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How One Investment Fund Is Tackling America’s ‘Glaring Inequality’ Problem
Acumen, a New York-based nonprofit global venture fund, today announced it has begun investing in US startups aimed at serving underprivileged Americans.
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- Impact Assessment, Investing
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Acumen Launches Acumen America to Tackle Poverty in the United States in Partnership with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Barclays and The Hitachi Foundation
Acumen, the nonprofit global venture fund, announced today the launch of Acumen America, a portfolio of American social enterprises focused on tackling poverty within the United States. Since its founding in 2001, Acumen has invested $101 million to build nearly 100 innovative enterprises addressing the problems of poverty in Africa, South Asia and Latin America. Now, after 15 years, the organization is bringing its impact investing model to the U.S. to help address the biggest issues facing the nearly 47 million people living in poverty. With the support of Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Barclays and The Hitachi Foundation, Acumen is building a portfolio of U.S. companies with a focus on health, workforce development and financial inclusion.
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- Uncategorized
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Viewpoint: It’s Time to Green Our Financial Deserts
Since 2010, more than 5,000 bank branches have closed in communities across the United States. Meanwhile, expensive alternative financial service providers like check cashers and payday lenders continued to proliferate at an alarming rate. Not surprisingly, these two trends have disproportionately impacted hard-working people of color, trapping roughly 9 million African-American families in a world where it costs more to have less.
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- Uncategorized
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
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Want to Serve the World’s Poorest Citizens? Take Your Company Public in India
For the last 15 years or so, there has been lots of hype about “business models” that will alleviate global poverty while turning a profit. It was a premise derived from the success of the microfinance industry in providing credit to some of the poorest people in the world, who, contrary to conventional wisdom, had a higher repayment rate than the typical borrower. As the late Dr. CK Prahalad hypothesized in his landmark book, “The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid”, there are several strategies that organizations fighting global poverty need to master – and that those capabilities are in abundance in the private sector. They are better at marketing. They are better at R&D and understanding price points. And they are good at partnerships when it serves their purposes. The public and non-profit sectors, alternatively, are generally not very good at any of these things.
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- Uncategorized
- Region
- South Asia
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Trending: Blending, The Fad for Mixing Public, Charitable and Private Money
MEETING the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals will require additional investments of $2.5 trillion a year in things like health care and education for the world’s poorest people, according to UNCTAD, a UN agency. A further $13.5 trillion is needed by 2030 to implement the Paris climate accord, according to the International Energy Agency, a watchdog group. It is enough to drive development types to drink—which may be how they came up with the term “blended finance”, a heady cocktail of public, private and charitable money.
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- Uncategorized
- Region
- South Asia
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Weekly Roundup: The (Possible) Impact of President Trump or Sanders on Emerging Economies
We avoid politics on NextBillion, but in ways that truly matter to our readers, this U.S. presidential campaign has invaded our territory. Many observers in recent weeks are taking a hard look at what a Donald Trump or Bernie Sanders presidency would mean for emerging economies. In this post, we examine some of the possible repercussions of two key policies advocated by the candidates.
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- Uncategorized
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Financial Products are Available – Why Aren’t the Poor Using Them?: IPA is seeking research partners to help answer that question
Take-up of mobile financial products remains low, and usage rates are often disappointing. That's why Innovations for Poverty Action is facilitating research to test solutions to this problem. We're republishing this post, which originally ran last July, since IPA is re-opening its fund for research proposals. The new deadline for Expressions of Interest applications is April 29, 2016.
- Categories
- Education
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What Africa Will Look Like in 100 Years
As Africa's population looks set to quadruple over the twenty-first century, The Telegraph digs into the data to reveal the opportunities - and challenges - facing a fast-changing continent
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- Uncategorized
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa