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Three Ways Inclusive Businesses Can Become More Customer-Centric
In any successful business, the customer always comes first. However, impact-focused enterprises often paint customers at the base of the pyramid with wide brush strokes, overlooking nuances in culture, location and literacy. Christian Jahn, Executive Director of the Inclusive Business Action Network, understands the desire to "help" poor people – but notes well-intended social entrepreneurs risk ignoring what their customers really want. Instead, Jahn recommends businesses develop a holistic view of customer needs, viewing them through a realistic lens for more meaningful impact.
- Categories
- Entrepreneurship
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Faster, Lighter Touch and Group-based: A Different Approach to Poverty Graduation
The poverty graduation model has continued to show great promise in helping ultra-poor people develop sustainable livelihoods. But Dianne Calvi of Village Enterprise points out that those programs, as currently practiced, are often too expensive to scale. In advocating a more streamlined approach to poverty graduation, Calvi reveals key findings from a randomized control trial involving some of the poorest households across 138 villages in rural Uganda.
- Categories
- Entrepreneurship, Investing
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The Secret to Social Business Scale? An Overlooked Need in Moving Past the Startup Phase
How can social entrepreneurs move from the startup phase into the growth phase? Whatever the focus of their business, entrepreneurs have to build capacity to benefit and employ more people as they scale – and this requires a unique set of skills. Carola Schwank at Siemens Stiftung Foundation discusses the crucial but often overlooked need of organizational development in social business, and describes how the foundation is helping entrepreneurs address it.
- Categories
- Entrepreneurship
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Does Rwanda need a law on social enterprises?
People running social enterprises in Rwanda are increasingly concerned that there is no law governing social enterprises in the country which could have provided tax exemptions for their companies.
- Categories
- Entrepreneurship
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
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Most Influential Post Nominee: There is Such a Thing as Too Much, Too Fast: Avoiding ‘Mismatched Expectations’ in Off-Grid Energy Investing
A recent post by impact investing firm Ceniarth on the "Energy Access Hype Cycle" has generated considerable discussion, prompting critical responses from fellow impact investors Persistent Energy Capital and the off-grid lighting trade organization GOGLA. With this post, writers at the IFC join the discussion, analyzing the effect of rapid growth rates, high levels of consumer financing and operational efficiency on the liquidity of solar home system providers.
- Categories
- Energy, Investing, Technology
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We need solutions that can be scaled up, and that too across diverse regions: Shrikant Sinha
Nasscom Foundation chief Shrikant Sinha talks about why he believes scalability is more important than pure innovation and how technology-led innovations can help India transform.
- Categories
- Impact Assessment, Technology
- Region
- South Asia
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‘Ready, Steady, Scale!’: A Practical Tool to Assess Your Social Business
To scale in base-of-the-pyramid markets, social ventures need to learn to operate and grow in complex, uncertain and resource-limited markets, and become highly adaptive to market and social context. That's why the MIT Practical Impact Alliance developed "Ready, Steady, Scale!" It's a guide to help inclusive business practitioners better understand their organization’s readiness for scale and to clearly identify opportunities for improvement.
- Categories
- Entrepreneurship
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Full Financial Inclusion in India? How the ‘JAM Trinity’ Can Help Businesses Make it a Reality
Changes in India’s financial inclusion ecosystem in the past 10 years have increased access, writes Prabhat Labh, CEO of Grameen Foundation India, but that's only part of the equation. More must be done to ensure poor families can actively use these services. Fortunately, the JAM trinity – Jan Dhan accounts, the Aadhaar ID system and mobile technology – has enabled completely new business models that scale processes for customer acquisition.
- Categories
- Entrepreneurship
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