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Press Release: WaterEquity Appoints Lauren Ferstandig as President
Founded by entrepreneurs Gary White and Matt Damon of Water.org, the success of WaterEquity is built on decades of collective experience investing in water and sanitation in emerging markets.
- Categories
- WASH
- Region
- Global
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From Nano to Investable: Why Formalising MSMEs Hasn’t Led to Scale, and What India Can Do About It
India has achieved something remarkable over the past decade: Millions of once-informal micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs) have been formalized, and it is now easier to start and register a business, and access credit and government programs and markets. But according to Pranshu Chhabra, Rudra Midhun Kumar and Chiropriya Dasgupta at Quiver, over 99% of these enterprises remain at the "micro" level, and the overwhelming majority of them are classified as “nano,” a subset of the lowest level of the MSME classification. They argue that while India has become very good at bringing enterprises into the formal system, it is struggling to help them move into their next stage of growth: becoming large enough to attract formal investment. They explore this challenge, explaining why the transition from nano to investable cannot be solved by capital alone.
- Categories
- Investing
- Tags
- governance, MSMEs, public policy, scale
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Analysis: AI Safety Is Designed in the West, and Failing Users Everywhere
English-focused guardrails fail in local dialects, causing dangerous medical misdiagnoses and denied public services.
- Categories
- Technology
- Region
- Global
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Financing AI Transformation in LMICs: What Multilateral Development Banks Must Do Differently
Multilateral development banks have spent the last decade building the foundations of digital economies across low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), and the broadband networks, digital ID systems and other priorities they've financed are helping to make AI deployments in these markets possible. But as Kunal Walia at Dalberg Advisors explains, this funding often goes toward piloting individual use cases, expanding digital infrastructure or creating an enabling environment, rather than uniting these different components into holistic AI systems that aim to scale. He argues that multilateral development banks must rethink their approach to ensure that the infrastructure they've helped build can actually enable AI transformation.
- Categories
- Investing, Technology
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Viewpoint: Why We Should All Be Worried About AI in Elections
"The more important question is not what happens when AI generates a fake video of a candidate, but what happens when it is embedded in the systems that administer elections themselves — in procurement decisions, biometric voter-verification systems, and data-sharing arrangements."
- Region
- Global
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Geospatial Startup NeoGeo Raises $20 Million from Neev II Fund and Aavishkaar Capital in India
"By optimising spatial planning, NeoGeo drives climate mitigation through measurable resource efficiency and carbon abatement, while simultaneously enabling climate-resilient development and adaptation through proactive hazard and vulnerability mapping."
- Categories
- Environment, Investing, Technology
- Region
- Asia Pacific
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South Africa Court Ruling Blocks Shell Offshore Exploration, Raising New Questions for Energy Investment and Environmental Governance
The dispute illustrates a growing tension in African resource-producing economies: governments seeking new sources of domestic energy, investment and fiscal revenue must increasingly reconcile those objectives with environmental safeguards, community rights and legal requirements for public participation.
- Categories
- Energy, Environment
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
- Tags
- blue economy, energy access, ESG, governance, mining, regulations
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The Catch-22 in Global Health Finance: Why Medical Oxygen is the Test Case for Turning Aid into Investment
By most measures, medical oxygen in sub-Saharan Africa isn’t an investable market. As Alex Losneanu and Jason Houdek at Oxygen CoLab explain, providing medical oxygen is capital-intensive and operationally demanding. That means small- and medium-sized oxygen suppliers typically stall out or get absorbed into grant-funded programs instead of becoming commercially viable, and funders conclude that these SMEs are too fragile to justify the investment risk. They argue that this conclusion is wrong, and also self-fulfilling, reinforcing a Catch-22 that exists across global health. They share findings from a supplier mapping project that show how emerging business models are enabling oxygen SMEs to scale, and propose three shifts in how catalytic capital can be designed to support these and other businesses across the global health sector.
- Categories
- Health Care, Investing
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