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Daniel Izzo on Brazil’s First Impact Investing Venture Capital Firm
Recently, the Opportunities for the Majority (OMJ) Initiative of the Inter-American Development Bank hosted Daniel Izzo, co-founder and partner of Vox Capital, Brazil’s first impact investing venture capital firm, which focuses on high potential businesses that serve the Brazilian low income population through products and services with the potential to improve their lives. In addition, Vox Capital is the first Brazilian fund OMJ is investing in.
- Categories
- Social Enterprise
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Scratch it Off the Public Health Wish-list: A menu of IT solutions for global health challenges
Observing the widespread use of ICT, coupled with intense interest from the global health community—witness, a few of my colleagues at the Center for Health Market Innovations set out to figure out why programs used technology. To answer this question, they analyzed more than 600 programs in over 100 countries—the contents of CHMI’s database at the time. Their findings, published in this month’s WHO Bulletin, highlight six key reasons health program managers adopt ICT.
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- Health Care, Social Enterprise, Technology
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NexThought Monday: Complexity is the New Black
NYT columnist David Brooks recently called on social enterprise types to take a dose of realism. I argue it’s time to accept full responsibility for changing politics as part of social impact. If in attempting to improve some economic or social aspect of people’s lives we aren’t also improving their political standing and the rule of law, any economic or social impact remains temporary.
- Categories
- Education, Social Enterprise
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Tools of the Trade: Building a Robust Deal Pipeline of Impact Companies in Emerging Economies – Part 3
What are the biggest lessons learned when it comes to finding high-quality companies in emerging markets? I posed this final question to our virtual panel of impact investing leaders who recommended teaming up with other investors to providing appropriate financing, making sure to select companies with a core social/environmental mission, embracing creativity, and embedding capacity building into the process.
- Categories
- Environment, Social Enterprise
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Transformational Entrepreneurship: Where Technology Meets Societal Impact
The slow decline of industrial manufacturing in developed nations and recent failures of financial capitalism across the globe have sent us searching for a new model of economic growth. I see the two movements of Technology Entrepreneurship and Social Entrepreneurship beginning to converge into a promising solution.
- Categories
- Impact Assessment, Technology
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B Corps Go Global: Sistema B Certifies South American Social Enterprise
Last fall, a small group of social entrepreneurs from South America met to discuss how to foster more social enterprise in the region and create more bang for the buck at existing enterprise. The result was Sistema B, the first effort to adapt the American system of B Corporations—which ease operations for companies that combine profit and social good—to a foreign setting.
- Categories
- Impact Assessment
- Region
- Latin America
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Guest Post: A Healthy Dose of Idealism – How David Brooks Got it Wrong
New York Times columnist David Brooks recently criticized social entrepreneurs for being too idealistic and out of touch with the realities of politics in developing countries. In response, Echoing Green’s Nidhi Chaudhary says Brooks fundamentally misses the point.
- Categories
- Education, Social Enterprise
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‘Citi and SEDC Working for Capacity Building’
Citi Pakistan and the Social Enterprise Development Centre (SEDC) at LUMS are collaborating on a capacity building project, supported by $50,000 grant from Citi Foundation.