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Welcoming the ‘Zeronauts’: Pushing Problems Toward Zero
John Elkington, who coined the phrase "triple bottom line," is jumpstarting a new dialogue. In an upcoming book, The Zeronauts: Breaking the Sustainability Barrier, he details 50 enterprises and their entrepreneurial champions who are all working towards zero: zero pollution, zero poverty, zero pandemics, zero population growth and zero nuclear proliferation.
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- Energy, Environment
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Bridging the ‘Financial Capability Gap’ to Financial Inclusion
Between 500 million and 800 million of the world’s poor have gained access to finance in recent years. But 25 percent or less of these individuals have received any form of financial training to help them make informed decisions about entire financial future. This represents the ‘financial capability gap." It’s the reason why today we are releasing Bridging the Gap: The Business Case for Financial Capability.
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- Education
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NexThought Monday: Combining Commercial Opportunity With Environmental Sustainability
The greatest potential for productivity gains lies in the millions of small-scale farms in Africa, Latin America and Asia. But as the pressure grows to produce more food, unsustainable practices like slash-and-burn agriculture and excessive tilling of cropland threaten ecosystems and contribute to climate change.
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- Agriculture
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In Tune With the SONG Fund: Investing in health in India
Who’s on top of the lightening-pace Indian impact investment space? One major player is the $17 million USD SONG Investment Company. Funded and owned by Google, the Omidyar Network, and the Soros Economic Development Fund, SONG was launched in 2009 to demonstrate that investing in SMEs can not only elicit shareholders returns, but also improve economic opportunities and jobs for the masses in India.
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- Health Care
- Tags
- impact investing
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Roundup – 3/3/12: Profiting Off the Poor, the Ends vs. the Means
So this week’s batch of articles primarily has focused on the growth of mobile money, be it in banking or in the form of an e-wallet. It also settled a key debate around profiting off the poor, at least between Vikram Akula, then the founder and CEO of SKS Microfinance, and Grameen Bank Founder Muhammad Yunus.
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- Uncategorized
- Tags
- microfinance
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The Big Idea: Taking Mobile Money Forward
The excitement of mobile money has been dampened by an inability of deployments to take hold outside a handful of successful markets. Driving the enthusiasm forward is the opportunity to bridge the gap between one billion people in emerging markets who have mobile phones but no bank account. On Tuesday, McKinsey & Company released a report “Mobile money: Getting to scale in emerging markets” seeking to cut through this excitement and identify critical success factors for implementation.
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- Technology, Telecommunications
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Touring the New NextBillion: New Jobs, Events Calendar
With the redesigned NB, we think we’ve made it easier to find, share and submit jobs; while keeping up with important dates on your social enterprise calendar. So let me take this opportunity to quickly walk you through these new features.
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- Uncategorized
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Learning From the Past, Looking Ahead: Highlights From Day 2 of the Harvard Social Enterprise Conference
“We really are at a crossroads,” The Economist’s Matt Bishop observed at the opening of the second day of Harvard’s Social Enterprise Conference. Bishop struck a theme for the day’s speakers: We’ve reached a point in time to rethink how markets work, and how more people can share in the benefits of the global economy.
- Categories
- Social Enterprise
