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See Who Won NB’s Top Post of 2018 Contest
Thank you to everyone who voted in NextBillion's seventh annual Top Post of the Year contest. Here are the winners and their vote percentage totals as well as the complete results for this year's competition. Congratulations to the top three winning contributors for their articles, which both challenged and enlightened us. And Happy New Year to all of our readers.
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- Agriculture, Education, Energy, Environment, Finance, Health Care, Investing, Technology, WASH
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The Donor-Funded Dilemma: What’s Stopping Emerging Countries from Developing Private Markets for Contraceptives?
In sub-Saharan Africa, the private sector provides family planning solutions to almost 40 percent of women. But that isn’t the case in Malawi, a country that’s long been dominated by donor-funded commodities. Erika Beidelman and Andrea Bare at the William Davidson Institute explore Malawi's family planning landscape, highlighting five factors that may be limiting the private sector’s involvement – issues that may apply to other countries with histories of donor-funded healthcare.
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- Health Care
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Finding the Right Financial Partner: Lessons Learned from One Startup’s Success in the Funding World
Kinnos was founded during the Ebola outbreak of 2014, marketing an innovative chemical product that allows even untrained workers to apply disinfectant correctly. Its founders (then students at Columbia University) quickly received more than $750,000 in grants and prizes. But as their company grew, they had to learn to navigate the risky landscape of startup investment. According to Christina Tamer at VentureWell, the Kinnos team's success in this area—they have raised $1 million in venture funding from angel investors—offers a number of key lessons for other entrepreneurs.
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- Health Care, Investing, Social Enterprise
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- impact investing, startups
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Using Mobile Technology to Fight Disease: Three Tips for Social Startups in the Developing World
In a world where nearly half of the population is too poor to access essential health services, preventable diseases still claim countless lives. Malaria alone is responsible for over 1 million deaths each year, and sickle cell disease also affects millions across the globe. But these diseases can be significantly helped with early diagnosis and cost-effective treatments, says Hemex Health co-founder Patti White. She explores the innovative technology Hemex has developed to address this issue – and highlights three elements of its approach that can help other social enterprises gain traction in the crowded startup space.
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- Health Care, Social Enterprise
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- startups
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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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- Health Care, Social Enterprise, Technology
- Tags
- partnerships
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Hardware Innovation is … Hard: How These Entrepreneurs Overcame the Challenges
Compared with the creators of app-based products, hardware-focused innovators face a much more difficult and expensive journey, says Villgro CTO Arun Venkatesan. The resources and time required to perfect hardware iterations are larger, the lack of a mature ecosystem is a problem, and the buyer is often distinctly different from the user or beneficiary. Venkatesan profiles four hardware innovators in agriculture and health care, discussing how they worked through these obstacles.
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- Agriculture, Health Care, Investing, Social Enterprise, Technology
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Helping Low-Income Patients Breathe Easier: Three Solutions to Oxygen Market Failures
For a child with severe pneumonia—and every other patient struggling for breath—access to oxygen is a matter of life or death. And even though oxygen is just as important to hospitals and clinics as electricity and water, market failures stand between oxygen and the people who need it. While medicines and vaccines are its primary focus, the global NGO PATH recently zeroed in on how to improve oxygen supplies in low- and middle-income countries.
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- Health Care
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Glasses for the Masses: Because It’s Easier to Navigate a Path out of Poverty When You Can See
On this World Sight Day, VisionSpring President Ella R. Gudwin writes that though eyeglasses are a cost-effective poverty reduction tool, 2.5 billion people do not have the eyeglasses they need to earn and learn. Gudwin announces a new partnership with Target and Williams-Sonoma Inc. that aims to improve workers' vision on a grand scale to bridge the visual divide.
- Categories
- Health Care, Social Enterprise
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