-
How Loan Guarantees Are Unlocking Private Capital for Clean Energy and Sustainable Agriculture
MCE Social Capital, a nonprofit impact investing firm, believes leveraging loan guarantees can unlock private sector capital for the more than 2 billion people who lack access to formal financial services. Over the past couple of years, MCE has expanded its focus to clean energy and sustainable agriculture in an effort to promote macroeconomic stability and a healthy planet.
- Categories
- Agriculture, Energy, Environment, Investing
-
FinTech’s Elephant Seal Problem
Like the elephant seal, most fintech companies are focused on growing as large as possible. That means they usually choose a free business model to facilitate growth. Kristen Berman and Wendy De La Rosa of the Common Cents Lab say there's a better way: Abandon the free model and focus on removing the true psychological barriers to financial management.
- Categories
- Technology
-
Heeding the Voice of the Planet: Why CSR Isn’t Enough
Academic and author Stuart Hart writes that we have inadvertently put most of our chips on continuous improvement inside of current fossil fuel-based businesses and have largely forgotten about the critical importance of disruption, innovation and transformational change to corporate sustainability. How do we move business from the folly of competing for corporate sustainability ratings to actually making a difference? It starts with providing the right incentives, Hart says.
- Categories
- Energy, Environment, Technology
- Tags
- renewable energy
-
Social Business Roundup: A Defiant Asset Manager, Salty Doorknobs and Who Has it Worse?
This week in social business, the world's third-largest asset manager is pressuring companies to add more women to their boards; a Nobel Prize winner's ponderings on inequality within nations might make you rethink life in America; and salt earns a chance to be a hero – for a change.
- Categories
- Energy, Environment, Health Care, Investing
-
RegTech for Regulators: Reimagining Financial Supervision and Policymaking
The authors – representing BFA, USAID, the Gates Foundation and Omidyar Network – say tomorrow's financial customers and service providers will be able to leverage technology to engage in a real-time, two-way conversation to quickly obtain information and resolve problems, benefitting consumers, regulators and financial institutions alike.
- Categories
- Finance, Technology
-
‘I Know Where I’m Going’: Lessons from the ‘Vital Voices’ Accelerator for Female Entrepreneurs
In the final article in a six-part series on entrepreneurship's role in women’s economic empowerment, Nathan Rauh-Bieri highlights the experiences of five entrepreneurs in the year-long Vital Voices GROW Fellowship. The women reflect on what they learned from the training, and evaluate its usefulness to their businesses and their leadership development. Their experiences provide six lessons about how to optimize the effectiveness of entrepreneurship education.
- Categories
- Uncategorized
-
Saving Lake Atitlán: Women-Focused Business Provides Clean Water – and Good Jobs
After seeing that Guatemala's Lake Atitlán, where she was baptized, was contaminated, leaving thousands without jobs and clean water, Francesca Kennedy founded the social enterprise Ix Style. The company employs local female artisans to make Huarache sandals and bags, and donates 15 percent of proceeds to purchase water filters for families in Guatemala.
- Categories
- Environment, Social Enterprise
- Tags
- public health
-
A Simple, Painless Way Governments Can Help the Poor and the Environment
In Haiti there’s a 15 percent tariff and tax on clean cookstoves. Based on elasticity of demand, Dalberg projects that if improved cookstoves’ taxes and tariffs were eliminated, their annual sales would increase by 13 percent, from 185,000 to 209,000. This in turn would mitigate costs associated with health and environment consequences of traditional cooking techniques.
- Categories
- Environment, Health Care
