News & Views

On the heels of her panel presentation at the BoP Global Network Summit last month in Vermont, Heather Esper, Program Manager for WDI's Performance Measurement Initiative, wrote an article for WDI's NextBillion blog site on tools and methodologies businesses are using to understand how they are really doing and to…

Impact assessment has been part of international development for more than half a century. However, debate continues on its value and varying methodologies. Heather Esper and Yaquta Kanchwala Fatehi of WDI’s Performance Measurement Initiative weigh in on the subject in a special issue of Thinkers magazine focused on the Base…

WDI has partnered with U-M’s Weiser Center for Europe & Eurasia (WCEE) and the Slovak-based Pontis Foundation to provide leadership training to non-governmental organizations (NGOs). The goal is to make them more successful and strong, thereby strengthening civil society in new democracies in order to advance positive social and political…

WDI President Paul Clyde recently wrote an article for the Stanford Social Innovation Review (SSIR) promoting educational models that tie pedagogy to business that can provide revenue and give students the chance to learn job skills. Clyde said technological advances are very popular in education, as they should be, because…

Ted London, vice president and senior research fellow for WDI’s Scaling Impact Initiative, was recently interviewed about co-creating value with the base of the pyramid (BoP) for an article in the annual magazine of the Dutch-based non-profit organization SNV. In the interview with Connect magazine, London discusses how the business…

WDI Senior Research Fellow and Healthcare Initiative consultant Prashant Yadav was a featured speaker at a supply chain conference July 23 in Chile. Yadav spoke about successful supply chains that serve customers at the base of the pyramid (BoP) at the 2015 Logistics and Supply Chain Conference in Santiago. He…

Mentoring for social entrepreneurship education in the Middle East and North Africa region is on the rise, writes WDI Program Coordinator of Education Nathan Rauh-Bieri on the NextBillion.net blog. Rauh-Bieri chronicles the effort of Mowgli Mentoring, the UK-based nonprofit that looks to help entrepreneurs create new jobs in a region…

WDI has changed the name of its case publishing initiative to WDI Publishing. Also new is the web address. Business case studies can now be found at wdi-publishing.com. Formerly known as GlobaLens, WDI Publishing produces high quality, relevant business cases that are sold to universities around the world. The new…

WDI Program Manager for Performance Measurement Heather Esper  led a working group on July 16 at the 2015 BoP Global Network Summit at the University of Vermont. Esper’s panel, “Evaluating the State of Assessment: Focusing on Value Creation,” highlighted tools and methodologies businesses are using to understand the impact they…

Surabhi Rajaram, a WDI intern working in Bangladesh this summer for CARE, recently wrote a blog entry looking back on her two months in a very remote area of that country. Rajaram, a graduate student in the School of Public Health, used a “by the numbers” format to write about…