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High Expectations Require New Approaches: What Africa’s Social Innovators Need to Scale — And Why Support Systems Must Evolve
Social entrepreneurs are tackling some of Africa's biggest development challenges. Yet many struggle to scale beyond their initial promise, despite heightened expectations to deliver both jobs and social impact. And as Amabelle Nwakanma, Akolade Oladipupo, Abdullahi Ibrahim and Chukwuemeka Okeke at LEAP Africa explain, though accelerators, incubators and fellowships have proliferated across the continent to support these innovators, it's unclear if these programs are actually aligned with their current needs. They share insights from a study LEAP Africa conducted, with support from the William Davidson Institute, to better understand where current enterprise support models succeed, and where they fall short.
- Categories
- Investing, Social Enterprise
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Analysis: Five Times AI Hallucinations Embarrassed Governments
From the Trump administration’s “formatting errors” to South Africa’s historic policy withdrawal, AI confabulation is infiltrating official documents.
- Categories
- Technology
- Region
- Global
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Press Release: Early Climate Health Investments Generate 68-Fold Gains in Low- and Middle-Income Countries
The study finds that every $1 invested by low- and middle-income countries in these services can yield $4 to $68 in economic benefits, depending on local conditions and implementation.
- Categories
- Environment, Health Care
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
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When Competitors Collaborate: How Eight Impact-First Investors Came Together to Confront the Valley of Death
The “Valley of Death” — the gap between early-stage capital and the scale-ready financing that social enterprises need to grow — is a perennial challenge in development finance. But according to Brigit Helms at Miller Center for Global Impact, investors rarely slow down enough to unpack why it persists, and what role they can play in closing it. She discusses the initial findings of a unique collaborative study conducted by eight leading impact investors — organizations that are both peers and competitors — who each contributed individual fund data to identify the cost of maintaining their impact-first models. As Helms argues, this expense is not an inefficiency to optimize away, but rather the true cost of closing the Valley of Death.
- Categories
- Investing, Social Enterprise
- Tags
- impact investing, research
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Viewpoint: Who Really Uses Her Mobile Money Account?
While men generally operated mobile money directly, the women they interviewed in rural Ghana were largely dependent on an intermediary to complete even the simplest transaction: a husband, a daughter, a neighbor or a local agent.
- Categories
- Finance
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
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Analysis: AI Optimism Surges in Asia, Unlike in the U.S.
New research shows Americans are far less excited about AI — and far less trusting of regulators — than their counterparts across Asia.
- Categories
- Technology
- Region
- Global
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Analysis: Supercharging Network Intelligence
How network organizations can use AI to better understand and support their members in real time.
- Categories
- Social Enterprise, Technology
- Region
- Global
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Iran War Cuts LPG Flows as Charcoal Demand Spikes in Africa and India
Cooking-fuel costs spike across Africa and South Asia after the Iran war disrupts Gulf liquefied petroleum gas supply, with conservationists warning the return to charcoal and firewood could undo a decade of clean-cooking progress.
- Region
- Global
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