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Five Series in Social Business: Announcing NextBillion’s 2018 Editorial Calendar
In 2017, NextBillion organized our content around 12 monthly themes - in 2018, we’re taking a slightly different approach. We’ll still publish special series around topics of interest to our readers, but these series will be more tightly focused, and they'll continue throughout the year. Check out the five themes we'll be exploring alongside our broader social business coverage – and learn how you can contribute.
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- Social Enterprise, Technology
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Expanding Financial Access Means Expanding Security – How ‘Tokenization’ Could Be the Key
When Experian was hacked last fall, the breach exposed the social security numbers of 143 million people in the U.S. Shortly thereafter, in South Africa, approximately 30 million citizens' identity numbers and financial information were hacked and leaked on the internet. As more people in emerging economies are equipped with personal identification numbers for digital financial services, the need for securing sensitive data grows exponentially. Suresh Rajagopalan of FSS touts tokenization as a remedy – and outlines some challenges it presents.
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- Finance
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How Impact Investing is Advancing Affordable Housing
For millions of people, especially for the 13.2 million who have worked with the organization to build new or updated homes, Habitat for Humanity is a household name. But many don't realize that the international charity that put “sweat equity” on the map is also pioneering a different approach: A pair of funds that invest in businesses that advance affordable housing via financial products and services. Jyoti Patel, global director-capital markets at Habitat’s Terwilliger Center for Innovation in Shelter, discusses the funds and their wide-ranging impact.
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- Investing
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Selling Without Selling Out: How to Avoid Harmful Sales Tactics in Financial Inclusion
You are probably bombarded with offers for useless products on a daily basis, with little consequence other than mild annoyance. But what if you were living at the BoP and the product being offered were at best useless, and at worst likely to undermine your economic future? That's the case for many financial services clients in emerging markets, says Barbara Magnoni of EA Consultants. She explores responsible sales tactics that providers can use to avoid doing more harm than good.
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- Finance
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Solar + Housing = Impact: Why Investors Should Boost Renewable Energy in Affordable Housing
When it comes to off-grid solar energy, we tend to think of market extremes such as rural poor people in developing countries without any electricity or well-off people in developed countries looking to charge up their Teslas. But Lori Chatman of Enterprise Community Loan Fund and Ismael Guerrero of the Denver Housing Authority detail a project to bring green power to public housing residents in the Mile High City. The project could serve as a model for impact investors looking to improve health, expand green jobs and earn a return.
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Getting Real About Innovation: Why Accion’s U.S. Network Made the Leap to Digitize its Lending Operations
Technology can boost small businesses' access to finance, but can also risk trapping them in a cycle of debt. And for lenders serving lower-income entrepreneurs, these risks and rewards are more acute. Gina Harman, CEO of Accion’s U.S. Network, discusses its ambitious efforts to digitize lending operations across its national online platform in this podcast Q&A, exploring how established organizations can adapt to emerging technologies – without compromising their missions.
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- Finance
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Key Strategies for ‘Social Startup Success’: A Q&A with Spark Co-founder Kathleen Kelly Janus
The nonprofit funding wall is real, says Kathleen Kelly Janus, leaving two-thirds of U.S. nonprofits at $500,000 and below in revenue. In “Social Startup Success: How the Best Nonprofits Launch, Scale Up and Make a Difference,” she explores how some social ventures are able to break through and scale, and shares lessons that are relevant to both nonprofit and for-profit enterprises. NextBillion editor Sonya Vann DeLoach discusses the book’s message with the author in this thought-provoking Q&A.
- Categories
- Social Enterprise
- Tags
- nonprofits
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Seeing Beyond Silos: A More Holistic Approach to Supporting Social Entrepreneurs
If it takes a village to raise a child, then it takes an entire ecosystem to shepherd a social enterprise from inception to scale. But that ecosystem too often is splintered with investors, accelerators and other advisors sorting themselves into silos. Alex Pan and Mark Correnti, with the Miller Center for Social Entrepreneurship, advocate for a "structured collaboration," with accelerators taking the lead as honest brokers.
- Categories
- Impact Assessment, Investing, Social Enterprise
