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The Challenges of Starting Your First Impact Fund
Starting an impact fund is HARD. New fund managers face a host of major challenges getting a fund off the ground. Dave Richards, managing partner and co-founder at impact fund accelerator Capria, shares three challenges and a few lessons on overcoming them.
- Categories
- Investing, Social Enterprise
- Tags
- impact investing
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NexThought Monday: Women Entrepreneurs to the Rescue
Ebola was always an emergency within an emergency, says Faruque Ahmed, executive director of BRAC International. Now, with the immediate threat of the disease gone, West Africans have the much-needed space to shift their energies back to tackling the even greater scourge of rural poverty and powerlessness.
- Categories
- Agriculture, Health Care
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Weekly Roundup 12-4-15: Did Zuckerberg and Chan Just Become the World’s Biggest Impact Investors?
The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative set tongues wagging and some people pining for an "unlike" button to click on Facebook this week. But impact investing/philanthropy expert Antony Bugg-Levine is taking a wait-and-see attitude, saying, "It’s the doing, not the announcing, we need to judge."
- Categories
- Investing
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How a Change in Perspective Helped Ignite Cookstove Sales
Envirofit is a social enterprise that since 2007 has produced and sold low-cost biomass cookstoves in developing nations. Along the way, it learned that good things happen when firms treat the BoP market as customers to be served, rather than beneficiaries.
- Categories
- Health Care, Social Enterprise
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Two Keys to Advancing Global Financial Inclusion
JP Morgan recently joined with the Gates Foundation, Bankable Frontier Associates, Accion International, Omidyar Network and others to create the Catalyst Fund. Catalyst will provide funding and mentorship to financial inclusion-focused social entrepreneurs in emerging markets that offer breakthrough technology innovations to promote financial health globally. Janis Bowdler discusses the new fund, and two key approaches to bringing financial services to the world's poorest.
- Categories
- Investing, Social Enterprise
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The Economic Case for Sanitation
"The economic impact of poor or zero safe sanitation is catastrophic but preventable," says Mark La Trobe, international managing director of Enviro Loo. He believes his firm – which makes waterless, chemical-free toilets that use air movement and heat from the sun to reduce solid waste – is in prime position to make a global difference.
- Categories
- Health Care
- Tags
- public health
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Smallholder Farmers and Big Business: 5 Insights from the Field
Modern agricultural practices and new technologies have transformed the productivity and lives of large farmers, but often fail to reach small and very small farmers for a variety of reasons. However, some pioneer companies and organizations across the world have sustainably increased the income and livelihoods of millions of smallholder farmers, by sourcing produce from them or selling products to them. What do these pioneers tell us?
- Categories
- Agriculture, Impact Assessment
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Mobile-izing Savings with Defaults in Afghanistan
The number of people with phones is far higher than the number of people who have easy access to traditional bank branches, especially among the rural poor. Until now, however, no one has tested whether mobile banking can facilitate default savings programs. This is exactly what a team led by Innovations for Poverty Action set out to do in Afghanistan.
- Categories
- Impact Assessment, Technology
