-
NexThought Monday: Social Financing: Three Opportunities and Three Questions
Combining the creation of social impact with financial returns is hard. Demonstrating social impact can be just as hard, and using impact analysis to actually improve a social investment strategy so that it creates greater social impact and financial returns is even harder. This is the challenge social financiers set themselves, and social impact analysis is needed to help them rise to meet it.
- Categories
- Uncategorized
- Tags
- impact investing
-
Weekly Roundup – 10/11/14: The Battle of Kenya
Has the battle for Kenya’s mobile money market officially begun? For months we’ve been following the growing tension between Equity Bank and Safaricom, as everyone from regulators to politicians took sides. But this week the war may have begun in earnest - though both parties continue to downplay the rivalry. We discuss the implications in this Roundup.
- Categories
- Technology
-
SC Johnson Expands BoP Product Initiative in Ghana
This week SC Johnson announced it was expanding the business concept, called WOW, to Yilo Krobo District of southeastern Ghana, and will begin offering newly-bundled mosquito control products as well as home-cleaning products. This comes two years after the initial pilot in Bobikuma, Ghana.
- Categories
- Uncategorized
-
Beyond the Metros: Exploring Western and Southern India’s Jaipur, Pune and Thiruvananthapuram
Villgro’s Unconvention|L team and Okapi Research, which are visiting nine tier III cities in India to map regional social enterprise ecosystems and outline highlights and insights. In today’s post they focus on Western and Southern Indian towns Jaipur, Pune and Trivandrum.
- Categories
- Uncategorized
- Tags
- incubators, scale
-
‘Positive, though not transformative’: Recent research clarifies the impact of microcredit, and points to ways it can improve
Recent research suggests that microcredit may not be targeting the world’s poorest as effectively as was once thought, says IPA. But these studies also tell a story of positive, though not transformative, results. They point to the importance of diversification of the traditional microcredit model, providing additional services in finance and beyond.
- Categories
- Impact Assessment
-
Direct-to-Farmer Finance: Business models for serving the hardest-to-reach smallholders
An estimated 90 percent of smallholder farmers lack strong relationships with buyers, limiting their access to finance, inputs, training and other support. And it’s difficult for financial providers to reach them. That’s why direct-to-farmer finance is so important, says Dalberg’s Laura Goldman. She discusses a new briefing on the approach from the Initiative for Smallholder Finance.
- Categories
- Agriculture, Education
-
If (When) At First You Don’t Succeed …: Multinationals are refining marketing strategies to reach the BoP
Proctor & Gamble’s PUR water filter famously tanked, failing to yield a competitive return. Eventually the business model disintegrated into a purely philanthropic effort. Other multinationals are learning the lessons from PUR and adapting.
- Categories
- Uncategorized
-
Band-Aids Won’t Fix Ebola: Long-term solutions in resource-poor settings will require innovative technologies and strategies
Ebola can be contained and its mortality rate reduced in functional health systems that provide a basic standard of care, even in emergency conditions. Poor countries currently lack these systems, but they can be developed through innovative technologies and strategies.
- Categories
- Health Care
