Catalysing Impact Deal Flow in East Africa: Recommendations for Development of the Services Market

East Africa has become a focal point for impact investors across the globe, with investments steadily increasing since 2010. Yet despite this growth in recent years, the number of investment opportunities available remains limited. Catalysing Impact Deal Flow in East Africa explores the causes of this constraint and provides recommendations for donors seeking to increase impact investing volumes (deal flow).Top TakeawaysTwo key challenges are constraining the growth of impact investing in East Africa: 1) The pairing of investors and enterprises ("matching challenge"); and 2) enterprises' lack of readiness to take on investment ("preparation challenge").Local service providers (consulting and advisory firms) that help enterprises raise capital and build capacity are already addressing both the matching and the preparation challenges. However, these service providers themselves face constraints in scaling their services due to delayed and conditional payment of fees from enterprises resulting from a deferred success fee model.An appropriate market-shaping intervention could help service providers to scale up sustainably, and help to develop a more vibrant impact investing market overall

Reducing Youth Unemployment in South Africa

South Africa is faced with a crisis of high and rising youth unemployment. Throughout the country, only 1 in 3 young people of working age is employed. This distressing statistic not only plays out through the limited earnings potential and future prospects of these youth, but also emerges within stymied business growth and unsustainable pressure on governmental social programs. The solution will take action from a variety of sectors and actors in order to turn the tide.This report, funded by The Rockefeller Foundation, highlights two cross-sectoral partnerships—the EOH Youth Job Creation Initiative and the Mentec Foundation—that have seen success in placing these disadvantaged youth in jobs throughout South Africa. The report concludes with a table of recommendations for employers, training providers, philanthropic funders, and government officials to begin growing and replicating these efforts.Top TakeawaysThroughout their lives, youth within South Africa are put at an employment disadvantage due to inadequate education and recruiting systems. Despite an estimated 500,000 entry-level vacancies throughout the country, young people often lack the necessary problem-solving skills, business acumen, technological savvy, and communication skills needed for the workplace, and structures that would enable this on-the-job learning (training, mentoring, and coaching) are not standard practice for most workplaces.In order to place more youth in jobs, sectors can bring their unique skills to bear while complementing one another's efforts: government incentives can encourage employers to take calculated risks and reform HR practices; training providers can focus more on skills, including job-readiness skills, that are directly demanded by employers and work with these employers for placement; and funders can strategically deploy grants to such programs and collaboratives.Youth who participate in demand-driven training programs and are then hired into jobs become valuable staff in short order: the youth were more motivated to perform well and assimilated quickly to the work environment

Shaping Inclusive Markets: How Funders and Intermediaries can Help Markets Move toward Greater Economic Inclusion

Positive progress toward worldwide economic inclusion is not only possible, but can also be made more possible. In Shaping Inclusive Markets, we draw lessons from history on how more inclusive markets have been achieved and highlight ways in which funders and intermediaries can strengthen the conditions for change

Hardware Pioneers: Harnessing the Impact Potential of Technology Entrepreneurs

Billions of households across the world live without conveniences such as electric lighting, flush toilets, and sanitary sewerage systems. Products such as milk chilling machines and solar home systems can have a significant impact on lives and livelihoods of people living in poverty in developing countries. Hardware pioneers—inventors and entrepreneurs creating breakthrough products tailored to the needs of these populations—are pushing the frontiers of technology and business to create and scale innovative hardware technologies.Numerous case studies within the report illustrate how these pioneers face many of the same challenges of any entrepreneur but with the added complexity of developing hardware and scaling in remote areas with scarce resources. There is a significant opportunity for actors across sectors to strategically leverage their resources in order to support the journeys of these hardware pioneers, from initial inspiration to ultimate impact at scale.Top TakeawaysHardware pioneers lack the right supports in the critical Pioneer Gap stages when they are blueprinting, validating, and preparing their models. In the early stages, these needs range from patient capital to prototyping facilities. Later on, issues such as distribution, financing, servicing, and quality standards become more important.Critically, because the success of hardware pioneers depends on the successful blending of both business and technology skills, those working closely with pioneer teams also need to bring the right combination of these skills, and this unfortunately is rare in the impact enterprise ecosystem.There is need to not just support hardware pioneers directly but also to assemble the other needed parts of the ecosystem, from last-mile specialist companies that help pioneers reach and serve their target markets to the programs and institutions that are helping to spark the initial impulse that gets pioneers started on their journey in the right way.New ideas can have an ultimate impact that is much greater than that of the original pioneer alone through a transfer of the idea to a more scale-ready partner or just through adoption and adaptation of the idea by follower entrepreneurs. We believe that there is great impact potential in supporting these more networked pathways for scaling

From Blueprint to Scale: The Case for Philanthropy In Impact Investing

This report springs from a point of view shared by Monitor and Acumen Fund -- that philanthropy is the essential but often overlooked catalyst that unlocks the impact potential of inclusive business and impact investing. The report has been created with funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation

Hardware Pioneers: Harnessing the Impact Potential of Technology Entrepreneurs, Executive Summary

Technology has been a powerful driver of humanity's development over the past few centuries. It continues to hold great potential to help us live longer and in better health, as well as raising our productivity and standards of living.Yet many of these benefits remain out of the reach of the global poor.While people living in the developed world have enjoyed the benefits of electric lighting since the late 1800s, nearly 1.3 billion poor households in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia still live in the dark today. Without electricity, many poor households are not able to make use of household appliances common in the richer world, like refrigerators, televisions,or computers.Modern sanitation technologies -- flush toilets and sewerage systems -- are another example. These technologies have existed for hundreds of years but are still not available to 2.4 billion people around the world. This lack of sanitation infrastructure leads to contamination of water sources across large stretches of South Asia and Africa. Water-borne diseases such as cholera, typhoid, and dysentery claim 3.4 million lives every year.Modern machinery and information technology have also changed the way we work. In advanced economies, large commercial farms enjoy the benefit of improved seed varieties, farm machinery, modern irrigation systems, and post-harvest storage systems. In stark contrast, many smallholder farmers in developing countries lack similar solutions and struggle to improve their crop yields and livelihoods.Against this challenging backdrop, inventors and entrepreneurs are developing new breakthrough products tailored to the needs of the global poor. These hardware pioneers are helping to improve lives and livelihoods by pushing the frontiers of technology and business. They are bringing reliable electricity to remote villages, safe drinking water to neglected slums, productivity gains to struggling smallholder farmers, and life-saving health services to sick children

Financing the Future of Asia: Innovations in Sustainable Finance

Around the globe, a wave of financial innovation that seeks to create social and environmental benefits while producing attractive returns is shaping the field of sustainable finance.From investments in publicly listed corporations based on environmental, social, and governance factors, to bonds issued to fund climate and environmental improvements; from micro-credit to small retailers through innovative credit assessments, to parametric insurance products improving the disaster resilience of countries, the world of sustainable finance is growing and becoming increasingly diverse.In this report, we take a closer look at these innovations and more, highlighting how they are working to mobilize private-sector capital at scale to address social and environmental challenges. We also explore recent developments and potential opportunities in Asia's four largest economies: China, India, Japan, and Indonesia

Dual theories for mixed symmetry fields. Spin-two case: (1,1) versus (2,1) Young symmetry type fields

We show that the parent Lagrangian method gives a natural generalization of the dual theories concept for non p-form fields. Using this generalization we construct here a three-parameter family of Lagrangians that are dual to the Fierz-Pauli description of a free massive spin-two system. The dual field is a three-index tensor T, which dinamically belongs to the (2,1) representation of the Lorentz group. As expected, the massless limit of our Lagrangian, which is parameter independent, has two propagating degrees of freedom per space point.Comment: 10 pages, no figure

BPS Saturated String Amplitudes: K3 Elliptic Genus and Igusa Cusp Form

We study BPS saturated one-loop amplitudes in type II string theory compactified on K3 x T^2. The classes of amplitudes we consider are only sensitive to the very basic topological data of the internal K3 manifold. As a consequence, the integrands of the former are related to the elliptic genus of K3, which can be decomposed into representations of the internal N=4 superconformal algebra. Depending on the precise choice of external states these amplitudes capture either only the contribution of the short multiplets or the full series including intermediate multiplets. In the latter case we can define a generating functional for the whole class, which we show is given by the weight ten Igusa cusp form chi_{10} of Sp(4,Z). We speculate on possible algebraic implications of our result on the BPS states of the N=4 type II compactification.Comment: 45 pages, LaTeX; v2: two references added, final version to appear in NP

Dendritic Spine Shape Analysis: A Clustering Perspective

Functional properties of neurons are strongly coupled with their morphology. Changes in neuronal activity alter morphological characteristics of dendritic spines. First step towards understanding the structure-function relationship is to group spines into main spine classes reported in the literature. Shape analysis of dendritic spines can help neuroscientists understand the underlying relationships. Due to unavailability of reliable automated tools, this analysis is currently performed manually which is a time-intensive and subjective task. Several studies on spine shape classification have been reported in the literature, however, there is an on-going debate on whether distinct spine shape classes exist or whether spines should be modeled through a continuum of shape variations. Another challenge is the subjectivity and bias that is introduced due to the supervised nature of classification approaches. In this paper, we aim to address these issues by presenting a clustering perspective. In this context, clustering may serve both confirmation of known patterns and discovery of new ones. We perform cluster analysis on two-photon microscopic images of spines using morphological, shape, and appearance based features and gain insights into the spine shape analysis problem. We use histogram of oriented gradients (HOG), disjunctive normal shape models (DNSM), morphological features, and intensity profile based features for cluster analysis. We use x-means to perform cluster analysis that selects the number of clusters automatically using the Bayesian information criterion (BIC). For all features, this analysis produces 4 clusters and we observe the formation of at least one cluster consisting of spines which are difficult to be assigned to a known class. This observation supports the argument of intermediate shape types.Comment: Accepted for BioImageComputing workshop at ECCV 201