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African Entrepreneurs Win $400,000 in Catalytic Funding to Scale High-Impact Startups
Six African startups have been selected as winners of the 2026 FINCA Ventures Prize Competition, receiving a combined $400,000 in catalytic funding to accelerate their impact in key resilience sectors.
- Categories
- Social Enterprise
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
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Impact Entrepreneurship During the Polycrisis: An Interview with Laurie Lane-Zucker
The impact sector has proven that business can do good. But how can it make those impacts last, as the polycrisis puts communities, ecosystems and business models at increasing risk around the world? Those are some of the questions at the heart of a new book, “The Impact Entrepreneur Breakthrough: A Field Manual for the Regenerative Economy,” by Laurie Lane-Zucker, the founder and CEO of Impact Entrepreneur. In this interview, he shares guidance from the book — and from his decades of work as a pioneering voice in the impact space — on how the sector can navigate the growing complexity of the global challenges it faces today.
- Categories
- Social Enterprise
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Right-Sizing IMM: Five Ways Impact Measurement and Management Can Work for Enterprises — Not Just Investors
Impact measurement and management (IMM) systems too often reward compliance over impact, extracting more than they’ve given back. According to Julia Mensink at Acumen and Heather Esper at the William Davidson Institute, impact data tends to be focused mainly on satisfying investors’ requirements, not informing investees' decisions — and gathering it often ends up consuming enterprises' time and resources and constraining their ability to create the impact they’re expected to measure. They share learnings from a gathering of IMM experts earlier this year, highlighting several ways investors, investees and IMM professionals can right-size these practices, aligning them with enterprises' actual decisions and integrating them into their core operations.
- Categories
- Investing, Social Enterprise
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Viewpoint: Entrepreneurship is Changing and Education Needs to Change With It
"UNDP research shows how young founders are using innovation and digital tools to respond to challenges in areas such as education, healthcare, inclusion, and local economic development, while Global Entrepreneurship Monitor reports that 84% of early-stage entrepreneurs consider social and/or environmental impact when making business decisions."
- Categories
- Education, Social Enterprise
- Region
- Global
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Entrepreneurship Unleashed: Winners of 2026 Global Case Writing Competition
"The primary goal of this competition was to place students in the shoes of protagonists who are facing pivot points in their enterprises’ journey toward profitability, scale and sustainability. The winners received cash prizes in addition to the publication of their cases."
- Categories
- Education, Social Enterprise
- Region
- Global
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Moving Beyond Grants: How NGOs Can Diversify Toward Earned Revenue, and How Funders Can Support That Transition
The development sector has reached an increasingly firm consensus that it needs to depend less on grants as the aid landscape evolves, and strategies to generate earned revenue have emerged as a key solution for NGOs seeking to remain financially sustainable. But as Toon Driesen at the Enabel Innovation Hub and Alex Losneanu and Pritika Kasliwal at Brink explain, commercializing innovative solutions to complex societal issues typically costs money before it makes money, and early funding support often falls away before a business model can scale. They share research that reveals what NGOs must do differently to execute the transition to an earned revenue model, and explore how funders can help them implement these changes.
- Categories
- Investing, Social Enterprise
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An Important Update on ANDE’s Future and Sunsetting Operations
Danielle Baussan, Interim Executive Vice President for Policy Programs at the Aspen Institute has made the difficult decision to wind down ANDE’s operations and sunset the network by November 2026.
- Categories
- Education, Energy, Finance, Health Care, Investing, Social Enterprise, Technology
- Region
- Global
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Africa Ecosystem Catalysts Facility Expands into Nigeria with USD 450K in First Investments
Backing Trade Lenda and AirSmat, Nigerian startups advancing financial inclusion and climate-smart agriculture through fit-for-purpose capital.
- Categories
- Investing, Social Enterprise, WASH
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
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