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Clean vs. ‘Clean Enough’: How the Clean Cooking Industry Can Overcome its Struggles to Scale
Access to clean cookstoves and fuels has only increased by 0.5% per year, well below all global development goals. To turn this trajectory around, Jessica Alderman at Envirofit International argues that the industry needs to resolve a high-stakes debate: Should it focus only on the cleanest solutions that have the greatest health and environmental impacts? Or should it fund and promote technologies that have lesser impacts - but that are more affordable and likelier to reach the people who need them most?
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- Energy, Health Care, Technology
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UNDP and Samsung Unveil Global Goals Partnership
Samsung Galaxy phones will carry the Global Goals app that defines each of the 17 goals showing users how they can take small actions towards achieving the SDGs.
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- Technology
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Think Big: Behind a Push to Unlock Billions in New “Catalytic” Capital for Global Development
The Global Impact Investing Network’s (GIIN) 2018 Impact Investor Survey shows a diverse and growing market. But the survey also finds a “particularly” wide gap in “appropriate capital across the risk/return spectrum.” Of the $288 billion in impact investment assets today, only 5 percent are allocated below market.
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- Investing
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Viewpoint: How Philanthropy Can Help Impact Investing Reach Its Potential
To be sure, catalytic capital is not for all investors. Rather, it is one of a range of financial tools needed to supplement traditional grant making and conventional investing. But catalytic capital must be part of the solution if we are to address the Sustainable Development Goals’ massive funding gap, which is estimated at $5 trillion to $7 trillion.
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- Investing
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Solar Water Pumps Have Been Around Since the 1970s: Here’s Why They Haven’t Scaled
Solar water pumps, which have been around for years, are becoming far more affordable thanks to declining solar panel prices and new business models – particularly for the roughly 500 million smallholder farmers worldwide. So why isn’t the industry taking off? Makena Ireri and Jenny Corry Smith of CLASP, a group of 14 donor organizations working to scale markets and reduce the prices of off-grid technologies, present several reasons. They explore solutions for making solar irrigation systems a priority in the off-grid conversation.
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- Energy
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GSMA signs $46.5M funding partnership with DFID
The partnership will unearth critical insights on the needs of the underserved and identify and invest in mobile-enabled innovations and business models which can drive inclusion at scale.
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- Finance, Technology
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Turning Impact Intention into Impact Evidence: How to Put the GIIN’s IRIS+ Metrics into Action
Accounting for impact is notoriously difficult. And though impact investors have long turned to the GIIN's IRIS metrics as a standardized measurement tool, as SoPact co-founder Hetal Sheth points out, the IRIS metrics don't make impact strategy actionable. Now that the GIIN has reintroduced its standards with IRIS+, Sheth explores how the new metrics improve on the previous version – and how SoPact’s Impact Cloud platform can help investors use them to build a robust impact management strategy.
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- Impact Assessment, Investing
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Viewpoint: To Solve the World’s Problems, the Global Development Community Turns Towards the Private Sector
Global capital markets hold more than $200-trillion in assets, and an allocation of just 1 per cent of these assets toward the SDGs would go a long way.
- Categories
- Finance
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