GRADIAN I: Spinning Out A Commercial Entity From A Nonprofit Foundation
A healthcare provider in Malawi delivers anesthesia using Gradian’s UAM Globally, 2 to 3 billion people lack access to adequate surgical care.1 Of the more than 230 million major surgical procedures performed worldwide each year, patients in low- expenditure countries receive just 3.5 percent of the total, even though they account for 34.8 percent of […]
Living Goods: Improving Health, Improving Incomes
Mary is a typical mother living in a rural Ugandan village. She has two options when one of her four children falls sick. Her first and allegedly cheapest option is walking long distances to a public facility, where she will spend hours waiting in the heat and in many cases find that free treatments are […]
Design Expo 2014 – Google Hangout Video – The Business Model Behind the Bright Idea
Persistent Energy Partners Look To Solar Horizon
Editor’s note: This is the first of a two-part article on Persistent Energy Partners and its first acquisition in Ghana. In part two, we take a closer look at PEP’s first acquisition and its position in the pay-as-you-go solar sector for low-income markets. In some ways, the business model for delivering products and services to […]
KARIBU Solar Power: Making Quality Solar Affordable
From Dream to Reality Initially started by then-banker, Adam Camenzuli, and his friends from York University (Canada) in 2012 our team seeks to address one of the many issues hindering African economic development: kerosene usage. Did you know that over 500 million people across Africa have little to no access to safe sources of light […]
Making Bluetooth Work For Rural Low-Income Families
By Vincenzo Capogna, Innovation Manager, SunnyMoney SunnyMoney is a social enterprise founded by London-based charity SolarAid and we are the largest seller of pico-solar lights in Africa. A pico-solar light is a compact portable device that uses a photovoltaic panel to produce up to 10watts of power. Combined with advanced batteries and LED bulbs it […]
GravityLight: Designing for the BoP
Globally, 1.3 billion people do not have access to electricity. Millions more are ‘under-electrified’, with unreliable and sporadic supply. Instead they typically rely on kerosene for lighting. Hazardous, expensive and polluting, there is a real need to replace kerosene with a safer, sustainable and affordable light. GravityLight was born from a challenge by SolarAid to […]
Inclusive Business In Asia – Abuzz With Potential
Photo: Selling fish in Myanmar Asia, the most populated continent, is well used to fast growth. But as the call for inclusive growth gets stronger, attention is turning to inclusive business. During April and May the team at the Practitioner Hub for Inclusive Business have been in touch with a host of contributors across the […]
In Defence of Fair Trade
The School of African and Asian Studies – SOAS – has just produced a coruscating critique of fair trade. The research report is based on field work among wage workers on coffee and flower farms in Ethiopia and Uganda. It finds ‘unambiguously’ that Fairtrade has made no positive difference to wage workers. It finds that […]
Working For The Common Good
Fairtrade’s new Workers’ Rights Strategy has thus far focused on increasing the benefits of Fairtrade for workers on large commercial farms. However, we also recognise that many small producer organizations and their members also employ waged workers and that the number of such workers is increasing as a result of the growth of Fairtrade and […]
Announcing the 2014 Design Expo Schedule
We are one week away from the start of the 2014 Design Expo! Running from 9 to 13 June, the Design Expo is an online celebration of products, services and business models transforming the lives of poor people. The Design Expo is a collaboration with iDE UK and is being supported by the UK’s Department […]
A 'Coopetitive' Business Model For Financial Inclusion
“Same: Same, but different” – We have all seen this printed on t-shirts across the world. It is a similar story here in Nepal with the shared access mobile financial services platform “Hello Paisa” – that is now beginning to scale up. The Hello Paisa platform is currently live with 8 partner banks – and […]
Profit Follows Purpose
“There is considerable potential for business and social impact goals to align.” That sentiment was heard repeatedly at the 2nd TA Initiative Summit, held May 5-7 in Nairobi, Kenya. Organized by Acumen, the 3-day event brought together intrapreneurs from global corporations and social entrepreneurs from throughout East and West Africa to explore the potential for […]
Haiti: Leading in the Production of Quality Apparel
Three high-level business leaders just did what others might think is too risky and counterintuitive. Joey Adler, the CEO of Diesel Canada and founder of the OnexOne Foundation; Richard Coles, the owner of Multiwear, one of Haiti’s leading apparel manufacturers; and Rob Broggi, a former hedge fund executive, created a company to demonstrate that Haiti […]
Announcing the Business Fights Poverty Design Expo 2014
A creative revolution is underway around the design of products and services that transform the lives of poor people. But perhaps the most exciting activity is around combining design innovation with business model innovation, so that social impact can be achieved on a massive scale. With 1.4 billion people living in extreme poverty, it is […]
How Haiti is Becoming a Leader in the Production of Quality Apparel
Three high-level business leaders just did what others might think is too risky and counterintuitive. Joey Adler, the CEO of Diesel Canada and founder of the OnexOne Foundation; Richard Coles, the owner of Multiwear, one of Haiti’s leading apparel manufacturers; and Rob Broggi, a former hedge fund executive, created a company to demonstrate that Haiti […]
MNCs and Social Enterprises: Learning from Each Other?
As investors in businesses that are impacting lives, we at Acumen see the potential for business to make a difference, but we also know that taking this impact to scale will require creative new partnerships. At a Summit in Nairobi last May, we and our partner Dow Chemical launched the Technical Assistance (TA) Initiative – […]
Everything You Wanted to Know About Inclusive Business
The eLab provides an introduction to managers who are tasked and set to create business with low-income communities. It is designed in a way that fits every managers schedule, while providing the most important insights every IB manager should be aware of. Let’s review these two propositions! Insights The eLab consists of 6 modules. Each […]
Solving the World’s Water Issues
Silo Busting: 4 ways to do good business
Role of business in shaping a better tomorrow Solutions to the world’s most pressing problems and exciting opportunities are global, interconnected and interdependent. Business’ resources dwarf those of the philanthropic and public sectors combined. All require leaders with vision and capacity to build systems for change across industries and borders. Yet alone, now and in […]