Value Chains

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Social Enterprise

TOMS Shoes and conscious consumerism’s 3 biggest sins

Many social enterprises exist to improve the lives of the poor, but if your business requires an endless supply of poor people, it might be time to rethink your strategy.

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Social Enterprise

Interview: EcoZoom on building a market for clean cookstoves in developing economies

Three billion people--half the world's population--need a safer way to cook.

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Financial Inclusion

Two ways to get farm loans where they're needed most: the boonies

To get small staple-crop farmers the loans they need, lenders must use new approaches tailored to the 90 percent of smallholders not in farmer organizations.

Thanks to co-ops like COOPCAB, the coffee business is back and brewing in Haiti. Photo: <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/27632962@N04/3395940600/">Vilseskogen (flickr)</a>

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Social Enterprise

As aid to Haiti slows, a private co-op scores loans and turns heads

This article was republished by The Christian Science Monitor.

Left: Patricia Wolff, founder and executive director of Meds and Food for Kids. (Photo: MFK.) Right: Paul Farmer, founder and executive director of Partners in Health. (Photo: <a href="http://flic.kr/p/csKJu9">Nyaya Health, Flickr</a>.)

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Social Enterprise

Devil take the hindmost? Haiti peanut battle puts NGOs head to head

When antipoverty nonprofits compete, it's not always clear who will lose more: the one whose business is threatened, or the people both nonprofits set out to serve.

Vegetables at Market <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/bioversity/6672475021/sizes/z/in/photostream/">Bioversity International (Flickr)</a>.

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Social Enterprise

You can't solve poverty by supplying products not in demand

Are humanitarian aid groups really demand-driven? Development economist James Riordan, says NGOs, government agencies and consulting firms, overwhelmingly, are not.