In May, the Aspen Network of Development Entrepreneurs announced that its new Advancing Women’s Empowerment Fund will offer grants to eight organizations. With support from the US Agency for International Development and the Visa Foundation, the $1.2 million fund will target the finance gap for women-led small and growing businesses in South and Southeast Asia.
Fund will distribute up to $1.2 million in grant capital across eight winning proposals out of a pool of more than 180 total applications.
Jagriti Yatra (JY), an ANDE member initiative in India, is an annual train journey of discovery for hundreds of enterprising young people. Through the journey, they meet, interact with, and get inspired by highly reputed senior social entrepreneurs and the growing band of small and growing businesses (SGBs) that are creating an impact across the country.
In a recently released Roadmap for the Small and Growing Business (SGB) Sector, improving access to talent was identified as one of the key pillars to enhance support to SGBs. Some of the facets highlighted are: Improving job prospects for new graduates, fostering peer-to-peer learning and focusing on development.
Until recently, we have known little about their effectiveness or how differences across programs and models influence entrepreneur performance. Vallabh Rao writes about the Global Accelerator Learning Initiative's (GALI) recently released report on a sample of incubators and accelerators in India.
Endeavor Insight discusses the latest report from the Global Accelerator Learning Initiative (GALI), which provides a landscape of acceleration and incubation in India.
Ross Baird of Village Capital and Dave Kim of the Gates Foundation address the the Silicon Valley model of investing, arguing that there is a "fundamental disconnect between entrepreneurs and (often foreign) investors in East Africa and India." They cite ANDE in reference to their discussion of human capital.
Access to clean water and sanitation has enormous health and development implications, especially in urban slums. ANDE's India Regional Chapter Program Coordinator, Devyani Singh, writes about increasingly viable business solutions to address the sanitation crisis in India, and how these solutions are essential to help achieve the Sustainable Development Goals.