Scott Anderson
NextBillion
Ann Arbor, MI, United States
Contact Scott
Discover and connect with journalists and influencers around the world, save time on email research, monitor the news, and more.
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Past articles by Scott:
How 'Market-Creating Innovations' Can Lift Nations Out of Poverty: A Q&A with Efosa Ojomo
Efosa Ojomo, co-author of "The Prosperity Paradox," discusses how market-creating innovations can lift developing countries out of poverty. → Read More
Impact Investing Impasse: The Case for 4-Hour Due Diligence
Impact investors are often guilty of stringing along social entrepreneurs with lengthy due diligence processes, says Andy Lower at investing firm A Different Approach to Poverty. In response, he devised a four-hour due diligence process, which has sparked debate in the sector. Lower discusses the approach in this Q&A. → Read More
Impact Investing Lessons for NGOs: Mercy Corps' Scott Onder Discusses its Social Venture Fund
NGOs aren't typically impact investors. But since 2015, Mercy Corps has run the Social Venture Fund, investing in ventures across the developing world. Scott Onder, managing director of the fund, discusses Mercy Corps' experiences – and lessons for other NGOs that may be considering a similar move – in this Q&A. → Read More
Announcing the Most Influential NextBillion Posts of 2017
Announcing the most influential NextBillion posts of 2017 - including articles from Ceniarth, Village Enterprise, and GRID Impact. → Read More
What was the Most Influential NextBillion Post of 2017? Vote for Your Favorite
What was the most influential NextBillion post of 2017? We present 12 options, one from each month, in our annual holiday contest. Vote for your favorite! → Read More
Sharing SOCAP: Why My Favorite Conference Needs to Leave San Francisco – And Other Takeaways from #SOCAP17
Why the social business conference should look past its traditional San Francisco location and consider other cities where impact investing is emerging. → Read More
New Editor Joins NextBillion Team
NextBillion is pleased to welcome a new editor to the team. Sonya Vann DeLoach has joined our staff as associate editor of NextBillion. Vann DeLoach is an award-winning journalist who for more than a decade was a copy editor for the Detroit Free Press, where she collaborated with reporters and editors on front-page, business and feature stories for both web and print editions of the newspaper.… → Read More
Environment Month Takeaway: It’s Time to Bust Some Business Models
Beijing’s only remaining coal-fired power plant officially powered down earlier this month. The Huaneng Beijing Thermal Power Plant was the last of four plants churning out dirty energy in or near the megacity. After years of news stories and constant photos of city dwellers hidden behind surgical masks as they made their way through streets thick with smoke – not to mention the massive public… → Read More
Social Business Roundup: The Problem with Sachets, the Beauty of Rats and the Dark Side of Cross-Selling
Waste at the Bottom of the Pyramid Base of the pyramid customers spend more than half of what they earn on food and beverages. Increasingly, those items are packaged in individually-sized sachets, affordably priced. That’s great for companies, even better for consumers, but increasingly bad for the environment – and it’s turning into “a major waste problem” writes Fernando Casado Cañeque and… → Read More
With New Partner, Wello Rolling Down ‘the Fastest Path to Scale’
Editor’s note: Throughout 2017, NextBillion is organizing content around a monthly theme, dedicating special attention to a specific sector alongside our broader coverage. This post is part of our focus on the environment for the month of March. Social enterprise Wello today announced it will license sales and manufacturing of its main product, the WaterWheel, to Mumbai-based Nilkamal Limited in… → Read More
Social Business Roundup: A Defiant Asset Manager, Salty Doorknobs and Who Has it Worse?
Progress for Gender Diversity – Significant or Symbolic? Women hold less than 6 percent of CEO positions at S&P 500 companies, and boards at Fortune 500 companies are almost 80 percent male. If those statistics alarm you, this week brought seemingly promising news. UBS Group announced a new $110 million venture capital fund that will invest in health, education and environment companies led… → Read More
Next Up for Impact Investing: ‘Solve for Market Demand, Not Investor Preferences’
I did not attend the Global Impact Investing Network’s first global forum in 2013 in London. But from what I understand, that inaugural event was typical for the still-nascent field. There were lots of questions about how to proceed, how to develop products that ultimately benefit people and the planet, how to measure their impact and how to make some coin while doing it. There were few answers,… → Read More
Weekly Roundup: Acumen’s SolarAid Acquisition, Davos Deja Vu , the Grumpy Gates Critics
Acumen Acquires SolarAid; We’re Likely to Acquire More Off-Grid Knowledge This week, nonprofit social investment firm Acumen announced it had purchased the Research and Impact division of SolarAid, a charitable organization (that?) has contributed much to the understanding of off-grid energy markets and efforts to bring clean power to the underserved. SolarAid’s Director of Research and Impact… → Read More
Convergence Looks to Convert Risk into Reward for Global Development Financing
An interview with interim CEO Andrew Stern For the past few months, Andrew Stern has been serving as interim CEO of Convergence, a brand new platform designed to connect and support private, public and philanthropic investors for “blended finance” deals in emerging and frontier markets. The big idea is to bring these disparate players together to back deals that, on their own, would be deemed… → Read More
Weekly Roundup: Big Upside of Small Farmers; Using the Bully Pulpit to Fight a Bully; It’s Good to Be Ultra-Rich
Competing for Farmers’ (Eyeballs) What if some of the most marginalized people on the planet – the proverbial “smallholder farmers” with a small plot and an even smaller number of livestock – could command the attention of powerful telecom and technology players? Here’s another question: What if it’s already happening? Perhaps you saw this week’s post from Kenny Ewan, the founder and CEO of… → Read More
Weekly Roundup: Starting SDGs, Africa’s IT Meritocracy, Safaricom’s Setback
Getting started on the SDGs The United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) officially took effect on Jan. 1, with the stated goals of freeing “the human race from the tyranny of poverty and want and to heal and secure our planet” over the next 15 years. Whew. Talk about a tall order. Where to start? That’s the question Afrobarometer asks, then attempts to answer, using data from 47,941… → Read More
2015’s Most Influential Post Winners Are
FINTECH Stories Dominated, but Not where you’d expect It comes as no surprise that financial technology (fintech) trends that brought “the unbanked” somewhat closer to true financial inclusion, dominated our Our Most Influential Post of the Year Contest. Stories of digital lifelines that carried savings, insurance and other financial products to the fingertips of the underserved were… → Read More
Weekly Roundup: Narayana Health’s IPO Hearten Investors and Patients Alike?
‘Charity is not scalable, good business models are’ The collective ears of the healthcare world pricked up this week on the news that Narayana Hrudayalaya is going public. The firm, which operates under the brand name Narayana Health, has been a shining star as a private entity founded in India by Dr. Devi Shetty. It’s innovated on the medical front – for example, Narayana was the first to use a… → Read More