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Shubham, which is focused on helping urban, lower-income families in India own a home through financing, lays out some of the problems it has encountered and issues it foresees in the informal home loan segment.
‘Seeing People for Who They Are, Not What They Can Prove on Paper’Blog Post
Starting an impact fund is HARD. New fund managers face a host of major challenges getting a fund off the ground. Dave Richards, managing partner and co-founder at impact fund accelerator Capria, shares three challenges and a few lessons on overcoming them.
The Challenges of Starting Your First Impact FundBlog Post
The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative set tongues wagging and some people pining for an "unlike" button to click on Facebook this week. But impact investing/philanthropy expert Antony Bugg-Levine is taking a wait-and-see attitude, saying, "It’s the doing, not the announcing, we need to judge."
Weekly Roundup 12-4-15: Did Zuckerberg and Chan Just Become the World’s Biggest Impact Investors?News
Making vaccines is a risky, oftentimes unenviable business. Vaccines are administered to healthy people who tend to be unforgiving if an adverse side effect or injury subsequently develops. The risk of being sued, even when a vaccine supplier follows best practices, combined with growing anti-vaccination sentiment, creates a climate that is not conducive to vaccine innovation. The dissuasive effect of litigation risk and legal liability is heightened both for vaccines aimed at diseases of poor countries, for which the financial inducements are weak anyway [1,2], and vaccines for public health emergencies, which are developed in accelerated clinical trials that may lack the statistical power or detailed follow-up necessary to detect rare adverse effects. Yet, as the West African Ebola outbreak demonstrates, the world can ill afford not to have vaccines against diseases of poverty in emergency situations [1]. Several reasons exist for not having a vaccine available, relating to the biology of the virus and the epidemiological challenges pertaining to evaluating a vaccine for a rare disease. However, financial incentives and disincentives for vaccine manufactures to invest in vaccine trials for rare diseases in resource-poor countries also need to be considered. We argue that, as one part of a comprehensive plan to promote vaccine development, there needs to be a plan to lessen the risks of litigation and liability to remove disincentives for these vaccines to be developed and later deployed. As others point out, no satisfactory plan now exists [3].
The Ebola Vaccine, Latrogenic Injuries, and Legal LiabilityNews
IBM IBM +0.00% and a large hospital system in India have partnered to diagnose and treat cancer care in a country of 1.2 billion residents who often cannot access oncologists, leaving their diseases undetected and untreated.
In India, IBM’s Watson Will Aid Cancer Care Where Doctors Are ScarceBlog Post
The number of people with phones is far higher than the number of people who have easy access to traditional bank branches, especially among the rural poor. Until now, however, no one has tested whether mobile banking can facilitate default savings programs. This is exactly what a team led by Innovations for Poverty Action set out to do in Afghanistan.
Mobile-izing Savings with Defaults in AfghanistanBlog Post
Held in the aftermath of the brutal Paris terrorist attacks, last week's European Microfinance Week conference had a special resonance. But the event also provided a hopeful response to recent grim headlines: it brought a strong focus to the ways the microfinance industry and broader financial inclusion movement can lessen the tensions that drive global conflicts – and how they can help communities recover when natural or man-made disasters strike.
Microfinance in a Dangerous WorldNews
About 150 participants drawn from the affordable housing value chain rose from a two-day affordable housing sector dialogue last Thursday with a call on government and developers to consider doing more in the provision of housing for the low income earners.
Developers Asked to Turn to Affordable Housing
