Digital Archive....

A Guide to Scaling Social Innovation SSIR Opinion & Analysis By Hilde Schwab For those who have been working in the field of social entrepreneurship for a decade or more, as we have at the Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship , 2013 is starting to feel like a watershed year. Don't get me wrong: We still have enormous hills to climb in changing mindsets, improving enabling environments and correcting market failures. But I think it's worth pausing for a moment and taking stock of the global trends. Governments as diverse as the United States, Colombia, and India have created new agencies with robust mandates to promote social innovation, including direct reporting lines to the president (or the prime minister, in the case of India). Senegal, the United Kingdom, and Canada have created national task forces to assess the social innovation policy environment and make recommendations for reform. And with yesterday's announcement by t...

"Letter to a Young Social Entrepreneur: the poor are not the raw material for your salvation" Chris Blattman That's the title of a post by an award-winning social entrepreneur himself , Liam Black: looking back I can see clearly that a core part of what drove me was the seeking of approval of an absent father (long story) and a huge enjoyment at the attention which came with being in the vanguard of the UK social enterprise movement. It feels very good to be talked and written about and even better if there are awards and baubles. Heroes are like the human body – the closer you get to them the more flawed, messy and complicated they are… I hope you will win lots of awards, Jude. But just be clear about your motivations. h/t Sara Minard. My opinions on social entrepreneurship exceed my hard knowledge of facts, which means I have a lot of inflammatory things to say. Unfortunately I have a baby in one hand and am supposed to be prepping two cl...

http://www.businessweek.com/printer/articles/111164-how-did-the-worlds-rich-get-that-way-luck

Paul Krugman: The Jobless Trap Economist's View We've been worried about the wrong thing: The Jobless Trap, by Paul Krugman, Commentary, NY Times : F.D.R. told us that the only thing we had to fear was fear itself. But when future historians look back at our monstrously failed response to economic depression, they probably won't blame fear, per se. Instead, they'll castigate our leaders for fearing the wrong things. For the overriding fear driving economic policy has been debt hysteria... After all, haven't economists proved that economic growth collapses once public debt exceeds 90 percent of G.D.P.? Well, the famous red line on debt, it turns out, was an  artifact of dubious statistics , reinforced by bad arithmetic. ... But while debt fears were and are misguided, there's a real danger we've ignored: the corrosive effect, social and economic, of persistent high unemployment. ... Fiv...

Bankelele Mobile & Card Payments across East Africa A new unsecured card solution was launched by afb last week that will allows customers to instantly spread the cost of their purchase at participating shops into affordable 6 month repayments. afb have signed up 52 merchants like Baus Optical, Cambridge Opticians, Fabguru Shoes, Kitengela Glass, and local supermarkets (Tumaini, Home Depot, Homemade) and are also signing up other merchant shops where consumers will be able to apply for cards and get them approved & issued in the stores ahead of making a purchase.  afb settles the transaction amounts directly into the retailers bank account, and the the customer makes repayments via M-Pesa. afb next hope to venture into loans and insurance in Kenya. How large is the card market? A Central Bank of Kenya reports showed that there were 9 million debit card...