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Good Intentions Are Not Enough: How Microfinance Can Truly Serve Low-Income Women Entrepreneurs
Smaller businesses require smaller loans, which are generally less practical or profitable for financial institutions. Group lending solves these issues for institutions – but it’s not always ideal for customers, who often prefer an individual loan. With support from MetLife Foundation grantee Women’s World Banking, Egypt’s Lead Foundation set out to design and deliver this type of product – specifically to low-income women entrepreneurs.
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Adding the Secret Sauce: The Recipe for Turning Young Social Entrepreneurs into Impactful Leaders
Six years ago, Alanna Sousa couldn't even pronounce the word 'entrepreneurship,' but she soon fell in love with social entrepreneurship. Sousa recounts her journey from naively opening a 'consultancy for social impact' in her native Brazil to learning the importance of mentoring and coaching for success in the social business sector. She now works for the Global Good Fund, which trains young entrepreneurs to tackle urgent social problems.
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Why CEOs of socially responsible companies face a higher risk of getting fired
As a consumer, you may feel a little better knowing that stores where you shop pay their workers a fair wage, hire a diverse workforce and avoid polluting the environment. But if you’re a CEO trying to run your business in this way — known as practicing corporate social responsibility — you may actually be taking on an unexpected personal risk, a new study finds.
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Lusia Kiroyan: Empowering female inmates through batik-wearing dolls
Since setting up the Cinderella from Indonesia Center (CFIC) foundation in 2012, she has empowered over 740 female inmates at two penitentiaries in Riau Islands and one in Jakarta to make dolls with dresses made of used batik attire or fabrics.
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British Council: US Social Enterprises Make Strides but Lag on Gender Equity
The report, done in cooperation with the US-based Social Enterprise Alliance, is titled “From an Activist to Entrepreneur: The role of social enterprise in supporting women’s empowerment in the US,” and is meant to be the first in a series of country studies.
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Sanitation Solutions: Stop Using Water as a Resource
NextBillion sits down with Isabel Medem roughly two years after we first wrote about her sanitation company, x-runner. The firm, Peru's first certified B Corp., provides in-home sanitation in the slums of Lima, by combining portable, dry toilets and a weekly pick-up system. Here, Medem talks about the firm's progress and some of the challenges facing sanitation worldwide.
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This New Tool Helps Social Entrepreneurs Pick The Right Accelerator For Them
If you work on food security or clean water or pollution prevention–or on one of more than 30 other issue areas–the tool narrows a list of 750 accelerators to those that are most relevant. The tool also filters by the location a startup aims to help, the type of business or nonprofit, the type of help the accelerator can provide, and the stage of the enterprise, from an idea to a business with strong revenue.
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- nonprofits
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Giving Capitalism a Social Conscience
Yunus has recently written a new book, “A World of Three Zeros: The New Economics of Zero Poverty, Zero Unemployment, and Zero Net Carbon Emissions,” in which he argues that capitalism is in crisis and remains moored in a flawed conception of human motivation. He proposes a far more robust role in the economy for “social businesses,” which he defines as “non-dividend” companies “dedicated to solving human problems.”
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