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Weekly Roundup: Jill Stein’s SRI Controversy; Culture Change as Opportunity; Mobile Money’s Hungry
The hubbub about Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein's insufficiently green investments might seem like a tempest in a teapot ... but it could signal an important shift; changing attitudes and rising disposable incomes in Kenya are opening possibilities for insurance firms; and research shows mobile money's driving a price revolution in international remittances. That, and more, in this week's Roundup.
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- Energy, Health Care, Investing, Technology
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Peer Mentorships Helping Colombia Write Its Next Chapter
Peer learning provides mutually beneficial relationships that advance the knowledge and well-being of all participants. In the second post in our series on the Graduation model of alleviating poverty, Fundación Capital explores the power of local peer mentors in supporting the income-generation projects of individuals affected by the violence in Colombia.
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- Education
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New Report: Small Merchants Offer Big Financial Inclusion Opportunities
Increasing micro and small merchants’ use of cashless payment systems will require broad participation and innovation from the financial sector, regulators, governments and the private sector. But the impact will be transformative for millions of small merchants, their customers and the broader economies in which they operate.
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- Uncategorized
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How Social Enterprises and Impact Investors Can Move the Needle to Achieve the SDGs
Betting on social entrepreneurship to accelerate the implementation of the SDGs makes sense from an impact and a financial return perspective, but the sector requires both financial and non-financial support. To put it simply, entrepreneurs need to unlock three doors: finance, market and talent.
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- Investing
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- data, impact bonds, impact investing, innovation, scale
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Pausing the Data Revolution to Ask a Few Questions
The people that many open-data proponents want to empower – for example, small farmers in Africa – don't have access to data that reflects on-the-ground realities, and lack the wherewithal to demand information that meets their needs. That led the authors to develop four key themes to help prioritize efforts to collect various open datasets to maximize the social good.
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- Technology
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Weekly Roundup: Pondering Vice President Bill Gates (Thanks, WikiLeaks), How Buyers Lag Sellers, and FICO Going Big – Real Big
Can you imagine Vice President Bill Gates? We can. That's only part of our Weekly Roundup, which also includes peeks at consumer purchases – or lack therof – from social enterprises; an effort to increase access to credit for over 3 billion people around the globe; and a program that had money, recognition and everything it needed to succeed – except customers.
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- Social Enterprise
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Second-Generation Graduation: New Ways to Scale a Proven Anti-Poverty Model
This post, the first in a series by Fundación Capital exploring the Graduation strategy as a way to pull people out of extreme poverty, looks at how the concept is evolving. With more governments investing in Graduation, and more technological tools being applied, Tatiana Rincon suggests that "we stand at the edge of change that could lead to a world without poverty."
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- Education
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The Mismatch: Customers Seek Holistic Solutions, Financial Service Providers Operate in Silos
Digital financial service providers too often operate in silos, designing products to solve particular financial needs. Meanwhile, users tend to blend a mix of formal and informal financial services to meet their needs. The challenge for FSPs is to recognize users' behaviors and respond accordingly, particularly to their need for flexibility and timeliness.
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- Uncategorized