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Extreme By Design: Film tracks the world’s biggest little ideas
“Extreme By Design,” a documentary produced and co-directed by Ralph King, was screened at Mercy Corps’ global headquarters in Portland for a public audience in early February. The film follows the journey of a group of students who design and build products to solve seemingly intractable problems of the world’s poor.
- Categories
- Technology
- Tags
- product design
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Changing Our Priorities: When we don’t actually want what we ‘need’
More organizations are spending less time on the tired “it’s good for you, why don’t you understand?” approach to poverty alleviation. The age-old question – how might we deliver a product or service that people “need” and want? – is being answered in new and interesting ways.
- Categories
- Uncategorized
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NexThought Monday : Customer Experience needs to drive vision at the BoP business, not vice versa
Base of the pyramid (BoP) organizations may arguably have some of the best intentions the private sector has to offer. But even they don’t always get it right. Many need to introduce customer experience to companies and organizations that count the BoP as customers. Customer what? Customer experience goes beyond customer service, beyond working once or twice with a representative.
- Categories
- Education
- Tags
- product design
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Students develop low-cost water filtering system for African nation
In an effort to bring fresh water to rural Kenyans, School of International Affairs (SIA) students Kory Hansen and Jin Ju Kim participated in Penn State's Humanitarian Engineering and Social Entrepreneurship (HESE) program to develop a ceramic water filtration system for parts of the sub Saharan African nation.
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- Agriculture
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
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All About India: A Health Care Market in Transition (Part 2)
Zeena Johar is president of IKP Centre for Technologies in Public Health, and CEO of SughaVazhvu Healthcare. In this second post in a four-part series on developments and challenges in Indian health care, Johar provides insights on addressing the country’s provider shortage, and reaching rural markets.
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- Health Care, Social Enterprise
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Can You Really Make a Fortune in Bop Health Care? An Interview With Paul Polak
Paul Polak has dedicated his life to promoting business solutions to global poverty. He believes there’s a fortune to be made in "radically affordable" products marketed to BoP customers. But does his approach work with the complexities of health care? And is for-profit business an ethical way of providing products that people literally can’t live without?
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- Health Care
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How the Aakash tablet bounced back
Internet-connected tablets, as I’ve explained before, have the potential to positively impact billions. Cell phones improved commerce and changed society by allowing, among other things, the poorest villagers in the developing world to connect with one another. The Internet will catalyze the next leap forward by providing those in the developing world access to the same ocean of knowledge as those in wealthier societies. This will transform education and revolutionize commerce.
- Categories
- Technology
- Region
- South Asia
- Tags
- product design
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NextThought Monday: Helping the BoP Design its Own Way Out of Poverty
Daniel Altman is an economist, writer and teacher with a deep commitment to international development. He’s had a revelation about the power of consumer products to create markets from the inside out, and he’s doing something about it.
Emerging Design Centers (EDCs) is a for-profit enterprise that puts cutting-edge design tools in the hands of the poor.- Categories
- Impact Assessment