NextBillion - A WDI Publication

Results

• News
  GSMA signs $46.5M funding partnership with DFID

  The partnership will unearth critical insights on the needs of the underserved and identify and invest in mobile-enabled innovations and business models which can drive inclusion at scale.

• Blog Post
  Turning Impact Intention into Impact Evidence: How to Put the GIIN’s IRIS+ Metrics into Action

  Accounting for impact is notoriously difficult. And though impact investors have long turned to the GIIN's IRIS metrics as a standardized measurement tool, as SoPact co-founder Hetal Sheth points out, the IRIS metrics don't make impact strategy actionable. Now that the GIIN has reintroduced its standards with IRIS+, Sheth explores how the new metrics improve on the previous version – and how SoPact’s Impact Cloud platform can help investors use them to build a robust impact management strategy.

• Blog Post
  Big Data, Big Opportunity: Is Data Science the Key to Universal Energy Access?

  Rural dwellers at the base of the pyramid are living largely "data-less," un-digitalized lives – but that's changing quickly with the spread of pay-as-you-go energy and the financial access it enables. In spite of the dangers of wrongly screening out customers as potential credit risks, denying them both further electrification prospects and access to credit, Guilhem Dupuy of GAIA Impact Fund and Thibault Lesueur of Solaris Offgrid take an optimistic view. They discuss why new off-grid energy data is an opportunity for increased investment, industry growth and economic justice.

• News
  Viewpoint: Moving From A***Hole Investing to Investing

  Daniel Madhavan, the CEO of Impact Investment Group, shares three things he doesn’t like about setting an allocation for impact investment and why it’s useless to put “impact” into a single unified bucket of delicious goodness.

• Blog Post
  Why Payment Fraud is a Critical Threat to Financial Inclusion – And How Mojaloop is Making it Worse

  The next key step in financial inclusion is payment interoperability, in which digital finance providers’ networks are connected to enable transactions between users of different systems. But though interoperability has major potential for the sector, it also comes with huge risks, says Clear Purchase founder Nick Brown, an expert in payment infrastructure. He explains why a massive payment fraud attack could do substantial and long-lasting damage to the financial inclusion movement, and how an open-source platform like the Gates Foundation's Mojaloop increases the risk.

• Blog Post
  Let’s Get Real: Energy Access is Leaving Everyone Behind

  Despite popular energy industry catchphrases like “leaving no one behind,” John Keane, the CEO of SolarAid and SunnyMoney, doesn’t buy the hype. While he sees much progress in new businesses, products and services entering emerging markets, Keane sees a tough road ahead for “smart, well-funded, entrepreneurs selling solar in the world” who also want to reach the poorest customers. Keane’s call to action includes re-prioritizing and re-focusing on the low-income customers the industry says it's trying to serve.

• Blog Post
  How Artificial Intelligence Can Simplify International Development Research: An Intriguing Experiment (Involving NextBillion)

  International development professionals must often spend a great deal of time trying to keep up with news, trends and research about their area of activity – and this requires a lot of manual labor. But much of this can now be automated and aided by artificial intelligence (AI). Jacob Rosen and Ashirul Amin at BFA explore how they used AI to sort and categorize a vast amount of development-focused content online, using NextBillion's 5,000+ article library as a test case. The results of their experiment show how AI can help people reduce time and labor and learn more efficiently.

• Blog Post
  Turning Impact Measurement on its Head: A Q&A with 60 Decibels Co-Founders Sasha Dichter and Tom Adams

  How should a social business measure its impact? The sector has always struggled to answer that question, leaving many enterprises and investors without useful data about the impact of their work. Acumen is addressing this issue by spinning out a standalone social enterprise called 60 Decibels, which leverages mobile technology to quickly and easily acquire impact data from low-income customers and beneficiaries. Co-founders Sasha Dichter and Tom Adams discuss its innovative model, and the potential it offers to investors, enterprises and the people they serve.