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The Path to 100 Gigawatts: How India Has Emerged as a Global Leader in Solar Energy
India has displaced Japan as the third-largest market for solar power and is poised to bump the U.S. from the No. 2 spot, as it works toward boosting its renewable capacity to 100 gigawatts by the end of 2022. Though it still relies on coal plants and has dangerous air pollution levels, the landscape is changing fast, with 14 new solar parks planned – including one that's set to become the world’s largest. Sahaj Desai outlines the momentum and challenges behind India's renewable energy revolution.
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- Energy
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Up to 2.5 Billion People Need Glasses: Can This Hardware Innovation Deliver?
Roughly 25 percent of the global population needs glasses, but lacks access. The problem isn't cost: Affordable glasses are readily available in emerging markets. What's lacking are trained eye care specialists. The social startup PlenOptika is tackling that issue with a device called the QuickSee: a binocular-sized autorefractor that non-specialists can use to scan a patient’s eyes and produce an eyeglass prescription within seconds. Paul Scott, director of engineering for ASME, discusses the innovation, and the challenges and rewards of running a social hardware startup.
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- Entrepreneurship, Health Care, Technology
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Inspiration, Ideation and Implementation: How Design Thinking Can Build Robust and Sustainable mHealth Ventures
Design thinking can help mHealth ventures develop their value propositions and potential impacts, meet customer needs, and shape business models that stand the test of time. In the final post in his series on making mHealth businesses sustainable, Khanjan Mehta provides a structured framework that helps these enterprises determine their viability, particularly in the early conceptualization phase.
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- Entrepreneurship, Health Care, Technology
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The Funder Problem: Good Intentions Aren’t Enough
Despite their good intentions, funders are often the biggest barriers to social enterprises or nonprofits achieving impact. Open Road Alliance, a philanthropic initiative that gives emergency grants to impact-focused organizations, gathered and analyzed five years of data about roadblocks faced by over 100 grantees. Nearly half of the problems the group found were caused by funders. Laurie Michaels describes the three categories of funder-related barriers that account for the most frequent challenges – and offers some surprisingly easy fixes.
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- Entrepreneurship
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Using Findex Wisely: Understanding the Strengths and Weaknesses of the World’s Biggest Financial Inclusion Dataset
The Global Findex report is an essential piece of data for the financial inclusion sector, but its insights should nevertheless be treated with caution, says Daniel Rozas. Exploring some inexplicable findings in the recent Findex 2017 release, he breaks down the limits of survey-based data, and explains how Findex can be used in combination with other forms of data to get a more accurate picture of financial inclusion progress.
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- Inclusive Fintech
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