Capricorn Investment Group, which manages the fortune of billionaire Jeff Skoll, has taken a stake in Encourage Capital, an impact investment firm that has developed innovative structures for restoring wild fisheries, generating carbon credits and managing stormwater. Capricorn’s investment is not in any of those specific initiatives but in Encourage, the overall asset-management firm, itself. Encourage […]

In the early days of microfinance – before its dramatic evolution from development sector hero to over-hyped villain and back to somewhat chastened respectability – it captured the imagination of many anti-poverty advocates, among them Jeffrey Ashe. After a stint in the Peace Corps, Ashe spent 20 years designing, evaluating and managing microfinance programs in over thirty countries – but then […]

The new new thing in Silicon Valley? Global development. The latest data point: Venture capital powerhouse Andreessen-Horowitz’s investment in Branch, its first in a U.S.-based company targeting the Africa market. Branch has closed a $9.2 million series A round that also includes earlier investors Formation 8 and the Khosla Impact Fund. Andreessen-Horowitz is betting on Matt Flannery, […]

In February, The New York Times reported on the state of joblessness and resulting desperation among educated young people in rural Tunisia. This was the same demographic that protested in 2010, overthrowing the Ben Ali regime and sparking the Arab Spring. Five years on, an arid employment landscape (62.3 percent of college graduates are without […]

It takes a village to raise a successful education technology company—and to build an ecosystem for education innovation that creates meaningful, sustainable change in our schools and for our students. But one of the most critical sources of that capital and expertise has until recently been sitting on the sidelines. In a new article for Stanford […]

Impact investors collaborate to address funding gap for startups The emergence and rapid adoption of new technologies like the Internet, cloud computing and smartphones are transforming the way the poor and underserved access financial services. Startups are at the cutting edge of these innovations. They are catalyzing the next leap forward in financial inclusion by […]

Commercial lenders don’t exactly flock to opportunities to offer low-cost loans, lines of credit and equity investments for small businesses and social services for low-income residents in U.S. cities. So a new fund is sweetening the pot to increase the flow of capital for such investments across the country. Living Cities, a collaboration of nearly […]

Albrecht Dürer’s masterful woodcut, “Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse,” is drawn from the Book of Revelation, the last book of the Bible’s New Testament. In it, the horsemen ride on red, black, white and pale horses, symbolizing war, famine, conquest and death. The black horse symbolizes famine ­– its darkness depicting the brute force of hunger. But this […]

Editor’s note: This is the third in a series of three articles offering new methods in generating, comprehending and The definition of social impact dramatically differs based on the role we are referencing, e.g. impact investor, funder, program agency or practitioner. Though there is a plethora of standards, tools and frameworks, most organizations do not […]

Dan Schulman, the CEO of PayPal, is on a mission to extend digital payments to the 2.5 billion unbanked people around the world. He is enlisting Village Capital, the scrappy business accelerator and venture capital firm, to help find local companies that can help. PayPal and Village Capital will support roughly 40 financial technology entrepreneurs who are using technology […]

Philip Berber is applying his experience building an online trading platform to the chronic problem of matching interested investors with promising entrepreneurs. An interested investor and philanthropist himself, Berber launched Enable Impact several years ago to help impact entrepreneurs and investors to find each other. Having built CyBerCorp, an online brokerage for day traders (and solid it to […]

Impact investing may have gotten off on the wrong foot, with venture-capital style private equity funds that generally have to be liquidated after 10 years. This season’s new style: Permanently capitalized holding companies with long-term ownership stakes in operating companies that deliver real benefits such as food security, clean water and climate mitigation.   There’s […]