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Affordable Housing: Where Success Favours the Brave
Affordable and mid-income housing is a beast like no other. It has a business model that bears little similarity to traditional real estate where developers often rely on price appreciation. Here, the margins are a lot lower, and builders must construct township-like projects quickly. A delay can wipe out profits, while buyers don’t have the ability to pay EMIs if projects are held up. Despite these challenges, three companies—Ashiana Housing, Poddar Developers and Value Budget Housing Corporation (VBHC)—have decided to focus on this segment.
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- Uncategorized
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Creating Your Own Luck: 5 Crowdfunding Tips for Social Entrepreneurs
Whether it involves smart watches or potato salad, it seems that every week brings another story of a crowdfunding campaign gone viral. And with $16.2 billion in annual funding, the industry represents a valuable opportunity for social enterprises large and small. Here are five tips that can help a social business launch a successful campaign.
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- Social Enterprise
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Six Years, Many Lessons: Scaling Impact from the Ashoka Globalizer Program
Why don’t great ideas that are useful and working effectively to solve some of the most pressing social challenges “travel” as well as business ideas do? An organization doesn’t have more impact the bigger it becomes, in fact, it’s quite the opposite … and this became our mantra and our working hypothesis at the Ashoka Globalizer Program.
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- Uncategorized
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Financial Inclusion on the Final Frontier: After years of isolation, Myanmar must build inclusive finance from the ground up
After decades of isolation, a new government is helping Myanmar rejoin the rest of the world, drawing a flood of new investment. But with 80 to 90 percent of its population lacking access to formal financial services, this investment could fail to fully impact the country’s poor. Accion CEO Michael Schlein discusses the need for new entrants to approach this market with social values and principles.
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- Uncategorized
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In Ghana, the Diaspora is Fueling a Social Enterprise Liftoff : Often well-funded, well-educated returnees are contributing to a ‘brain gain’
Social enterprise in Ghana is taking off and Ghanaians returning from living and studying abroad are playing a key role. But are there lessons from the returning diaspora that could strengthen social enterprise activity even more? A recent British Council and ODI study explores the landscape.
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- Education, Social Enterprise
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Twitter Top 10: 4-12-15
New resources. New partnerships. Even a cool new toilet. This week’s Twitter Top 10 is full of fascinating ideas and useful info, and you can help us get a head start on next week’s list. If you see anything interesting in the Twitterverse, you’re welcome to tweet it to our editors.
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- Agriculture, Education, Energy, Health Care
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Avoiding Death by a Thousand Cuts: How a Young Social Enterprise Weathered a Series of Microfailures
David Santillán Giles thought everything was on track with his young social enterprise. But he soon found himself dealing with a string of unforced errors that would put his company in jeopardy. He discusses these mistakes and what he learned from them in the latest post in our series on failure in social enterprise.
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- Social Enterprise
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The Missing Link in Africa’s Tech Eco-System: From idea to biz plans, we need more pre-incubation – and this is how
There are now more 100 tech hubs across Africa. While we have been successful in creating spaces for innovators, the next task ahead of us as an ecosystem is to develop services that help young innovators to better define the problem they want to solve and develop a truly convincing value proposition that can scale.
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- Technology