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WDI Partners with Villgro Africa and Haskè Ventures to Scale R&D Impact Voucher Model Across Seven African Countries
R&D impact vouchers connect small and mid-size enterprises (SMEs) with public research organizations through affiliated researchers, enabling businesses that might otherwise lack resources to access cutting-edge scientific expertise while providing African researchers with access to SMEs that they normally would not be exposed to.
- Categories
- Investing
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
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What Drives Corporate Philanthropy in Asia: Exploring the Region’s Unique Approach to Giving
As Asian wealth has surged in recent decades, so has the region’s corporate philanthropy. According to Gwendolyn Lim and Denise Chew at the Bridgespan Group, the 20 top Asian corporate funders alone commit an average of $3.7 billion annually to social and environmental causes. They explore the factors that are driving this trend — from Asian business culture to government CSR policies — and discuss three widely used approaches to corporate giving in Asia, as highlighted in a recent Bridgespan report.
- Categories
- Investing
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Press Release: UNICEF and the GIIN Join Forces to Integrate Child Outcomes Into Impact Investing
The collaboration will result in tools and guidance that help investors to measure, manage and optimize their impact on children.
- Categories
- Investing
- Region
- Global
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Addressing the Communications Breakdown in Global Development: How AI-Enabled Assessment Tools Can Reach Excluded Communities
Development work can only be effective if it’s based on the actual needs and lived experiences of the communities it aims to serve. But as Talía Jiménez Romero at Fortell Impact explains, in many of the remote, under-resourced areas where this work is most needed, the voices of local people are often the hardest to hear, due to barriers related to language, education, and lack of access to the internet and other technologies. She explores how AI can be leveraged to facilitate data collection and needs assessments in these multilingual and low-connectivity contexts, while complementing the work of local teams on the ground.
- Categories
- Technology
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The Impact Sector is Confusing Satisfaction with Impact: Rethinking the Growing Reliance on Perception Surveys
Measurement standards in the impact sector have shifted toward perception surveys — i.e., forms that ask individuals to rate their personal experience with a program or organization — to quantify success. But as Juan Taborda Burgos, Jorge Bouchot and Miranda Hansen at Root Capital argue, perception-based metrics can mask a program’s ineffectiveness, potentially leading organizations to scale interventions that do not work. They share insights from a recent Root Capital report that reveal the downsides of relying solely on perception data, and offer four actionable principles that can help leaders navigate the pressure to demonstrate impact — while avoiding costly mistakes.
- Categories
- Agriculture, Investing, Social Enterprise
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Viewpoint: The Economy That Remembers: Institutional Amnesia and the Regenerative Correction
Modern capitalism has perfected a hidden discipline: the systematic design of economic systems that forget. What we call “externalities” are not costs that disappear — they are consequences displaced. The regenerative economy, at its core, is not simply greener or more inclusive. It is an effort to build systems that remember.
- Categories
- Investing, Social Enterprise
- Region
- Global
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Spiro Secures $50 Million to Boost African Expansion
Spiro, Africa’s electric mobility leader and battery swapping pioneer, today announced the raising of $50 million in debt funding from Afreximbank and two new investors Nithio and Africa Go Green Fund managed by Cygnum Capital. The new funding follows Spiro’s landmark $100 million investment in October 2025, which became Africa's largest-ever electric mobility investment.
- Categories
- Energy, Transportation
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
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Press Release: IDB Lab to Invest $8 Million in AgVentures III Fund to Advance Agtech Innovation
Fund manager SP Ventures' impact thesis is to generate social benefits for vulnerable populations by supporting technologies that democratize access to productivity and efficiency for small- and medium-sized farmers.
- Categories
- Agriculture, Investing
- Region
- Latin America
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