NextBillion

Exits make the wheel of impact investing go around. And right now that wheel is not turning, particularly in smallholder agriculture in Africa. Exits offer companies the opportunity to grow and sustain their operations, while also allowing investors to recycle returned capital into other impactful solutions. Without them, companies will be locked into a permanent, fruitless s...

India has achieved something genuinely remarkable over the past decade. Millions of people who would once have run businesses entirely outside the formal system now have an enterprise identity. Starting a business has become easier. Registering one has become easier. Access to credit and government programs and markets has widened.

But there is another number worth loo...

The global development sector is not short on promising social innovations. In health, education and climate, among other sectors, NGOs have built innovative solutions to societal problems that have reached their desired impact: They work in the places they were designed for, often at a cost-per-user that no commercial operator could match. Getting them to scale is the harder...

In 2013, I co-founded Light of Hope, an education company that runs an after-school programme for children aged 4-12 in Bangladesh. We built creativity workshops, moral education curricula and learning experiences for children who struggled in a rote-learning school system. The programmes wor...

In most of the international development and social impact organisations I work with as a strategic AI advisor, the actual use cases of artificial intelligence are not normally based on formal policies or other top-down guidance. Rather, AI is more commonly used via ad hoc workarounds, a practice sometimes termed “shadow AI use.”

Staff are regularly using publicly avai...