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Bringing essential services to the poor, whether in remote rural areas, provincial towns, or in the slums of megacities, is a great challenge for governments in developing countries. Lack of governmental capacity and fiscal resources at the national and local levels prevents effective public provision of water, power, education, and health services to the poor. And private firms, which often step in to serve the middle and upper classes, are dissuaded by high risks and low affordability from providing these services to the poor, or what is sometimes referred to as "the last mile." In contrast, social enterprises have been able to provide basic goods and services to the poor. This is the gap that the present book aims to fill. It catalogues over 40 of the most effective market-based solutions for service delivery to the poor brought about by social enterprises. It tracks how stylized business models have been developed to address development challenges. The sectors covered are education, energy, health, waste, water, sanitation, and finance. The book's analysis employs and greatly benefits from systematically applying a common framework that helps explain the relevance and implementation of the model for even general development practitioners.

Social enterprises are emerging as a new area of public policy: several countries seek to stimulate private sector contribution to development outcomes, and social enterprises could be important players in that agenda. However, those seeking a middle ground between for-profit and non-profit sectors to enable social enterprise have found legal frameworks to be lacking. This has triggered a range of legal developments over the past ten years, with a number of countries seeking to implement appropriate legal frameworks that can support and stimulate the development of social enterprise. These legal frameworks can both define social enterprise as well as to structure it, through the creation of new legal forms and regulations. The objective of this study is to analyze various definitions and forms under which social enterprises operate in five countries and the implications for public policies. The study is based on literature review and a small number of interviews clustered around Italy, Malaysia, South Korea, the United Kingdom, and United States, where social enterprise has attracted government`s interest. The study analyzes how the government operationalized its engagements with social enterprises. It takes a historical perspective to understand the legal forms available to, and adopted by, social enterprises, and the advantages and disadvantages of various approaches.

India suffers from a high maternal and infant mortality rate, especially in rural areas, where poor women do not receive effective care and one in every 22 infants die within one year of life. In 2010, Dimagi, in partnership with Catholic Relief Services (CRS), IntraHealth International, Real Medicine Foundation, and Save the Children, deployed CommCare mobile technology to help Accredited Social Health Activists (ASHAs) improve their care for pregnant women and their newborns at the last mile in rural India. CommCare uses audio, video, imagery, short message service (SMS) texting, data and tracking forms, multiple languages, and other features to standardize ASHAs' service delivery, improve counseling techniques and patient coordination, and collect real-time data for performance monitoring. The multimedia aids enhance client engagement and assist low-literate ASHAs and their clients. Through a partnership with the Government of India and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, a CommCare-based application is being scaled across eight Indian states to strengthen the monitoring of the service delivery of anganwadi center's in the country. The CommCare mobile application is intended to replace the extensive paper registers anganwadi workers are required to maintain. The app is designed to improve the care anganwadi workers provide their communities, tracking distribution of immunizations and supplementary food, attendance of children at preschool, and the nutrition status of children up to age five.

Tuberculosis (TB) afflicts 2.8 million citizens in India, representing more than 30 percent of the world's total burden. To control TB, complete adherence to treatment is crucial—under the World Health Organization's (WHO) Directly Observed Therapy Short-course (DOTS) strategy. In this strategy, patients are required to take up to 75 doses under supervision over six months at a treatment center or in the presence of an observer. However, the scarcity or inaccessibility of treatment centers and truthful observers in hard to-reach areas often results in high default rates. Missing a dose or interrupting treatment is extremely dangerous, since those who default can relapse, or much worse, develop the deadlier, drug-resistant strain of TB. A continuing social stigma for those who have TB is also linked to incomplete treatment and lack of follow-up. There is poor data collection as well. Since 2006, Operation ASHA (OpASHA) has helped deliver the Last-mile connection to TB treatment and prevention in India by leveraging existing government infrastructure to supplement the country's own efforts. OpASHA receives free medicines, diagnostic facilities and physician services from the national TB control program. Through a partnership with Microsoft Research, OpASHA has pioneered a biometric technology called eCompliance for treatment. OpASHA serves 10 million people in nine states across India, in addition to 2.2 million people in Cambodia. OpASHA has expanded to Cambodia, and its model has already been replicated in Uganda, Kenya, and the Dominican Republic.

In India, women and girls, especially in rural areas, are particularly affected by illiteracy. The social enterprise educate girls works to reform the existing school framework and create community ownership of government schools to improve Indian girls' enrollment, retention, and academic performance. As of fiscal year 2017-18, educate girls operates in 10 districts in Rajasthan and 3 districts in Madhya Pradesh benefiting approximately 3.8 million beneficiaries. Educate girls creates community ownership of government schools by leveraging existing public, private, and community resources to empower the local communities. The educate girls model allows for sending one girl to school at United States dollar (USD) 5 per year. Its monitoring and evaluation system measures enrollment, attendance, and quality of learning for these girls, even at a large scale. The program's impact is assessed through rigorous evaluation techniques, including quasi-experimental designs and randomized control trials. The educate girls model has the potential for far-reaching benefits - continuing to address gender inequality in education can bring about real transformation, such as improvements in health, income levels, and overall livelihoods in rural populations.

The rationales for public investment in R&D and innovation have evolved over time from an initial emphasis on market failures amongst neoclassical economists towards a broader view based on a systemic characterization of innovation amongst evolutionary economists. More recently, a renewed emphasis has been placed on the critical role of innovation to address social challenges and overcome development traps. The purpose of this article is to summarize the different rationales for public investments in R&D and innovation in developing countries, with the aim of providing clear arguments to better advocate for the continuation and expansion of such investments in front of an audience that has to prioritize among multiple competing development agendas in the context of financing constraints, including budget allocators, high-level policymakers and the civil society at large

With 700 million people residing in rural India over a large and diverse topography, providing access to safe drinking water is a significant challenge. The government has tried, playing a key role in financing and implementing drinking water schemes. However, about 30 percent of urban and 90 percent of rural households still depend completely on untreated surface or groundwater. The health and economic burdens of poor drinking water are enormous. It is estimated that about 21 percent of communicable diseases in India are water-related. In response, Waterlife, a for-profit company based out of Hyderabad, has experimented with an innovative business model—building and operating stand-alone water purification plants in underserved areas of India that would otherwise have no access to safe drinking water. Waterlife partners with local governments to provide the location and money for construction of the plants. Customers pay a small fee to fill up their 20-liter water jars, and this fee is used to pay back the government expenditure and cover ongoing plant maintenance and operations. The Waterlife model builds strong community ownership due to a transparent operating system with responsive customer service; community awareness campaigns on the importance of safe drinking water; locations in convenient public settings; and the training of a local corps of villagers to manage plant operations and maintenance. Impact can be seen in a reduced incidence of waterborne diseases and related medical expenses and improved job opportunities and school attendance for local villages. The expectation is that if continued and expanded, the utilization of Waterlife plants will enhance long-term economic and health development outcomes for disadvantaged and disenfranchised populations in India.

While its poverty rate has fallen slightly over the past two decades, the DRC remains one of the poorest countries in the world. The unaddressed demand for service delivery will require local private sector solutions to meet the needs of the poor, marginalized, and other underserved populations. Social enterprises (SEs) champion emerging private sector solutions to bring services to these populations, by switching from charity-based, donor-dependent organizations to revenue generating and sustainable enterprises. This report provides an overview of opportunities for, and constraints to, social entrepreneurship in the DRC and lays out a menu of options for strengthening social entrepreneurship through development programs.