Narrow Results

African countries performed poorly in achieving the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and are lagging behind the rest of the world in terms of achieving the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). In Africa, the achievement of development goals depends on the generation and success of entrepreneurship to address sustainability challenges. A major challenge to the success of development goals and entrepreneurship in Africa is lack of finance. Taking financial capital as a prerequisite resource to effectively exploiting social entrepreneurial opportunities, this chapter adopts the resource-based entrepreneurship theory to identify impact investors as the providers of financial resources to social entrepreneurs for contributing to the achievement of SDGs in Africa. The chapter employs a systematic literature review and illustrative case examples to demonstrate how impact investment can play an essential role in attracting private capital to finance social enterprises toward the realization of SDGs in Africa. The chapter highlights how social entrepreneurs and impact investors distinguish themselves through their social and environmental objectives, and explores how stakeholders could best rally around the overlapping interests in impact investing and social entrepreneurship to achieve the UNSDGs. The chapter argues that investors and social entrepreneurs will play a significant role towards the achievement of SDGs in Africa.

Looking for excellence in library services and fostering closer and better relationships between academic scholars and library staff is a major ongoing trend. According to that, the library of the Catholic University in Milan is promoting a pilot project – codename Nexus – aimed to:

• designing, implementing and delivering a "one stop information shop" for internal researchers, bundling together homogeneous resources and tools,

• carefully selecting and optimizing available services, with a clear understanding of users' behaviour and with a project perspective (e.g: helping scholars in producing high quality educational material).

In order to do so, we are in the process of developing suitable qualitative methods, enabling us to assess the perceived value of library services, through a close relationship with a selected panel of scholars, giving a structured feedback about:

• "dos and don'ts" when introducing new services in an academic library context

• scope and scale economies gained in releasing a defined range of "research deliverables" (e.g.: educational materials, bibliographies, papers)

• cost/benefit analysis of new services, in terms of effective usage.

Expected major benefits for the library will include:

• deeper understanding of effective users' needs and qualitative evidences about perceived value of new services (including spending rationalisation)

• improved partnership between administrative staff and the internal research community, leading to a better academic climate

• increased support to library innovation initiatives, including necessary resources (mostly in the human resources and technology areas).