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‘If You Break It, You Fix It’ and Other Creeds of the Young Makers Among Us
The makers: These are people who see a need for something in their own lives — or the lives of their neighbors, or schoolmates, or industry peers — and instead of complaining, or buying something, they make it. They make alternative energy, and bicycles, and computers, and crafts, and food, and furniture, and GPS devices, and robots, and tools, and toys, and wearable devices, and magic.
- Categories
- Education, Technology
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Inclusive Compliance: The New Playing Field for Inclusive Business Innovations
Not all supply chains are the same, and not all of them are limited to structured factories or facilities. Difficulties arise when monitoring labor standards in informal sectors, such as evaluating environmental or social standards. This was the driving force behind inclusive compliance.
- Categories
- Agriculture, Impact Assessment
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Runa Tea’s Low-Calorie, High-Impact Model: With revenues reaching $1M Runa is generating income for 2,000 farming families.
A great-tasting, caffeine-containing, calorie-conscious tea WITH a sustainable environmental impact? I didn’t think such a product could exist until I looked into Runa Tea, one of the latest brands in the business with social impact space. Currently, Runa has revenues hovering around $1,000,000 annually and in turn is generating over $100,000 of direct income per year for 2,000 farming families. Founder Tyler Gage shares the inspiration behind the company.
- Categories
- Agriculture, Health Care, Social Enterprise
- Tags
- nutrition
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NexThought Monday: Sharpening the Social Impact Lens: Why We Need a Broad, but Clear View on Impact Measurement
Despite the challenges, financial institutions can still work to understand the shape of their impact. One promising way is to organize activities around an issue, creating a social lens through which to contextualize and focus investing. From there, an organization can determine how they’re best able to address the issue, which in turn determines appropriate investing filters and social performance metrics. The case of investing through a gender lens is an encouraging example of this strategy, where investing organizes around women’s economic empowerment and access to quality healthcare.
- Categories
- Impact Assessment
- Tags
- impact investing
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Weekly Roundup: Being the Change, With Humility
Earlier this month, the IFC released a report called "Being the Change: Inspiring the Next Generation of Inclusive Business Entrepreneurs Impacting the Base of the Pyramid." It’s based on interviews with 14 founders and CEOs of IFC’s inclusive business clients. These are truly inspiring stories about how BoP businesses are formed and the personalities that drove an idea to reality.
- Categories
- Education
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Uncorking Bottled Light: A Study In Energy Access, Acceptance: A pilot project is testing solar ‘bottle’ lamps to curb illegal energy usage
Traditionally, slum dwellings are dark, one-room structures with no window or passage through which sunlight can enter. As a consequence, slum residents end up using illegal electricity lines to power light bulbs in their homes. In Dhaka, this illegal consumption amounts to approximately 275MW of electricity per year. Sajid Iqbal, a budding entrepreneur and environmental science and management student, sees a market opportunity.
- Categories
- Energy
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Advancing Impact Investing Platforms… Promise and Peril!: We can’t always assume all investment strategies must scale
Impact Investing is not a single hammer looking for all the nails in the world—it is a diverse and dynamic approach to creating innovative applications of capital in appropriate ways to maximize potential impact. While the promise of investment platforms is, uh, promising, it is important we not start our discussion with the assumption that all investment strategies must scale!
- Categories
- Uncategorized
- Tags
- impact investing, scale
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Testing Assumptions About Women and Technology
Many at LifeSpring, including outreach workers themselves, agree that the hospital could benefit from digitally collecting information about its clients. But nobody was very excited about trying it. The reason: Most existing mobile health (mhealth) solutions are built on SMS (short message services, or simply text message) platforms, and LifeSpring was not confident about its outreach workers’ ability to use text messaging – or even about their ability to navigate and comprehend a text-based data collection system.
- Categories
- Education, Technology
