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- Energy
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Moving Forward in a Post-USAID World: Why Women Must Be at the Center of Financial Inclusion
The demise of USAID has profound implications for the movement toward gender equality in financial inclusion and other development priorities. According to Julia Arnold and Sara Seavey, consultants specializing in women’s financial inclusion, the agency played a central role in funding, researching and coordinating global gender equality work — and without that anchor, these efforts are at risk of fragmentation and regression. They argue that this moment places responsibility on the sector itself to preserve the values, evidence and accountability structures that made progress toward gender-inclusive finance possible.
- Categories
- Finance
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How to Support Rural Social Enterprises: Three Key Learnings from a Field Visit in Malaysia
While global media coverage of the social enterprise sector often focuses on countries like India and Kenya, Malaysia remains relatively underrepresented in these conversations. Yet as Sreevas Sahasranamam at the University of Glasgow explains, the country has developed rich models of social innovation deeply rooted in indigenous knowledge systems, ecological stewardship and local resilience. He shares three key learnings from five community-led ventures, each of which demonstrates how practitioners and policymakers can best support rural social enterprises — not only in Malaysia, but globally.
- Categories
- Social Enterprise
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High Expectations Require New Approaches: What Africa’s Social Innovators Need to Scale — And Why Support Systems Must Evolve
Social entrepreneurs are tackling some of Africa's biggest development challenges. Yet many struggle to scale beyond their initial promise, despite heightened expectations to deliver both jobs and social impact. And as Amabelle Nwakanma, Akolade Oladipupo, Abdullahi Ibrahim and Chukwuemeka Okeke at LEAP Africa explain, though accelerators, incubators and fellowships have proliferated across the continent to support these innovators, it's unclear if these programs are actually aligned with their current needs. They share insights from a study LEAP Africa conducted, with support from the William Davidson Institute, to better understand where current enterprise support models succeed, and where they fall short.
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- Investing, Social Enterprise
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Turning Silos into Synergy: An Inclusive Finance Pilot Provides Lessons for Multi-Stakeholder Collaboration
Silos and fragmentation have slowed progress in inclusive finance for too long, as the efforts of private actors, public institutions, philanthropic funders and other stakeholders are often not intentionally aligned. As Seth Spiro at FINCA and Moustapha Seck at FLUID argue, one reason for this lack of alignment is that many of the systems underpinning inclusive finance were not built for multi-stakeholder collaboration. They explore solutions to these structural constraints, explaining how FINCA’s partnership with FLUID has aligned incentives, learning and execution to overcome organizational silos.
- Categories
- Agriculture, Finance, Investing
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Africa’s Energy Future Needs More Than ‘Trickle-Down Electronomics’: Why the Debate Around False Trade-Offs Risks Leaving Millions Behind
Africa’s energy access debate is increasingly focused on the question of whether to prioritize household access or industrial and productive uses that can drive economic growth. But as Ryan Kilpatrick and Patrick K. Tonui at GOGLA argue, the deeper challenge is about understanding how electricity demand, income generation and productivity evolve in practice — and determining how best to balance the technologies, delivery models, financing structures and timelines involved in widespread electrification. They discuss these overlapping factors, and push back against the concept of “trickle-down electronomics” — i.e., the assumption that prioritizing industry will enable governments to expand grids to unserved areas and allow households to afford electricity over time.
- Categories
- Energy
