Guest blogger Heather Esper of the William Davidson Institute at the University of Michigan offers advice on measuring and understanding the impact of BOP business projects on poverty.
Hearing the Voices of the Poor through Impact Assessment
When developing business models that engage with the base of the pyramid, companies are, of course, looking for sustainability and profitability, but they also want to know what effect their work will really have on people’s lives. We invited Heather Esper, a research associate at the William Davidson Institute at the University of Michigan, to tell us about the institute’s Impact Assessment Workshops, which are designed to help answer that very question.
Early this year the IDB presented a proposal to Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs to conduct a reasearch project to measure the "Poverty Penalty" in the region. This blog was prepared by the "Columbia Poverty Penalty Group" that worked on the assignment.
If you’re reading this blog, it’s unlikely you spend a great deal of your time waiting for things – perhaps several minutes in line at the grocery store, or longer in a doctor’s waiting room. But what if you had a long wait ahead of you each time you needed to go to the bathroom or get a drink of water?
