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Social Entrepreneurship & Social Innovation: Not the Same Thing
At the UN Social Innovation Summit held at the end of May in New York City, a plenary panelist stated that social enterprises and social innovation are “really the same thing.” This conclusion was not questioned and appeared to be a point of view the conference leaders and speakers were eager to adopt.
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(With Video) Tenda Atacado: Providing Credit, Business Services to a Network of BoP-Focused Stores Across São Paulo
In São Paulo, more than 60 percent of microenterprises fail within the first five years—often due to lack of access to credit. The failure rate for small businesses in developed countries is about the same, but not for the same reasons, of course. Most small entrepreneurs in Brazil are excluded from the financial system: banks are reluctant to lend them in the absence of credit history, depriving them from access to financial services or credit to grow their businesses.
This is where Tenda Atacado Ltda, a retailer and wholesale distributor in the state of Sao Paulo, enters this story.- Categories
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Guest Post: Sounding Off On Scale – At Rio+20, Big Energy Companies Talk Barriers to Access for All
Business Action for Sustainable Development (BASD 2012), a temporary coalition of 13 international business organizations, hosted more than 800 leaders of government, business, United Nations, NGOs, and other organizations at the BASD 2012 Business Day on June 19 in Rio de Janeiro. The event was held under the theme “Achieving Scale”, and formed the culmination of a year-long process to ensure the business input to the Rio conference was heard.
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- scale
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Say Hola to the Nuevo NextBillion en Español
We’re really excited to share what is the most substantial overhaul of NextBillion en Espanol (NextBillion Spanish) since its launch in 2008. Our sister site focuses on social enterprise development and BoP best practices across Latin America.
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Replicating M-Pesa: Mobile and Cloud Technology Spur Innovation in Financial Inclusion
Mobile technology and cloud computing are opening doors for low-income individuals and rural communities to financial services. Today, firms like M-Pesa and Ekgaon are paving the way for affordable banking products tailored to the needs of the BoP. But the question is: Can M-Pesa be replicated elsewhere.
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3 Lessons From Ideo For Designing The Best Social Enterprises
If you follow the design world, the name Ideo should sound familiar to you. The consultancy firm has worked on major products for some of the biggest companies in the world including Apple, PepsiCo, and Microsoft. But a little over a year ago, Ideo decided providing design solutions for corporate giants wasn’t enough, so they helped form a separate nonprofit organization called Ideo.org focused solely on delivering the firm’s unique human-centered design to nonprofits, social enterprises, and charitable organizations.
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Pearson to invest in low-cost private education in Africa and Asia
Pearson, the UK education company and owner of the Financial Times, has launched a £10m fund to invest in private schools in Africa and Asia aimed at providing affordable education for poor children.
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- Sub-Saharan Africa
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Ashoka Wins First Place In 2012 Global ‘Long-Term Capitalism Challenge’
San Francisco. Ashoka’s Full Economic Citizenship (FEC), an initiative founded by Ashoka’s Leadership Group Member Valeria Budinich, was named the first place winner of the 2012 Global Long-Term Capitalism Challenge, co-sponsored by the Management Innovation Exchange (the MIX), Harvard Business Review and McKinsey & Company.The announcement capped a day-long global gathering called the MIX MASHUP, where over 200 of the world’s most respected corporate executives, management consultants and thought leaders came together to share their transformative, disruptive management innovations. They gathered from numerous countries to learn which of them had won the top awards from three global competitions held during 2012 (Reinventing Management, Beyond Bureaucracy and the Long-Term Capitalism Challenge) and which corporation overall was voted “Management Innovator of the Year.”
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