SocialFinance.ca produces a weekly round up featuring social finance related news, insights, job openings, and events. We source the content for these round ups from Twitter, an RSS reader, and directly from our community of social finance practitioners. Below is our round up for the week of January 30.
Finance Models
Social impact bonds and pay for success financing are generating a great deal of interest around the globe, and the US and Australia have been at the centre of much of it since the turn of the new year, as this post describes. In this short clip, Les Hems, Director of Research at the Centre for Social Impact in Australia, provides an overview of what's happening Down Under.
A profusion of crowd-funding platforms has emerged in the last few years, from the peer-to-peer lending site Zopa to microfinance giants Kiva. Theresa Burton and Michael Norton have stepped into the fray by setting up Buzzbnk – a crowd-funding platform for start-up social entrepreneurs.
So will crowd-funding platforms be the panacea for start-up funding? Matt Black of Social Enterprise Live caught up with Theresa to find out more.
The 2012 World Economic Forum Annual Meeting kicked off today with a markedly sombre tone. Economic imbalances and rising inequality threaten to reverse the gains of globalization, according to the WEF report Global Risks 2012, released earlier this month, while the past year's global economic turmoil, spiraling debt crisis and social upheaval are surely weighing heavily on the minds and agendas of global leaders gathering in Davos.
The theme for this year's meeting is, appropriately, "The Great Transformation: Shaping New Models." There is a recognition that our current system for economic and global governance is broken, and systemic change is required.
We have previously explored the links between social finance and Islamic finance; here, we explore Islamic finance claims of social impact. Part 1, published last week, examined the model; here, Part 2 lists a few examples of Islamic finance being used to produce social benefits.


























