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The Art of ‘Nice,’ Putting ‘Care’ In African Healthcare
What’s the secret to attracting 300 patients a month to a brand new, three-room health clinic in a sprawling industrial area? It might be the free manicure/pedicure women receiver after paying for a full “head-to-toe” checkup, but more likely, it’s the value of Penda. In Swahili, Penda means love, and that’s the key to Penda Health Clinics, a new chain of low-cost health facilities in Kenya that puts “care” at the center of their business model.
- Categories
- Health Care, Social Enterprise
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The Hidden Agenda at Rio+20
As everyone knows by now, the "main event" – the official negotiations among government leaders –was a disappointment. The general consensus among participants was that the official agreement, spelled out in agonizing detail in a document entitled "The Future We Want," would not produce the future we want. It is, at best, an exercise in rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. As the week wore on, it became clear to me that the so-called "side events" (organized by companies, NGOs, and consortia) had really become the main event.
- Categories
- Environment
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Part III: Getting the Most Out of Your Board
If designed and managed correctly, a corporate governance board,strengthens, not weakens, the leadership of a social enterprise and helps to ensure the success of the social enterprise.
In last week’s post, we at the Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship discussed the first step: creating the right governance board for your social enterprise. The focus of this post is on managing the board once it is created.- Categories
- Social Enterprise, Uncategorized
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Village Capital seeks to help entrepreneurs with social purpose
Entrepreneurial accelerator programs, where early-stage companies can get advice and sometimes funding, are not uncommon.When 15 startup businesses got together in Atlanta this spring for a 10-week program put on by the nonprofit organization Village Capital, however, it was something different.
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- Uncategorized
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Business fighting poverty
For nearly 100 years, Africa has been a key driver of Anglo American's business success. Almost 40% of our assets remain in South Africa. Three of our seven main business groups (platinum, iron ore and thermal coal) and two of our key associates (diamonds and manganese) operate out of South-ern Africa. These are all globally competitive businesses and we are investing in them: $20bn in capital expenditure in South Africa over the last 10 years, and a future growth pipeline of almost $15bn.
- Categories
- Uncategorized
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
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Weekly Roundup: Extending Customer Credit – the Way to Scale?
This week we received the exciting news that VisonSpring has sold more than one million pairs affordable eyeglasses customers living at the Base of the Pyramid. But for every VisionSpring, surely there are countless other social startups that have failed to reach scale, and not necessarily because they are marketing an inferior product. It might be because their customers cannot reasonably afford to make a purchase, even one as “small” as $10. This is the need identified by Invested Development, which announced the creation of the Impact Factoring Fund, (IFF) that looks to provide short-term liquidity and working capital to early stage, high-growth companies in emerging markets.
- Categories
- Energy
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NexThought Monday: In Failure, a Marketing Lesson for Social Entrepreneurs: What we can learn from the closing of The Hoop Fund
The Hoop Fund was built on a truly innovative premise: Allow consumers to purchase premium goods from small businesses in the developing world, while simultaneously supporting those businesses with microloans. Unfortunately, the model suffered from critical gaps in marketing strategy, which made it almost impossible to achieve scale.
- Categories
- Education
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Weekly Roundup: This BoP Exit Brought to You, Courtesy of the Cloud
This week atyati technologies, a leading technology platform provider for the rural banking sector in India, with 2.5 million end users was purchased by Genpact, a $1.9 billion global leader in business process and technology management. The acquisition marks one of a handful of instances where a BoP-focused private initiative has been acquired in a mainstream transaction.
- Categories
- Uncategorized
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