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Turning Impact Measurement on its Head: A Q&A with 60 Decibels Co-Founders Sasha Dichter and Tom Adams
How should a social business measure its impact? The sector has always struggled to answer that question, leaving many enterprises and investors without useful data about the impact of their work. Acumen is addressing this issue by spinning out a standalone social enterprise called 60 Decibels, which leverages mobile technology to quickly and easily acquire impact data from low-income customers and beneficiaries. Co-founders Sasha Dichter and Tom Adams discuss its innovative model, and the potential it offers to investors, enterprises and the people they serve.
- Categories
- Entrepreneurship, Impact Assessment, Investing
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Omidyar to Support Three Emerging Market Think Tanks Exploring Appropriate Use of Digital Identity
Omidyar Network has invested in a trio of organizations from different regions to support enhanced understanding of the appropriate use and limits of digital identity.
- Categories
- Technology
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PayPal Makes Its First-Ever Investment in a Blockchain Startup
Neither PayPal nor Cambridge Blockchain disclosed the investment amount, but recent filings with the SEC indicate that Cambridge Blockchain has raised a total of $3.5 million in new equity from several investors over the past nine months.
- Categories
- Technology
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Digital Lending To Small Business in India Set To Surge, Says BCG-Omidyar Report
As the number of digital lending platforms rise and the availability of data around small businesses improves, digital lending to the country’s micro small and medium enterprises could surge, said a report co-authored by consulting firm BCG and philanthropic investor Omidyar Network.
- Categories
- Finance, Technology
- Region
- South Asia
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Open the Spigot: The Way We Think About Impact Investing is Too Narrow
You hear about it all the time in impact investing reports, articles and blogs: The lack of deal flow. But Tanner Taddeo of ChangeSquare believes the industry's challenge isn't a lack of investible companies, but rather the industry’s narrow definition of impact and how it "blinds" investors to companies that are creating impact in other industries and geographies. Taking a more holistic, rather than plug-and-play approach, will contribute to a broadening definition of impact and subsequently open the spigot for deals, he argues.
- Categories
- Entrepreneurship, Investing
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Viewpoint: Move beyond mere trade-offs in impact investing
We’ve seen a remarkable increase in the diversity of impact investors, each with different impact goals and investment strategies. But we’ve also seen an increasingly polarized debate about whether impact investing requires a trade-off between financial return and social impact.
- Categories
- Investing
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India has a growing impact investing industry, but can it scale?
India’s impact investing market has grown rapidly in the past few years — the total value of impact investments in India since 2010 has been $5.2 billion, according to a McKinsey report — and $4.2 billion of that is since 2015. In that time, average deal sizes have increased — from $7.6 million in 2010 to $17.6 million in 2016, though the number of investments has stayed between 60-80 a year.
- Region
- South Asia
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The Vanishing American Dream: The Long Road to Financial Stability
The American economy is growing. Unemployment is down, incomes are inching up and the days of the Great Recession are but a distant memory... except for one thing: A shocking 57 percent of the country—approximately 138 million Americans—are struggling to make ends meet. Jennifer Tescher of the Center for Financial Services Innovation and Tilman Ehrbeck of Omidyar Network say the time to address this crisis is now. They share some promising innovations – and a new research tool – that could help.
- Categories
- Finance
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