This piece is part of a series under the theme of “Elevating Underrepresented Voices at ANDE.”
On September 24, 2020, Geigy Mathews and Denis Karema from Enviu hosted a Solution Salon entitled "Eliminating waste to 0% in the textile & food chain, impossible?" as part of ANDE's 2020 Annual Conference. The session highlighted the complex, multi-sector solutions that will be required in order to facilitate the transition towards fully circular textile and food sectors.
2019 was a promising year for the small and growing business (SGB) ecosystem. The recently released State of the Small and Growing Business Sector report from ANDE shows that a wide variety of investment vehicles were launched last year, committing capital close to $3 billion.
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.