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Can Impact Investing Avoid the Failures of Microfinance?

Harvard Business Review

Morgan projected up to $1T in investment would be deployed this decade — which would make impact investing twice the size of official development aid to the world’s less develop countries (as defined by the United Nations) , presuming historic levels of aid stayed constant since 2010. Lessons from Microfinance.

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Businesses Serving the Poor Need to Get Over Their Unease About Profit

Harvard Business Review

And their intuition isn't baseless: As the bottom-of-the-pyramid concept shifted into the public eye and attracted the criticism of the development sector, the standards for judging the impact of a venture aiming to serve low-income consumers seemed to get a lot tougher. The microfinance industry is a rare D and E success story.

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Funders Can Give More than Money

Harvard Business Review

percent lower than its value in 2007. Six years ago, David and Donna Allman approached Opportunity with an idea that fell outside our traditional microfinance model: to build a Community Economic Development (CED) program in Nicaragua. We know that microfinance alone will not break the poverty cycle.

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Entrepreneurship Needs to Be a Bigger Part of U.S. Foreign Aid

Harvard Business Review

In 2007 such young enterprises created almost two-thirds of the nation’s 12 million new jobs. ” In less mature economies and fragile regions of the world, entrepreneurs are just as, if not more, critical to livelihoods and development. Even this paltry figure overstates the total.