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Africa Social Enterprise Forum 2009
As many of you know, today is the 2009 Africa Social Enterprise Forum in New York City, organized by Co-Chairs JerryAnne Heath and Magogodi Makhene. ASEC boldly confronts the notion that all the best thinking (and doing) in social enterprise comes from the West, and I applaud the organizers for making this distinction.
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Here’s Some Reading for the Weekend
I’m finally back home. While I enjoy almost every aspect of being on the go, traveling also implies an almost inevitable distraction from routines and habits that I cherish, many of which relate to reading. My mailbox was packed with good stuff and I’m currently working on a few pieces I thought I’d share for you to catch in the coming weekend.
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Changemakers Announces New Competition: Innovations for Improved Nutrition
Our friends at Changemakers point our attention to a recently launched competition that is very closely linked to the role of enterprise in development. Run in alliance with the Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition (GAIN), the competition is open to innovators with new ideas to expand and improve nutrition.
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E+Co’s Gold Standard – Lessons Learned?
E+Co, a mission-driven clean energy investor in developing countries, is working to implement strategies that enable Wall Street investors to put capital to work in developing countries through the carbon markets. To that end, they just announced that E+Co has successfully registered two energy efficient cookstove projects with the Gold Standard...
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Reconciling Social Motives and Profitable Means
Reconciling social motives with profitable means of achieving them is a fundamental, underlying tension - a constructive one, I think - in the development through enterprise space. We’re far short of consensus, but more and more people seem to buy the "why" and the "whether." What we’re discussing is increasingly the "how." This was reflected...
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BoP Conference Updates – A Busy Fall Ahead
For those interested in the base of the pyramid (BoP) space, it will be a busy fall as many conferences and events are upcoming. I’ve just updated the Take Action page here at NextBillion, but in case you are not in the habit of checking it regularly, here’s a rundown of the events coming up, along with some commentary.
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Anecdotes and Analysis: The Microfinance ?Bubble?
An article in The Economist brought to my attention an interesting debate about the possibility of an emerging ’bubble’ in microfinance. While news of a bubble is in itself extremely interesting, the argument also highlights a fundamental weakness we currently face in analyzing the BoP space: The lack of quantitative data to back our arguments.
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BoP Business Development and the Extractives Industry
BoP business development by definition should engage the community in the process from the outset. However, extractives projects can be scoped, planned, funded and largely executed before the community is involved in any meaningful way. That begs the question of whether BoP business development and the extractives industry are compatible.
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