-
Your Chance to Shape a Sector
Impact investing isn’t for the faint of heart, and forging the way forward on the next chapter of understanding and accelerating impact in our space is for the bravest of the brave. Yet we know that better answers are out there; we know that there is increased appetite to dig deeper and to find real lessons about what is and isn’t working and why.I’m hiring someone who wants to lead this charge.
- Categories
- Impact Assessment
-
Guest Post: Understanding Company Impacts on Development With a Few Useful Examples
How useful are impact assessment approaches? And how should a company decide what approach to use? The answer of course depends on why the company wants to assess impact. To help in understanding the options, the Business Innovation Facility has produced a two-page summary of approaches to assessing impact, with the strengths and weaknesses of each.
- Categories
- Impact Assessment
-
Welcoming Our New Content Partner: Mercy Corps
Mercy Corps’ status as both a relief organization responding on the ground to urgent post-disaster and post-conflict situations, and an organization developing long-term, market-driven strategies to develop economies, gives it an interesting perspective on the past, present and future of global development. That’s why I’m very happy to welcome the organization as a NextBillion Content Partner.
- Categories
- Impact Assessment
-
Investing for social impact reaps more than financial returns, says Al Tamimi
For Al Tamimi Investments (ATI), channelling its private capital for social benefit is reaping more than financial returns for its businesses.ATI was founded in 2006 by Emirati business leader Essam Al Tamimi and Rachael Wunsch, an accomplished venture capitalist from Australia. Using personal capital gained from the success of his law firm Al Tamimi & Company, ATI sought to invest in businesses that would enrich and bring value to the UAE community.
- Categories
- Impact Assessment
- Region
- North Africa & Near East
- Tags
- impact investing
-
NexThought Monday: European Impact Investing – Poised to Grow or Largely Irrelevant?
Last year, Ashoka’s Germany Director, Felix Oldenburg, took on – and took apart – impact investing as we currently know it, challenging it on a few specific points. Now, we share a telephonic debate between Oldenburg and Johannes Weber, founder of Social Venture Fund, the first pan-European social venture capital fund, who contests Oldenburg’s assumptions to push forward the dialogue on our much-discussed, much-anticipated new space of impact investing.
- Categories
- Impact Assessment, Social Enterprise
- Tags
- impact investing
-
Focusing on a Virtuous Circle Around Business Strategy and Impact Assessment
As a first-timer at the Aspen Network of Development Entrepreneurs (ANDE) Metrics Conference in Washington D.C. last month, I was surprised to see a packed room on the first morning of the conference. After all, this was a conference about a very niche topic – the techniques used to measure social and environmental impact within the embryonic industry of impact investing. Impact investing is a broad term that describes profit-seeking investments that also generate positive social and/or environmental impact.
- Categories
- Impact Assessment, Social Enterprise
-
NextThought Monday: Helping the BoP Design its Own Way Out of Poverty
Daniel Altman is an economist, writer and teacher with a deep commitment to international development. He’s had a revelation about the power of consumer products to create markets from the inside out, and he’s doing something about it.
Emerging Design Centers (EDCs) is a for-profit enterprise that puts cutting-edge design tools in the hands of the poor.- Categories
- Impact Assessment
-
PopTech: On Failure, Jedi Knights and the Edge of Social Change
I recently sat down with Executive Director and Curator Andrew Zolli, and PopTech President Leetha Filderman for a candid conversation on a broad spectrum of topics, from impact investing to the importance of failure, to the pace of social innovation and how PopTech sees its role as an accelerant. While best known for its leave-your-head-spinning conferences, it appears that what’s actually popping at PopTech is a lot quieter, slower and more fundamental than may initially meet the eye.
- Categories
- Education, Impact Assessment
- Tags
- failure, incubators