News & Views

This month’s WDI Global Impact speaker will provide a behind-the-scenes look at how the business, government, philanthropic and investing communities overcame years of mistrust and misaligned priorities to begin a shift toward collaborative investments. Tami Kesselman, an expert in impact investing who works at the intersection of corporate, government, entrepreneurial…

A group of business leaders are partnering with the William Davidson Institute to find both financially and ecologically sustainable solutions to Ethiopia’s medical waste problem. While Ethiopia has official directives that mandate the proper and timely disposal of medical waste, enforcement often has been challenging. This has resulted in warehouses…

The Global Health Supply Chain Technical Assistance (GHSC TA-TZ) project, funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), aims to strengthen Tanzania’s health supply chain systems across different disease programs. Two research managers from WDI’s Healthcare focus area, Michael Krautmann and Ben Davis, conducted a midterm review of…

Improving reproductive health supply chains to boost access to family planning products in Mozambique. Educating senior managers from around the Baltics. Helping both investors and enterprises they support better measure impact  in Latin America. Creating new MBA-level curriculum for universities in Papua New Guinea. These partner projects are just a…

Tom Light, managing director of WaterEquity and a recent guest of the WDI Global Impact Speaker Series, sat down for a one-on-one video interview while on campus. (Watch the discussion below.) Light, who was interviewed by Pascale Leroueil, vice president of WDI’s Healthcare initiative, talked about a number of aspects…

WDI’s Performance Measurement Initiative (PMI), along with two partners, have compiled a detailed guide for companies and other private sector partners working with USAID to help them meet project goals and generate value. The report, “Nine Questions Every Company Should Ask to Strengthen their Partnership with USAID,” focuses on how…

In sub-Saharan Africa, the private sector is a common provider of family planning solutions, used by almost 40 percent of women in the region. But this isn’t the case in Malawi. To find out why, we spent two weeks in-country this past September, exploring Malawi’s private sector landscape for family…

WDI’s M²GATE program, which brought together more than 500 students from five Michigan university campuses and their peers in Egypt, Libya, Morocco and Tunisia to find entrepreneurial solutions to social challenges in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, culminated Nov. 14 with three teams participating in a…

Tom Light, managing director of WaterEquity, the first-ever impact investment management firm with an exclusive focus on ending the global water crisis, is scheduled to be the next guest for the WDI Global Impact Speaker Series. Light’s talk, "Liquid Assets: Investing to End the Global Water Crisis," will begin at…

By Colm Fay In early September in Delhi, India, the William Davidson Institute at the University of Michigan, and Miller Center for Social Entrepreneurship at Santa Clara University launched “Closing the Circuit: Accelerating Clean Energy Investment in India.” The event included round-table discussions with enterprises and investors on how they…