Interviews

Wednesday
October 11
2017

NextBillion Editor

Wednesday at SOCAP17: Tweets, Live Interviews, & Quick Takes from Impact Investing’s Flagship Event

SOCAP17 is kicking into high gear, and NextBillion’s team of roving reporters will be providing a variety of on-the-ground coverage, including:

  • Facebook Live video interviews: See our schedule of upcoming interviews here, and check out the videos on our Facebook page, or embedded in our daily coverage posts (below).
  • Live tweeting from our main Twitter account, @NextBillion.
  • Interesting quotes, tweets and takeaways from the panels and discussions we’ll be attending, compiled in blog posts published today (see below) and Thursday.

If you’re at the event, stop by the media room in the Festival Pavilion and say hello!

 

A live Q&A with Tahira Dosani, Managing Director, Accion Venture Lab

Tahira Dosani directs Accion Venture Lab, a seed-stage impact investing initiative focused on financial inclusion. In this Q&A, she discusses the rewards (and risks) of using mobile tech to serve low-income customers, ways to lower risks to scale for innovative fintech companies, and some innovations and enterprises that are drawing Venture Lab’s attention.

 

 

A Live Q&A with Rosa Lee Harden, co-founder of socap

Rosa Lee Harden calls SOCAP an “oasis” for the worlds of business, investment, social impact and sustainability – to name just a few groups that don’t often come face to face. They’re coming into far closer contact today compared with about 10 years ago, when SOCAP first launched. Harden, who along with her husband Kevin Jones, launched the conference, which this year has attracted more than 3,000 attendees. She stopped by the media room for chat about how SOCAP has evolved, how they measure impact from the conference and what it means for impact investing to hold the “moral high ground.”

 

 

A Live Q&A with Ceniarth director Greg Neichin

Ceniarth director Greg Neichin wrote some of the most well-read (and controversial) NextBillion posts of 2017, tackling the unexpectedly touchy topic of whether impact investing is contributing to a “hype cycle” in off-grid energy, and why impact investors should be willing to make “necessary and realistic concessions” to generate real social impact. We spoke with Neichin about both of these topics – and several others – in this live and characteristically frank interview.

 

 

A Live Q&A with MacArthur Foundation’s Debra Schwartz

On Tuesday evening, NextBillion continued our illustrious SOCAP tradition of screwing up our first Facebook Live interview of the conference due to unexpected tech issues (see last year’s sideways interview with Eric Stephenson of the Cordes Foundation for a cringe-worthy example). This year, our interview with Debra Schwartz, Managing Director, Impact Investments at MacArthur Foundation was briefly muddled by audio issues – the audio is very low (but audible) until around the 7:50 mark, after which it normalizes, getting much louder (be careful with your ears, if you’re wearing headphones). We thank Debra for her patience with our snafu, but especially for sharing her fascinating insights into MacArthur’s approach to impact investing, and her deep knowledge of the sector. Watch the interview below:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Categories
Investing, Social Enterprise
Tags
impact investing, interviews, social enterprise