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FEATURED EVENT – SOCAP14
SOCAP14 is the world’s leading conference on impact investing and social enterprise. Held at San Francisco’s Fort Mason Center from Sept. 2-5, SOCAP14 will unite innovators in business, tech, the sharing economy, health, philanthropy, and more to advance environmental and social causes.
This year’s theme "Igniting Vibrant Communities" challenges us all to look for vibrant communities when seeking evidence of successful impact.- Categories
- Uncategorized
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- impact investing
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Three Steps to Jumpstart Agriculture Mobile Payments: Step 2 – forming strategic alliances
In the second of a three-part series laying out three steps for embedding mobile money into agriculture development at the BoP, Lee Babcock explores the importance of strategically aligning large commodity buyers with mobile financial services providers and other supporting entities that work with smallholder farmers.
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- Agriculture, Technology
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Israeli Innovation Meets Rwandan Entrepreneurship: High-tech for Western markets is still the main focus of Israeli startups, but that’s slowly changing
Israel has the second-highest concentration of start-up companies after Silicon Valley, but most of this entrepreneurial energy has been focused on Western markets. This is slowly changing, with projects like kLab in Rwanda, writes Caylee Talpert, deputy director of the Pears Innovation for International Development Program at Tel Aviv University.
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- Technology, Telecommunications
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Make Your Clothes Worth Wearing: How global brands are (finally) investing in factory workers
Business for Social Responsibility (BSR), a nonprofit that encourages social responsibility in business, has made the case that teaching economic and health skills to workers goes beyond a nice corporate social responsibility campaign: it actually improves a company’s bottom line. In 2007 created HERproject, a training program for garment factory workers that has caught on among big manufacturers.
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- Uncategorized
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Achieving ‘Resilience’: Financial services beyond the scramble to survive
Since the Microcredit Summit Campaign began in 1997, the world of financial services for the poor has shifted from microcredit to microfinance—a broader range of formal and informal products and services. Resilience: The State of the Microcredit Summit Campaign Report 2014 reflects these changes with an interesting discussion of innovations that go beyond credit.
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- Education
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NexThought Monday – Creators, Not Just Consumers: Facebook and other global players are bringing transformative digital technology to the BoP – but will local economies benefit?
A budding tech industry can help transform emerging markets, says Chris Locke. But as global powerhouses like Facebook and Google focus on the BoP, will they build local jobs and economies, or act like digital extractive industries, mining personal data and using it to create value elsewhere?
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- Impact Assessment, Technology, Telecommunications
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Weekly Roundup (8/9/14) – Ethics and Africa: Controversy around a White House summit and an Ebola cure highlight tensions between the global north and south
This week, president Obama hosted nearly 50 African leaders at the White House to strengthen business ties with the continent - provoking cautious optimism and quite a bit of criticism. Meanwhile, a new development in the Ebola scare raised questions about the inequalities between rich and poor countries.
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- Health Care
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Watch the Replay of our Google Hangout with Margot Kane: A Q&A with Calvert Foundation’s VP of Strategic Initiatives
Margot Kane is VP of Strategic Initiatives at Calvert Foundation. She manages strategy development, fundraising and implementation of new investment initiatives and portfolios that target key impact areas like the revitalization of iconic cities. We discussed these initiatives and other impact investing topics in this live interview.
- Categories
- Impact Assessment, Investing
- Tags
- impact investing
