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Reshaping Africa’s Food Systems: Three Opportunities to Drive Sustainable, Inclusive and Scalable Impact
Africa's agricultural sector is plagued by low yields, fragmented value chains and a large finance gap, and the region is home to 60% of the world’s uncultivated arable land. As Neil Wood, Oscar Garza and Hanna Dohrenbusch at Open Capital explain, these challenges have brought the sector to a critical juncture. They share three key solutions based on Open Capital's work on 450+ agriculture and food systems projects across Africa, which have the power to help drive the future of agriculture on the continent in the decades to come.
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- Agriculture, Energy, Environment, Investing, Technology
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Nine Business Models for Productive Use of Electricity in Africa: A Framework for Generating Profit and Impact in Off-Grid Energy
Improving energy access in rural Africa is crucial for poverty reduction, but grid electricity is often inaccessible or unaffordable — and off-grid alternatives present similar challenges. Olowo Aminu, Bodunde Akinola, Nneka Chime and Mosorire Aiyeyemi at CrossBoundary argue that Productive Use of Electricity (PUE) has the potential to solve these issues, boosting household income and economic growth, while increasing profitability for energy providers. They share a framework CrossBoundary has developed to help off-grid companies and other stakeholders plan for effective PUE implementation.
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- Agriculture, Energy, Environment, Technology
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NextBillion’s Most Influential Articles of 2023: Announcing the Three Winners of our Annual Contest
As 2024 gets underway, we'd like to announce the results of NextBillion’s annual “Most Influential Article of the Year” contest. This year's contest featured a strong slate of articles, covering a diverse array of topics ranging from systems change to decarbonization, in sectors that included energy, agriculture, finance and more. We've highlighted the three winners, as selected by our readers, in this article.
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- Agriculture, Energy, Environment, Finance, Investing, Social Enterprise, Technology, WASH
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Announcing NextBillion’s Most Influential Articles of 2023: Cast Your Vote in our Annual Contest by Jan. 7!
As 2023 draws to a close, it’s time for NextBillion’s annual tradition: our “Most Influential Articles of the Year” contest. As we've done since 2012, we've selected 12 of our most-read articles from the past year, inviting readers to vote for the ones that influenced their thinking the most. You can vote multiple times — up to once per hour — during the voting period, which will run from Dec. 22 to 11:59 pm on Jan. 7. Best wishes for a healthy and prosperous new year!
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- Agriculture, Energy, Environment, Finance, Investing, Social Enterprise, Technology, WASH
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PUE at the BoP: Three Approaches To Making Productive Uses Of Energy Accessible To All
Productive Use of Energy (PUE) technologies, such as solar water pumps, refrigeration and sewing machines, are crucial for helping smallholder farmers and other microentrepreneurs generate incomes. But as Christopher Emmott at Acumen explains, the high up-front costs of PUE appliances prevent many people at the Base of the Pyramid (BoP) from purchasing them. He shares some innovative approaches and business models that can enable vulnerable communities to access these life-changing technologies.
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- Agriculture, Energy, Social Enterprise, Technology
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Scaling Climate Finance for Smallholder Agriculture: Lessons Learned from Partnering with Farmer-Allied Businesses
Small-scale agriculture supports the livelihoods of more than 600 million families and generates over 40% of jobs in Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. Yet as Elizabeth Teague at Root Capital points out, agricultural livelihoods are highly vulnerable to climate change, and smallholder farmers receive just 1.7% of global climate financing. She discusses how Root Capital is working with farmer-allied enterprises to help close this gap, sharing what they’ve learned about how to design and scale climate financing for smallholder communities.
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- Agriculture, Environment, Investing
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Agricultural Insurance + Energy Access: An Innovative Pilot Program Reveals the Value of Bundled Services — And the Need for Cross-Sector Partnerships
As the world works to achieve SDG7, it's becoming clear that cross-sector partnerships will be key to meeting its goal of affordable, sustainable energy for all by 2030. Anshul Patel at Bboxx — a leading distributor of pay-as-you-go solar energy products — shares learnings from the company's recent partnership with Pula, an agri-insurance technology firm, which insured Bboxx customers against the climate-related crop failures that can lead to payment defaults and repossession of their energy products.
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- Agriculture, Energy, Finance, Technology
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Rethinking Scale in Agribusiness: An Impact Investor Explores the Massive Benefits of Being Small
Many impact investors have adopted the mindset of traditional venture capital, seeking out companies with the potential to reach millions of customers. But Chris Wayne and Coco Lim at Acumen argue that this single-minded focus on scale ignores the realities of agribusinesses in emerging markets, and overlooks small businesses' potential to make a deeper impact. They explore why impact investors should focus on more than just the number of "lives impacted” by their agriculture investments, moving toward a more nuanced understanding of scale in this crucial sector.
- Categories
- Agriculture, Investing, Social Enterprise