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International Women’s Day 2021: A Moment to Reflect, Be Thankful, and Recommit to Advancing Gender Equity

2020 will forever be remembered as the year COVID-19 laid bare the burdens of women. While different from one context to another, “the negative effects are disproportionate for women everywhere,” as we highlighted in a previous... Read more

Viable Sanitation Enterprises—The Linchpin in Sanitation Markets

Shukla Shauchalay is located in a bustling market in Samastipur in Bihar, India. The entrepreneur first got involved in the sanitation business a decade ago as a sub-contractor manufacturing cement pit rings for a local NGO’s sanitation program. In 2014, he decided to open his own business to... Read more

Investing in Women: A Powerful Approach for Investors in India

Gender-lens or gender-smart investing refers to investments that achieve greater social and financial return on investment by focusing on businesses that are owned or led by women, have good gender balance, and/or serve women customers with their products and services. Given this double benefit... Read more

Uniting to Protect Democracy for All

Like most of you, I’m still processing what happened yesterday at the U.S. Capitol. I was glued to the TV. Horror. Disbelief. Sadness. Resolve.

In my year-end reflections, I promised that I would not use the word “unprecedented” to describe current events but… what we saw yesterday was... Read more

End of Year Reflections 2020

“During these unprecedented times…” That’s a phrase I hope to never read again, and not simply because it’s such a cliché. The very notion of an unprecedented crisis invites us to accept that widespread suffering is inevitable when the threat is too large.

Certainly, COVID-19 and... Read more

Running on Empty: Challenges Faced by Private Pit Emptiers in Urban Uganda

By 2050, over two-thirds of the world’s population will live in urban areas. However, water and sanitation services are often unable to keep pace with population growth in rapidly urbanizing cities, leading to deteriorating health conditions.... Read more

Developing a Market-Based Approach to Sanitation in Uganda

Household sanitation is a longstanding development priority for the government of Uganda. There has been a significant reduction in open defecation (from 12% in 2000 to 7% in 2015¹). However, access to basic sanitation... Read more

SSIR Blog: What Investors Need to Know to Embrace Catalytic Capital

In a post on Stanford Social Innovation Review, FSG's Harvey Koh writes about how the catalytic capital questions of development finance institutions, private foundations, and other types of investors must be answered... Read more

Economics of Impact: Unlocking Purpose-Led Performance Management

With increasing recognition that markets today create wealth and positive social impact inequitably and deplete or degrade natural resources, more companies must rethink their purpose and strategies in order to provide real and lasting solutions to these substantial problems. In the process,... Read more

Thank You, Lauren Smith

To FSG’s stakeholders around the world:

With mixed emotions, I want to share with you all that my fellow co-CEO, Dr. Lauren A. Smith, will be stepping down from her role at FSG in early October.

Lauren will be joining the CDC Foundation as Chief Health Equity Strategy Officer, a... Read more

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