Social Enterprise
Lending in the Shadow of Colonialism
Financial program to help microenterprises in Tanzania fails to take historical context into account.
Financial program to help microenterprises in Tanzania fails to take historical context into account.
Philanthropy must hire outside the box, write the first check, and take unsolicited applications.
Increasing access to quality food worldwide requires money from investors for food-related enterprises. Blended finance can help boost their risk tolerance. A Viewpoint from the Summer 2020 issue.
Achieving the Sustainable Development Goals will require new funding mechanisms beyond overseas assistance. Though not without challenges, development impact bonds, including those launched to reduce maternal and child mortality, offer an encouraging option. A feature story from the Spring 2020 issue.
Businesses straddling the worlds of commerce and development offer the chance to address poverty at scale, but very few succeed. To improve them in India and elsewhere, investors and practitioners should note four common challenges and ask five simple questions.
Companies seeking to do business in low-income markets often make the mistake of transferring assets from higher-income markets to fill perceived gaps. They should instead look to partner with those who live in these markets and to identify the assets already available there.
Lower-income communities have stronger need for nonprofits but struggle to attract and sustain them.
The experience of the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves in accelerating investment, collective action, profitability, and impact provides lessons for other impact industries attempting to do the same in base of the pyramid markets across the developing world.
The world’s poor and low-income countries need greater access to modern energy solutions, including clean-burning fossil fuels for household use.
In accepting responsibility for social entrepreneurship, you and I accept the inescapable tension between two very legitimate impulses: the impulse to respect a community, and the impulse to change it.