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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
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A Formula for Social Innovation?: Reflections from the UN Social Innovation Summit, 2012.
At last week’s United Nations Social Innovation Summit in New York, all manner of change agents - from social entrepreneurs, to philanthropists, industry titans, impact investors and celebrities stretched the confines of a term that, admittedly, gets thrown around haphazardly and can mean different things to different people. What exactly is “social innovation?”
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- Impact Assessment, Technology
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NexThought Monday: Mindful Metrics – A Conversation With GBF’s Metrics Officer
This guest post from the Grassroots Business Fund is part of a short series on approaches to metrics, leading to the upcoming Metrics Conference from the Ground Up Conference later this month hosted by the Aspen Network of Development Entrepreneurs. Allison Basile joined the Grassroots Business Fund (GBF) in 2009 and serves as its metrics officer, a role in which she oversees the organization’s metrics and environmental and social management
- Categories
- Impact Assessment, Investing
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Catchafire matches talented volunteers with opportunities to serve
Tom D’Eri needed some help. In September of last year, he co-founded a small social enterprise that helps people with autism find employment. He quickly realized that he needed some outside assistance with things like branding and website development, topics that he didn’t have much experience with himself.
- Categories
- Impact Assessment
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How Financial Innovation Can Save the World
Financial innovation got a bad rep in the financial crisis. But inside the well-barricaded Federal Reserve Bank in downtown San Francisco last month, the financial engineers were at it again.
- Categories
- Impact Assessment
- Tags
- impact investing
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Bottoms Up: A Thought Experiment on Designing for Social Impact
I have been a participant in several student-led communities lately that demonstrated some of the social principles of biomomicry: The Social Enterprise Boot Camp (a collaboration between Columbia, NYU and SVA Design for Social Innovation), GES (Global Engagement Summit at Northwestern) and the NYC Creative Interns. While they still may not have cracked the code for how we will evolve to become a sustainable species, they provide enough hope to keep us all working at it.
- Categories
- Education, Impact Assessment
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