About
the end poverty fund
The “Elephant in the Room” when it comes to poverty reduction is that no one wants to invest in the “Base of the Pyramid” because they are risk averse.
The “End Poverty Fund” (Under formation) is focused on mitigating investor risk by investing in scalable and sustainable social franchise solutions to a wide variety of poverty reduction challenges.
“Social franchises” are commercial franchise businesses that provide, or intend to provide, economically sustainable solutions to global poverty reduction challenges in health, sanitation, food insecurity, education, agriculture, energy, nutrition, housing, climate vulnerability and more.
A social franchise prioritizes delivering social impact that is financially and environmentally sustainable.
The Institute is the “Capacity Building Pipeline Engine” for the End Poverty Fund and other investment Funds, private or public, that are focused on ending poverty.
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Given that Social Franchising is a new business model, it requires a new generation of trained human resources who can develop, manage and scale franchisable social ventures.
Whereas many post-secondary institutions worldwide offer entrepreneurship training, fewer than 5% of these institutions offer social entrepreneurship and social franchise management training. This situation has resulted in an acute human resource shortage
The End Poverty Fund, is being formed as a private investment fund, in part, to help mitigate the risk for social impact investors so they will come down the risk averse ladder and make investments in seed, early-stage and mature “social franchises” that are focused on creating jobs and delivering affordable social impact for the world’s poorest communities.
The application of commercial franchising, one of the most popular and successful commercial business models over the last several decades, has emerged as a potentially effective and efficient approach to addressing societal challenges at scale.
Social sector franchising harnesses the franchise model to take proven commercial proofs of concepts and scale them rapidly to reach large numbers of the poor with necessary socially impactful goods and services.