Innovative Finance: Hacking for Social Change

We start by defining what innovative finance is and why we need to innovative around financing for social impact. The seven themes of impact we consider are housing, health, education, financial inclusion, agriculture, energy, and water, sanitation, and hygiene. Our case studies are a social enterprise, impact investor, foundation, non-profit and government who are each building innovative financing strategies. You will be investigating why these organisations were created and what the specific issue areas are that they have chosen.

This week we are going to look at how you assess the needs, challenges and roadblocks in your issue area. You'll be introduced to Due Diligence, an essential process that needs to be undertaken to map the problem and solutions landscape of an issue area. Following this, we cover design thinking - a useful tool that can be used when conducting due diligence. It emphasizes the importance of understanding the user perspective when mapping problems and potential solutions.

This week we are going to focus on the resources you have to achieve the outcomes in your issue area. The primary goal of this week is to get you to think creatively about your assets, revenue streams and funding sources. We are going to start with how you create revenue from assets that you have already identified and work that you (or others) are already doing. Then we are going to look at the different types of funders you should think about engaging with around resourcing.

We'll consider the opportunities and risks that you may face when dealing with your issue area. First, you'll learn how to look for specific types of opportunities outside of your issue area. We'll draw on the best practices of other sectors or geographies to create new approaches to achieving your outcomes. We'll then dive into the darker side - the risks that you'll need to understand and address with your innovative financing strategy.

Here we introduce you to the five stages of the innovative finance process, which you have been working through during the past four weeks. This week we have arrived at the design process. This requires us to look back over what we've done to create a design for our innovative financing strategy. In this week our cases tells us how they designed for impact.