the mif blog

Map of Paraguay showing estimated values of the index on January 28, 2018. Areas with green colors indicate wetter soils while yellow to red colors indicate regions where crops are subjected to some degree of water stress.

By Cesar Buenadicha, Galia Nurko and Miguel Aldaz*

Businesses are one of the key pieces that build a society’s ecosystem and, as such, are increasingly being called to take on more purpose-driven projects that address society’s most pressing problems.

Did you ever wonder where your avocado and quinoa come from? Quite possibly from small-holder farmers in the Peruvian Andes. Although these delicious foods eventually make it to your store’s shelves in the US, Europe, Asia, and elsewhere in the Americas, producing, harvesting and exporting them is getting more complicated all the time due to the effects of climate change.

Durante los días 14 al 18 de mes de agosto 2017 se realizaron las primeras pruebas de campo para el transporte de insumos y muestras médicas en la provincia de San Juan de la Maguana, para conectar los Centros de Atención de Primer Nivel (CPN) de Los Montecitos y Los Cocos, con el hospital municipal de Bochehio. En las pruebas se realizaron 24 vuelos y se transportaron 17 muestras médicas con igual número de resultados de laboratorio, atendiendo un total de 17 personas en 3 de los 5 días de vuelo.

An innovative financing mechanism, known as Social Impact Incentives or SIINC, has begun to take form and test its first experiences in Latin America, through the collaboration between the MIF, Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC) and the German firm “Roots of Impact”.  SIINCs are financial incentives paid to emerging, high-impact social enterprises for reaching selected results and impact goals that are negotiated between the social enterprise and the outcome payer (in this case, MIF). The payments allow the company to improve revenues and profitability – and thus attractiveness to other impact investors – in exchange for achieving social impact, measured and verified by an independent evaluator.