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NexThought Monday – Second Chances in Global Development: How savings and lending groups can achieve what microcredit hasn’t
Jeffrey Ashe’s early research on behalf of USAID helped make microfinance a global development phenomenon. He now believes that savings and lending groups could have an impact that’s just as profound, but with a key difference: while microfinance struggles to reach the very poor, he says, savings and lending groups are expressly designed to meet their needs.
- Categories
- Uncategorized
- Tags
- savings
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Cash Versus Cows (Part 1): Looking at the benefits of asset versus cash transfer programs
Is it better to give a cow or cash? Are cash and asset transfers hand-outs or a hand up for the extreme poor? BRAC examined the two approaches, and in the first installment of a two-part post, it compares the impact of cash transfers versus physical productive assets like livestock, seed and agricultural inputs, or a bundle of goods for petty sales.
- Categories
- Agriculture
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Curbing the “Impact Impostors”: The growing movement toward transparency in impact investing
Impact investing’s rising popularity has spawned some unfortunate side effects. For instance, as demand for a social component has grown among investors, so have efforts to brand standard equity investments with the impact label – even when their actual impact is negligible. In the final post of his series, Bill Burckart details the efforts of policy makers, regulators and investors to address this issue.
- Categories
- Impact Assessment, Social Enterprise
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NexThought Monday – Why Did Vittana Close Down?: The real question: why don’t more organizations pull the plug?
Kate Cochran was part of a small team that decided to close Vittana, a nonprofit crowdfunding organization that aimed to spark student loan markets in the developing world. Cochran argues that more social enterprises, be they nonprofit or for-profit, should know when it’s time to call it quits.
- Categories
- Education
- Tags
- crowdfunding
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The Supply Chains of the Future: How Tau Investment Management is using strategic supply chain investment to transform the garment industry
Factory fires and collapses have killed almost 2,000 workers in Bangladesh’s garment industry in the past 10 years. Tau Investment Management is addressing these challenges by investing to create a better supply chain. Benjamin Skinner, Tau’s co-founder and senior vice president, discusses the approach in part five of our Impact Investing Insights video series.
- Categories
- Environment
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5 Success Factors for Technology Distribution and Adoption in the Last Mile
How can innovative technologies be distributed and adopted at scale in the last mile? This is a key question driving social enterprises and nonprofits aiming to leverage the power of innovative products designed for the poor. Kopernik, a nonprofit headquartered in Indonesia, has consolidated its observations into five key factors – factors that Project Manager Tomohiro Hamakwa hopes will be useful for other enterprises hoping to make market inroads.
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- Energy, Social Enterprise
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Who Is the ‘User’ In ‘User-Centred Design’?: When it comes to financial products, don’t discount the role of intermediaries
The obvious “users” of financial products are the end customers of the financial institution or mobile network operator. But as Graham Wright of Microsave notes, there is another very important “user” - the organization that will ultimately deliver the product.
- Categories
- Education
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Impact and Risk Metrics…in Smallholder Finance and Beyond: Three new metrics collaboration tools from the Initiative for Smallholder Finance
In financing smallholder farmers, there’s a gap of over $400 billion between demand and supply. Impact and risk metrics can play an important role in closing that gap, but current metrics are confusing to industry leaders and daunting to potential new entrants. The Initiative for Smallholder Finance has created three new metrics collaboration tools to help clarify the space.
- Categories
- Agriculture, Impact Assessment
