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Viewpoint: CSR As a Seed Fund for Social Enterprises
Would it not be great if a corporate social responsibility (CSR) fund becomes a seed or social fund for investment in a cluster of a dying art or a traditional skill and transforms it into a success story? Or, how about a CSR fund that transforms an entire village into one where all households are digitally literate?
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- Uncategorized
- Region
- South Asia
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Weekly Roundup 11-6-15: Rotary provides blueprint against disease, but passion’s hard to duplicate
Polio has almost totally been eliminated and Rotary International deserves much of the credit. As an added bonus, this U.S.-based service organization composed of business and professional leaders has given the world a playbook to fight deadly diseases.
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Does Divestment Work?
Beginning in the early nineteen-eighties, students on college campuses across the U.S. demanded that their universities stop investing in companies that conducted business in South Africa, in protest of the apartheid system. As an example of social activism, the campaign was a phenomenal success: by the end of the decade, about a hundred and fifty educational institutions had divested. But did the campaign succeed in pressuring the South African government to dismantle apartheid? The answer is less obvious than you might think. The economists Siew Hong Teoh, Ivo Welch, and C. Paul Wazzan studied how U.S. divestment movements affected the South African financial market and the share prices of U.S. companies with South African operations. Divestments were expected, on average, to decrease share prices, but the study found that, in fact, political pressure turned out to have no discernible effect on the shares’ public market valuations. According to the authors, a possible explanation of this finding is that “the boycott primarily reallocated shares and operations from ‘socially responsible’ to more indifferent investors and countries.”
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- Impact Assessment, Investing
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When It Doesn’t Make Sense NOT to Invest: Tyler Norris of Kaiser Permanente on healthy communities and creating change
Tyler Norris, vice president of Total Health Partnerships at Kaiser Permanente, has spent more than three decades promoting better health, working in the public, private, nonprofit and civic sectors. A lot of his ideas are framed around the concept that healthy communities lead to healthy people and, therefore, community health should be a big part of impact investing.
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- Health Care
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Weekly Roundup 10-16-15: The built-in drama of SOCAP
The world of double-bottom-line investment is still in its infancy, relatively speaking, and it’s growing. The key players are still trying to understand each others’ motivations and how best to work together. That intricate, evolving dance between investors and investees is, at the end of the day, what SOCAP is all about, and why it’s so compelling.
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- Energy, Environment
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Tigo Pesa Helps in Tanzania’s Financial Inclusion
By ensuring that mobile money services are brought closer to the people in rural areas, the company is complimenting the government’s efforts to even out any imbalances that prevent the majority of upcountry people from carrying out financial transactions in a secure manner writes LEONARD MAGOMBA.
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- Uncategorized
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
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Viewpoint: Responsible Investing Needs Better Steering
The focus should now be on environmental, social and governance investing, along with funds and index products that use these criteria.
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Perspective: Corporate Social Responsibility has become a racket – and a dangerous one
It manipulated the pollution levels of its cars. It deliberately designed “defeat” software to fool regulators and, more importantly, customers into thinking it was hitting targets it was nowhere close to. And who knows, as the scandal unfolds, there may well be even worse revelations about the scale of corporate wrongdoing at the German car giant Volkswagen. It is now engulfed in a scandal from which the company may never recover.