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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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Meet The Man Who’s Shaping Africa’s Future
VENTURES AFRICA – Just like the great American civil right activist Martin Luther King Jnr. had a dream of an equal social existence, so did Ghanaian-born entrepreneur, Fred Swaniker, dream to build a Pan-African school that will position the new generation of African youth towards prosperity in future years. His mission was to give the African child a network of successful peers to tap for job opportunities, mentoring and career guidance.
- Categories
- Education, Impact Assessment
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
- Tags
- microfinance
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The Dashboard Shift: A New Way to Present Data, Impact: Several new dashboards are blending data and storytelling in new ways
Data from which nothing is learned is wasted. At SOCAP 2011, Steve Wright, director of Social Performance Management at Grameen Foundation, shared his “8 rules of (social) enterprise efficacy measurement.” One of these rules is: metrics should be made public to encourage cooperation, alignment and emergence. In recent months, several dashboards have emerged as a popular way to share metrics.
- Categories
- Impact Assessment, Technology
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Handheld Poverty Fighters: Building the Killer Apps of Global Prosperity
Among many in the development space, connective technologies are either the cheat code to global prosperity or a false prophet obscuring the real challenges effecting the world’s poor. Officials as high-ranking as Secretary Hillary Clinton have called the spread of cheap cell phones and laptops a driving force against poverty even as many of their most promising applications are failing to deliver on scale.
- Categories
- Impact Assessment, Technology
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
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Off the Grid Solutions in Mobile, Solar Schools: Four mini case studies of business, nonprofit, CSR, models
Beep beep! For some students, hopping on the school bus is hopping into the classroom. Four communities are using solar-powered mobile classrooms to overcome inaccessibility to the power grid.
- Categories
- Education, Energy, Impact Assessment
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Release of 2012 MIV Survey – growth stabilizes in spite of lower rates and investor redemptions
Washington D.C., October 16, 2012 – Today MicroRate released The State of Microfinance Investment 2012, which finds that microfinance investment has stabilized into a lower growth rate following the global financial crisis.
- Categories
- Education, Impact Assessment
- Tags
- microfinance, research
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GlaxoSmithKline opens door on data in bid to aid discovery of medicines
British drugs company releases findings of clinical trials and announces new effort to find tropical disease cures
- Categories
- Education, Health Care, Impact Assessment
- Region
- Europe & Eurasia
- Tags
- research
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Can A Motivated Group Of People Change The Way Markets Work For The Better?
Criterion Ventures is trying to rebrand the idea of systems change, and change a few major systems--like the rules that govern the entire economy--along the way.
- Categories
- Impact Assessment
- Tags
- impact investing
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