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Award-Winning Startup Targets Affordable Medicine for Every African
MPharma is one of five social businesses to receive awards from the Skoll Foundation at this week’s Skoll World Forum, Britain’s leading event for social enterprise.
- Categories
- Health Care
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
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Press release: IIX awarded S$1.2M from Australian government to develop ecosystem for gender lens investing in Asia
With a decade of experience building the impact investing market and driving women’s empowerment across the world, IIX will leverage its ecosystem and gender-focused approach to support the growth of 500 impact enterprises across Asia.
- Categories
- Investing
- Region
- Asia Pacific
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The Social Innovation Paradox: Why it’s Hard to be Both Innovative and Scalable
Feeling good about using an organic cotton tote bag for groceries, instead of disposable plastic bags? Research suggests that you'll need to use it 20,000 times to offset the high water costs of growing the cotton. That's just one example of the unseen web of impacts behind seemingly positive interventions, says Bright Simons, president of mPedigree. Interventions with more concrete impacts are more often penalized for their negative side effects, he says – but they're also more likely to scale. Simons explores the resulting paradox: The most scalable interventions become risk-averse, sacrificing innovation for growth.
- Categories
- Entrepreneurship, Impact Assessment
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A New Ally in Cocoa Sustainability
Acumen partnered with Hershey to publish Cocoa Interrupted:The Role for Social Enterprise in Cocoa Sustainability. The report presents an opportunity for the cocoa industry to bring new ideas and new solutions to the challenges facing cocoa farmers and their communities through collaboration with social enterprises.
- Categories
- Agriculture
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
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Paycheck, Please: Why Jobs Are Better Than Charity
Those of us who “won the zip code lottery” by being born in a prosperous country often take for granted something that’s out of reach for many people around the world: a stable and satisfying job. Suzanne Skees explores how the Skees Family Foundation leverages the power of dignified, secure jobs to fight poverty – and highlights what they've learned from partner organizations about how to maximize the impact of job creation efforts.
- Categories
- Entrepreneurship, Investing
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OPIC commits $8 million to support small farmer microlending in Myanmar
Proximity Finance, which designs its loans to meet the particular needs of smallholder farmers, is the microfinance arm of Proximity Designs, a social enterprise dedicated to serving Myanmar’s rural families.
- Categories
- Agriculture, Finance
- Region
- Asia Pacific
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African e-health startups secure $1.5m Skoll Foundation grants
African e-health startups mPedigree and mPharma are among the five organisations to have been awarded US$1.5 million in grant funding after winning the 2019 Skoll Awards for Social Entrepreneurship.
- Categories
- Entrepreneurship, Health Care
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
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When college is out of reach, this academy trains Ugandans to be entrepreneurs
Uganda has one of the world’s youngest, and highest growing populations; a whopping 68 percent of Ugandans are under the age of 24. Few of those young people have formal jobs. Less than 3 percent of the Ugandans aged 15 to 24 are officially employed, according to World Bank figures. About 90 percent work informal jobs, where they do not pay taxes but also receive no benefits and few worker protections.
- Categories
- Education, Entrepreneurship
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
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