Our Blog
Upaya Social Ventures And MIT D-Lab Announce Collaboration To Support Women-Led Startups In India
Upaya Social Ventures (Upaya), a nonprofit growing small businesses to create jobs for the extreme poor, and MIT D-Lab, a program developing and advancing collaborative approaches and practical solutions to global poverty challenges, today announced a pilot integration of their accelerator programs to help women-led small and growing businesses in India access critical finance to scale their enterprises and create jobs to lift people out of extreme poverty
Upaya Fundamentals: Origins And Inspiration
Many people who hear about Upaya try to compare our work to that of microfinance. It is understandable. After all, the microfinance movement captivated the world and its power and spread convinced many that this was the silver bullet to fight poverty.
The “Missing Middle” Is More Complicated
In our industry of impact investing, there has long been a lament that small and growing businesses (SGBs) are the “missing middle” of the space—these are the companies that are too large for microfinance funding and too small for traditional investors or even most impact investors