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NexThought Monday: Franchising at the BoP – Identifying Best Practices: The book ‘Fairplay Franchising’ presents principles that apply across franchise models
Best practices for BoP franchise models are constantly evolving. New and existing franchises alike regularly look to one another for advice. Now they have another touchstone resource: Waltraud Martius and her book Fairplay Franchising. The book presents a set of principles that apply across franchise models.
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74 Million Served, and Counting: 10th Annual Class of Global Social Entrepreneurs Coming to Silicon Valley
SANTA CLARA, Calif., Aug 02, 2012 (BUSINESS WIRE) -- Anuj Sharma's startup company, Sarvajal, has found a way to bring clean water to thousands of households in rural India, who would otherwise have to walk miles or drink disease-causing dirty water. Sarvajal dispenses water from solar-powered, ATM-like machines. Customers pay around $3 a month with their cell phones, and special mobile technology alerts the company if there are problems with any of its 157 franchised machines.
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Waste Not, Want Not: Eco-Fuel Africa
Sanga Moses, is the founder of Eco-Fuel Moses recently applied for the WWF Switzerland Tropical Forest Challenge – a challenge that is working to identify the best for-profit solutions having a positive impact on tropical forest biodiversity in any of the 75 tropical forest-rich countries around the world.
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 - Energy, Environment, Technology
 
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NexThought Monday: Shape Up and Scale Up: The Value of Mentors for Guiding Impact Entrepreneurs (Part 1)
A recent study by I-DEV International analyzed incubator/accelerator models and best practices across the globe and determined that mentor and peer learning are, in fact, the strongest components of existing social incubator/accelerator models. Given their importance, we wanted to get a handle on the types of mentor programs currently offered by a few of these incubator/accelerator programs.
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The Art of ‘Nice,’ Putting ‘Care’ In African Healthcare
What’s the secret to attracting 300 patients a month to a brand new, three-room health clinic in a sprawling industrial area? It might be the free manicure/pedicure women receiver after paying for a full “head-to-toe” checkup, but more likely, it’s the value of Penda. In Swahili, Penda means love, and that’s the key to Penda Health Clinics, a new chain of low-cost health facilities in Kenya that puts “care” at the center of their business model.
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 - Health Care, Social Enterprise
 
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The Hidden Agenda at Rio+20
As everyone knows by now, the "main event" – the official negotiations among government leaders –was a disappointment. The general consensus among participants was that the official agreement, spelled out in agonizing detail in a document entitled "The Future We Want," would not produce the future we want. It is, at best, an exercise in rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. As the week wore on, it became clear to me that the so-called "side events" (organized by companies, NGOs, and consortia) had really become the main event.
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 - Environment
 
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Part III: Getting the Most Out of Your Board
If designed and managed correctly, a corporate governance board,strengthens, not weakens, the leadership of a social enterprise and helps to ensure the success of the social enterprise.
In last week’s post, we at the Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship discussed the first step: creating the right governance board for your social enterprise. The focus of this post is on managing the board once it is created.- Categories
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Village Capital seeks to help entrepreneurs with social purpose
Entrepreneurial accelerator programs, where early-stage companies can get advice and sometimes funding, are not uncommon.When 15 startup businesses got together in Atlanta this spring for a 10-week program put on by the nonprofit organization Village Capital, however, it was something different.
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