Thoughts on innovation in financing and social business models

Today at the Clinton Global Initiative Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala spoke at the Innovation breakout session about innovation in the finance sector, her point was that developing countries should strive to become self-sustainable and that one of the ways that they could do so was through financial innovation in the informal sector, to bring it back to the formal sector and therefore be able to tax it thus increasing the revenue for low income countries.

Last week at Sao Paolo, Ashoka gathered Fellows working in technology to talk to investors and to discuss business models as a way to scaling technology for low-income populations. Next week we'll be posting some of the reflections of Ashoka Fellows on the subject, like that of Ashoka-Lemelson Fellow Albina Ruiz in the video above; her main points:

"... the experiencies that each of us have had with financing of social enterprises indicate that, many times, what is available in the market is not in tune with what we need. Therefore, why not even think about innovating this sector in finance for social businesses?"

"I think that we still have so much to go still... it is also a learning process, and we are still in it. We are social entrepreneurs, not business people. But we believe in the need to create social enterprises to demonstrate a different enterprise model that our countries, and the world, need."

Albina is speaking at 10:30am tomorrow at the Clinton Global Initiative (watch it live on the CGI LiveStream channel). Check out our interview with Albina about her organization here.