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Measuring Environmental Performance in Microfinance
What responsibility does the microfinance industry have in reaching each of the Sustainable Development Goals? Of the 1,100 microfinance institutions reporting social performance information to MIX in 2014, 40 percent reported that they raised clients’ awareness of environment impacts. Additionally, 34 percent claimed to have some form of environmental risk management in place and 19 percent said they offer environmentally-friendly credit products. But the microfinance sector still lacks a set of established metrics to track their green performance management.
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- Environment, Impact Assessment
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Does Your Organization Actually Empower Women?
Although many organizations working in international development make grandiose claims of their programs’ ability to empower women, with few tools available to actually measure empowerment, it is hard to tell if these claims are based on fact. The Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index is one way to ensure that they are.
- Categories
- Agriculture, Impact Assessment
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‘Seeing People for Who They Are, Not What They Can Prove on Paper’
Shubham, which is focused on helping urban, lower-income families in India own a home through financing, lays out some of the problems it has encountered and issues it foresees in the informal home loan segment.
- Categories
- Uncategorized
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Turning Flower Pots into Life-savers
In 2009, Philip Wilson led his Guatemala-based organization’s transition from an NGO to a social business, and since then its customer base has expanded dramatically. Ecofiltro found that giving its water filters away was not scalable or financially sustainable – but that ensuring his customers' dignity was.
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- Health Care
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NexThought Monday: Pay for Success … With an Important Twist
Did you ever wonder how to adapt the pay-for-success model to market-based social enterprises and inclusive businesses? How to catalyze and secure private investments that allow scaling? And how to make sure that each party involved has an incentive to outperform on impact? Roots of Impact believes they've found an answer to these questions.
- Categories
- Investing
- Tags
- impact investing
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Weekly Roundup: OPIC’s Big Jump with LeapFrog; the Dearth of Do-gooder Drones
With a $200 million planned investment by the U.S. government’s development finance arm, impact equity firm LeapFrog Investments has now attracted $1 billion in funds to invest in companies reaching low-income people with financial and healthcare services. This week, the board of directors for the Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC) approved the investment, as well as eight others. LeapFrog’s announcement hailed the OPIC investment as “the largest commitment in history to any impact fund manager.” That’s not something I could independently confirm, but it is OPIC’s largest single commitment to a private equity manager.
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- Investing, Technology
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Eight Reasons to Invest in African Tech Innovation
In Africa, the middle class is growing, populations are urbanizing, IT infrastructure is improving and cell phones and mobile payments are more widely used than in most of the world. All of this has contributed to a recent tech startup boom that has garnered growing interest from international investors. Here are eight reasons why African technological innovation is a wise investment.
- Categories
- Investing, Technology
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The Imperative of Change – An Interview with Bill Drayton
"All of us are living at an extraordinary time, when the world is making the final move away from being organized around repetition, to being organized around change." That's the view of social enterprise pioneer Bill Drayton, founder and CEO of Ashoka. He describes this vision and its vast implications in this video interview, recorded at the SOCAP15 conference.
- Categories
- Social Enterprise
- Tags
- employment, interviews
