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Trending: Blending, The Fad for Mixing Public, Charitable and Private Money
MEETING the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals will require additional investments of $2.5 trillion a year in things like health care and education for the world’s poorest people, according to UNCTAD, a UN agency. A further $13.5 trillion is needed by 2030 to implement the Paris climate accord, according to the International Energy Agency, a watchdog group. It is enough to drive development types to drink—which may be how they came up with the term “blended finance”, a heady cocktail of public, private and charitable money.
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- Uncategorized
- Region
- South Asia
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Viewpoint: Business Fails the BOP
Businesses have made significant strides in the last 40 years, identifying innovations that make serving the world’s poorest profitable. Single-use packets developed by giants like Proctor and Gamble made fast-moving consumer goods affordable. Mobile technology leapfrogged conventional telecom in Africa, improving connectivity and reach. Capital inflows from micro-financing opened small business opportunities for billions. These innovations, and many others, have enabled multinational corporations to enter emerging economies and create profitable products and services at scale.
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- Uncategorized
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Viewpoint: Business Fails the BOP
Businesses have made significant strides in the last 40 years, identifying innovations that make serving the world’s poorest profitable. Although these innovations have unleashed markets, traditional for-profits have made two serious errors in serving the base of the pyramid (BOP).
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More Giant Rats On the Way. And That’s a Good Thing.
APOPO trains African giant pouched rats to sniff out tuberculosis (TB), a top infectious disease killer worldwide even though it’s curable and preventable. The program has proven successful in screening for TB in crowded prisons in Tanzania and Mozambique, and APOPO hopes to roll it out in at least six countries by 2020.
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- Health Care, Social Enterprise
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Glaxo promises to give world’s poorest access to its top treatments
Sir Andrew Witty, the outgoing chief executive of GlaxoSmithKline, has unveiled plans to make the company’s latest drugs available to the world’s poorest people at a fraction of the commercial price.
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- Health Care
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NexThought Monday – Moving Beyond Capital: Designing Technical Assistance that Works as Hard as Entrepreneurs
Technical assistance can be extremely valuable to early-stage enterprises, but they are a diverse group with different priorities, with limits on the amount of technical assistance they can absorb. Development partners have a responsibility to listen to the entrepreneurs they support and to think creatively about how to best deliver demand-driven, flexible technical assistance.
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- Health Care
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Telenor’s newest plans: Dial I for insurance in India
Late last decade, Uninor (a JV between Telenor and Unitech) was among the brash new entrants to Indian telecom, giving larger players sleepless nights. At the vanguard of a price war, Uninor offered rates as low as 29 paise per minute and came up with schemes like unlimited talktime for students at a flat rate of Rs 37 for calls within the network.
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- Technology
- Region
- South Asia
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Stepping in for Social Enterprises
With nearly a decade and a half of working in the social enterprises space, Paul Basil firmly believes that there is a huge gap in funding for-profit ventures that cater to the bottom of the pyramid. There are funds available at the angel space and then at the Series A stage, when the ventures get their first round of funding from VC firms. But, between the angel and the Series A stage, there is a huge gap.
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- Investing
- Region
- South Asia
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