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Village Capital Makes First Africa Ecosystem Fund Investments in Ghana
The initiative was created to support startups building solutions around economic mobility and climate resilience in Ghana, Nigeria, and Tanzania.
- Categories
- Investing, Social Enterprise
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
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The DIV Fund Issues Request for Proposals
Through its tiered model, the Fund provides financing for early-stage pilots, rigorous evaluation of promising solutions, and the scale-up of interventions with demonstrated impact and cost-effectiveness.
- Categories
- Social Enterprise
- Region
- Global
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Shell Foundation, Global Alliance for Mass Entrepreneurship, and Amazon India Announces New Programme to Empower Women Micro Entrepreneurs through Market Connect and Clean Energy Access
his collaboration addresses these challenges by connecting women-led businesses to new customers through Amazon’s Saheli program, which offers lower selling fees and specialized support, including account management and training.
- Categories
- Agriculture, Education, Social Enterprise
- Region
- Asia Pacific
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When Competitors Collaborate: How Eight Impact-First Investors Came Together to Confront the Valley of Death
The “Valley of Death” — the gap between early-stage capital and the scale-ready financing that social enterprises need to grow — is a perennial challenge in development finance. But according to Brigit Helms at Miller Center for Global Impact, investors rarely slow down enough to unpack why it persists, and what role they can play in closing it. She discusses the initial findings of a unique collaborative study conducted by eight leading impact investors — organizations that are both peers and competitors — who each contributed individual fund data to identify the cost of maintaining their impact-first models. As Helms argues, this expense is not an inefficiency to optimize away, but rather the true cost of closing the Valley of Death.
- Categories
- Investing, Social Enterprise
- Tags
- impact investing, research
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Analysis: Supercharging Network Intelligence
How network organizations can use AI to better understand and support their members in real time.
- Categories
- Social Enterprise, Technology
- Region
- Global
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Africa’s Firms are Not Growing—New Data Reveal a Jobs Challenge
Across 48 Sub-Saharan African economies, a firm that has operated for nearly three decades employs barely twice the workers it had at birth. The gap relative to high-income economies is large, structural, and costly.
- Categories
- Agriculture, Energy, Finance, Health Care, Investing, Social Enterprise, Technology, Telecommunications, Transportation, WASH
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
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Viewpoint: Impact Investing’s New Discipline
Impact investors are not asking for less impact — they are asking for more discipline. Drawing on conversations with investors across Miller Center’s network, Brigit Helms explores why execution, unit economics, additionality, and impact-revenue alignment are becoming central to the next phase of social enterprise finance.
- Categories
- Agriculture, Social Enterprise
- Region
- Global
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Analysis: Does Everything in the Social Sector Need to Scale?
In a world that no longer behaves like a scalable system, success must be something other than growth.
- Categories
- Investing, Social Enterprise
- Region
- Global
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