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Miller Center Capital Backs Manikstu Agro to Expand Goat Farming Livelihoods in Rural India
The catalytic loan will help scale government-subsidized livestock units for smallholder farming households.
- Categories
- Agriculture, Social Enterprise
- Region
- Asia Pacific
- Tags
- lending, scale, smallholder farmers
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Analysis: A Path Through AI Overwhelm
Many social impact leaders feel pressure to engage with AI but are overwhelmed and lack a clear starting point.
- Categories
- Social Enterprise, Technology
- Region
- Global
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How to Support Rural Social Enterprises: Three Key Learnings from a Field Visit in Malaysia
While global media coverage of the social enterprise sector often focuses on countries like India and Kenya, Malaysia remains relatively underrepresented in these conversations. Yet as Sreevas Sahasranamam at the University of Glasgow explains, the country has developed rich models of social innovation deeply rooted in indigenous knowledge systems, ecological stewardship and local resilience. He shares three key learnings from five community-led ventures, each of which demonstrates how practitioners and policymakers can best support rural social enterprises — not only in Malaysia, but globally.
- Categories
- Social Enterprise
-
High Expectations Require New Approaches: What Africa’s Social Innovators Need to Scale — And Why Support Systems Must Evolve
Social entrepreneurs are tackling some of Africa's biggest development challenges. Yet many struggle to scale beyond their initial promise, despite heightened expectations to deliver both jobs and social impact. And as Amabelle Nwakanma, Akolade Oladipupo, Abdullahi Ibrahim and Chukwuemeka Okeke at LEAP Africa explain, though accelerators, incubators and fellowships have proliferated across the continent to support these innovators, it's unclear if these programs are actually aligned with their current needs. They share insights from a study LEAP Africa conducted, with support from the William Davidson Institute, to better understand where current enterprise support models succeed, and where they fall short.
- Categories
- Investing, Social Enterprise
-
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
-
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
-
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
-
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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