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When Awards and Idealism Aren’t Enough: My social enterprise earned a ton of public acclaim – but it was missing something even more important
In her early 20s, Leticia Gasca launched a social enterprise to help some of Mexico’s poorest people. Powered by idealism and some promising early results, the company garnered both national and international acclaim. But behind the scenes, it was struggling with the harsh realities of doing business. Gasca shares the story in this frank post, the first in our series with F*ckUp Nights on failure in social enterprise.
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- Social Enterprise
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This Antiseptic Was Brought to You By …: USAID guide mimics some market practices to speed ‘bench to bedside’
When it comes to global health, “people are good at inventing things but not always good at reaching scale,” according to David Milestone, senior adviser at the U.S. Agency for International Development’s Center for Accelerating Innovation and Impact. That’s why USAID developed “IDEA to IMPACT: A Guide to Introduction and Scale of Global Health Innovations,” which officially debuted on Monday.
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- Environment, Health Care
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How to Make Good on Gates’ Big Bets? : By doubling down on bundled solutions
The Bill and Melinda Gates’ 2015 letter identifies four “big bets” that could lead us to a future with vastly reduced levels of poverty. At the Grameen Foundation we are bundling two of these “bets” - financial services with practical information on good farming practices - into a unified push to reduce rural poverty.
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- Agriculture, Technology
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Twitter Top Ten 2-1-15: Our favorite tweets of the week
Welcome to Sunday! We hope you’re kicking back with a warm cup of coffee or tea, or perhaps something stronger depending on your tastes. And, we hope you enjoy our weekly assortment from Tweets from the week gone by.
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Weekly Roundup – New models to fund global health care
Lots of people have ideas about how to improve global health. Fewer have ideas about how to fund those improvements. We highlight possible innovations, plus an old debate to provide context.
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- Health Care
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Mind, Society and Behavior – and Financial Inclusion: How should behavioral research inform initiatives at the World Bank and beyond?
Paying attention to how people think, and to how history and context shape their thinking, can improve the design and implementation of development policies and interventions that target human behavior. What does this mean in practice? And how should it apply to financial inclusion efforts, and to the World Bank’s work in particular? Douglas Randall discusses.
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A Better Way to Get Paid? : Defining quality for ‘payroll cards’
For low-income employees who lack access to bank accounts, payday often comes in the form of cash or a paper check. But cash can easily be lost or stolen, and checks often require a costly or time-consuming visit to a check casher. Reloadable, prepaid "payroll cards" are a much better alternative, says Thea Garon at the Center for Financial Services Innovation, in describing CFSI’s new Compass Guide to Payroll Cards.
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- Tags
- digital payments
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The Overlooked Secret to Successful Small Businesses: The ‘demand side of financing’
The inability to access capital is a frequent obstacle for would-be entrepreneurs in the developing world. But most of the energy spent on solving this problem is currently focused on the financial industry, or the supply side. Instead, we should focus more attention on the demand side of funding – working with entrepreneurs, argues Juan Carlos Thomas of TechnoServe.
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