The “Missing Middle” and the Growth of Social Enterprises
Every fall at Social Capital Markets (SOCAP), the who’s who of impact investing and social enterprise convene in San Francisco to network and share stories about topics like market-based solutions to poverty, social stock exchanges, and just how much capital is waiting to be deployed to solve the world’s toughest problems. It’s inspiring to be sure, especially the growth in the number and diversity of participation. It’s...

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The Story of Neeraj and Amit
To highlight the work of social entrepreneurs, this animated video tells the story of a relationship between an Indian householder and a young social entrepreneur. In the story, the householder, Neeraj, is given the opportunity to pull himself out of poverty through the intervention of Amit, a social entrepreneur. The video tells of one man's journey from destitution, picking rags from a garbage heap, to owning a business of his own. In...

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Hybrid Value Chains – a Method for Solving Grand Challenges in Development?
In mid-may Bill Drayton of Ashoka visited the World Bank to present his thinking on Hybrid Value Chains (HVC). In a recent article published in the Harvard Business Review, Drayton and Ashoka-colleague Valeria Budinich warned that “if you are not thinking about HVC collaboration, you’ll soon be guilty of strategy malpractice.” (Click here to view a recorded video of the event). So what does Ashoka mean when they talk...

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I am going to be the leader of my country.
A U.S. congresswoman from Arizona was shot. The Hollywood Foreign Press was handing out Golden Globes to the entertainment industry. The White House was preparing for a visit from China’s president. The people of Southern Sudan were announcing preliminary results of a vote for independence from their Northern counterpart. All of these headline events are worthy of attention. One event that did not make a headline is the one that...

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What’s the Secret Sauce for Scaling Up?
How can one go to scale? This is the continuous challenge that confronts all successful social entrepreneurs. For Grupo EOZ in Mexico, there were a few key elements behind their answer: a combination of funding, partnerships and publicity, much of it due to its participation in a national TV competition called Iniciativa México. From August to November 2010, 50 finalists from a pool of 47,000 initial applicants were featured weekly...

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A Locally Based Model Goes Global
Development Marketplace winner Pachamama Coffee Cooperative (PCC) was featured in the New York Times not too long ago. Its newest initiative CoffeeCSA.org found its roots in humble beginnings. Springing from the Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) movement which began in the 1960’s in Switzerland, consumers receive their produce directly from the farmer through a household subscription paid for in advance. Then on a weekly or bi-weekly...

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Training the Burkinabe in Building Timber-Free Housing Alternatives
The WB team were welcomed to Boromo (a province of Bales located two hours from Ouagadogou) by a team from Association La Voute Nubienne; a French non-governmental organization(NGO) with field offices in Burkina Faso. Their team is composed of 11 Burkinabes and a French team member, who trains masons to construct timber-free houses using the Nubian Vault technique. A Nubian Vault house is made from locally...

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Development Marketplace: A Silicon Valley for Development
In 1999, as news of protesters being subdued with pepper spray in Seattle at the WTO Ministerial Conference came drifting in, we sat explaining our plans for the World Bank's first Development Marketplace to a senior member of the International Finance Corporation's innovation team. He agreed that innovation was important, and that the Bank Group had not paid enough attention to this in the past — he was on board. He then turned around to...

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Development Marketplace: A New Call to Action
The Development Marketplace Program (DM) is now ten years old. It started at a time when the power and promise of Social Entrepreneurship was only barely considered by the Development Community. A movement was just starting to take shape. This movement is founded on the belief that social entrepreneurs, with their passion for equitable growth, with their “out of the box” thinking, with their business skills and with their deep...

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Social Entrepreneurship as a Bottom-Up Model of Socio-Economic Development
In most parts of the world, if conventional hierarchic organizations and risk averse bureaucracies fail, they lose their reputation. By contrast, fail often and fail fast is part of the innovation ethos in Silicon Valley where failure is associated with learning. Rapid prototyping involves learning through iterative stages of disciplined failure—each characterized by an effort to surface design errors. In this context, engineering design...

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An important part of any effort to make a change in the world is being able to tell stories. By telling stories, you can make an effort feel real to both the people it is meant to affect and to the people who are supporting the effort.

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Humans are storytellers. It is part of who and what we are. While the projects are fascinating to learn about, it's the stories that really bring it alive. The stories illustrate how the projects are impacting people and communities. The stories may also show lessons learned along the way -- lessons that can be used by others who have an idea. If you are involved in a project, we want to hear your story. Contact us at dminfo@worldbank.org with "Story for the Web" in the subject line. We will contact you and discuss your approach.

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