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Enter Unreasonable Labs: Trial and error on a global scale
Teju Ravilochan, CEO of the Unreasonable Institute says the social enterprise organization needs "co-conspirators" to help them forge a new system of trial and error. They’re looking for 10 teams from 10 locations around the world to run 10 Unreasonable Labs, five-day versions of Unreasonable Institute with 10 ventures each.
- Categories
- Impact Assessment, Social Enterprise
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MIT-USAID Program Releases Pioneering Evaluation of Solar Lanterns
When a person lives on less than $2 a day — as some 2.7 billion people around the world do — there isn’t room for a product like a solar lantern or a water filter to fail. It’s a challenge development agencies, nongovernmental organizations, and consumers themselves face every day: With so many products on the market, how do you choose the right one?
- Categories
- Energy, Impact Assessment
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Who Asks the Question May be as Important as the Question Itself: When the surveyed become the surveyors, monitoring and evaluation becomes localized
With Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E) moving into the mainstream of the development industry, it’s time for NGOs to start documenting their programs in deeper ways. One way to do that, according to Semilla Nueva, is to localize the process.
- Categories
- Agriculture, Impact Assessment
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Assessing ROI in Educational Development: In India, assessment tools are still lacking, but change is coming
In India, there is a growing realization that quality of school education has to significantly improve in India, particularly for underprivileged students. Prachi Windlass at the Michael & Susan Dell Foundation says a wider dialogue on applying a robust assessment framework to education in India is needed.
- Categories
- Education, Impact Assessment
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Curbing the “Impact Impostors”: The growing movement toward transparency in impact investing
Impact investing’s rising popularity has spawned some unfortunate side effects. For instance, as demand for a social component has grown among investors, so have efforts to brand standard equity investments with the impact label – even when their actual impact is negligible. In the final post of his series, Bill Burckart details the efforts of policy makers, regulators and investors to address this issue.
- Categories
- Impact Assessment, Social Enterprise
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Impact and Risk Metrics…in Smallholder Finance and Beyond: Three new metrics collaboration tools from the Initiative for Smallholder Finance
In financing smallholder farmers, there’s a gap of over $400 billion between demand and supply. Impact and risk metrics can play an important role in closing that gap, but current metrics are confusing to industry leaders and daunting to potential new entrants. The Initiative for Smallholder Finance has created three new metrics collaboration tools to help clarify the space.
- Categories
- Agriculture, Impact Assessment
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Innovations in Education: What CEI has learned in its first year, and what’s ahead
In its first year, the Center for Education Innovations has documented close to 500 programs serving the poor in more than 135 countries. Next up: Understanding more about what works, why and how.
- Categories
- Education, Impact Assessment
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Leading From the Front: How we helped develop the Truelift Assessment Tool, and why MFIs should use it
There will always be skepticism about the microfinance industry’s initiatives to promote transparency. Nevertheless, Freedom from Hunger CEO Steve Hollingworth says that organizations like his are working to refocus the sector on poor clients’ needs. He describes how Truelift, a global initiative to promote accountability and learning in pro-poor development, advances that goal.
- Categories
- Impact Assessment
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