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The Tupperware Effect: Can Direct Sales Help Women Living in Poverty?
While direct sales presents a potential career path for Americans looking for work, most of the growth for companies like Tupperware and Avon is happening abroad-specifically, in emerging markets like Africa and Indonesia. The presence of these companies in poor nations have provided a much-needed chance for women to gain economic independence. It’s been a successful partnership on both sides, and the impact of these companies is s...
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BoP Career Paths: Interview with Chris Laurent of MicroVest
In this series, NextBillion brings you Baase of the Pyramid career path stories and best practices from across the BoP industry spectrum. Today’s post features an interview with Chris Laurent, Business Development Officer at MicroVest; a capital-mobilizing intermediary for microfinance institutions.
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New Business Models for Sustainable Trading: Part 4
It’s easy to hate the middle men. These invisible actors in the supply chain are often portrayed as shady characters who create little "value", instead contributing to higher prices at the grocery store register and lower wages to farmers. What do they do, anyway?
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Students: Make the Most Out of the Recession
I’ve been chatting with a number of my students in Social Venture Creation about their commitment to their projects post class. To my delight, many are strongly considering moving forward to launch because of the state of the jobs market. And even better, they are recruiting their colleagues to join on!
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Finding the Efficient Frontier of Financial and Social Returns
One of the most heavily-attended panels at the Harvard Social Enterprise Conference this year was titled: Social Impact Investing: Putting Your Dollar to Work in the Developing World. Moderator Amit Bouri opened with a question for the audience: "How many believe that to increase social impact, financial investors must sacrifice financial returns?"
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Find Out What Works. Then [Find A Platform to] Spread It.
A couple of months ago I had the pleasure of meeting Toshi Nakamura, co-founder of Kopernik, an interesting venture that is addressing the challenge of technology dissemination at the base of the pyramid.
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Developing a Rigorous Methodology to Assess Impact
As more BoP ventures begin to think about measuring impact, many have questions around how to do so. This post explores some important issues to think through when developing a rigorous methodology to assess impact.
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Kenya Dispatch – M-PESA to the Rescue
Since its introduction in 2006, I have been obsessing over an innovative little cell phone service called M-PESA. Launched by Safaricom ? Vodafone?s subsidiary in East Africa ? the M-PESA service allows Safaricom customers to transfer phone credit wirelessly, through SMS.
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