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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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Making the market a force for good
When women in Haiti added fruit flavouring to purified water and sold it to their peers, an impromptu community business was born. While the main aim was a health-related one – the women used purifying sachets distributed after the 2010 earthquake to clean the water – the unforeseen knock-on effect involved women educating their peers about not drinking contaminated water and running their own mini-enterprise.
- Categories
- Impact Assessment
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Disruptive Sanitation: Can 3-Wheeled Carts and Better Septic Tanks Add Value to the Supply Chain AND Clean Up Jakarta?
A Mercy Corps project titled PUSH (Program of Urban Sanitation and Hygiene Promotion) undertook a market analysis of Jakarta’s sanitation industry. Funded by the Suez Environment Foundation, the project found a massive untapped market of potential customers in urban Indonesia. Around 94 million Indonesians live without access to sanitation services and 22 million people—more than two and a half times the population of New York City.
- Categories
- Health Care, Impact Assessment
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Mindful Metrics: Gaining Momentum With Social Enterprise Funders, Public and/or Private
Regardless of constituency – from donors to social enterprises to government development agencies – the momentum behind the metrics field is accelerating. Private funders are increasingly requiring investment enterprises to collect metrics – some are even specifying how the metrics are collected. Investors and donors are also soliciting new research on impact to inform what is and isn’t working in development. This research continues to push the envelope with new methods to collect metrics.
- Categories
- Impact Assessment, Investing
- Tags
- impact investing