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Necessity Breeds Lifesaving Invention – and a Hub to Launch More Innovation
Dr. Dayo Olakulehin, a young doctor in Lagos, Nigeria, fell asleep while manually ventilating a 5-year-old boy with breathing difficulties. That led him to invent D-Box, a cheap, portable, rechargeable ventilator – and then he helped develop a company to launch the device and other medical innovations in Africa.
- Categories
- Health Care, Social Enterprise
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NexThought Monday – Lean Research: Introducing a Movement for Change
When used as a guiding framework, the principles of lean research have the potential to improve the quality and accuracy of the data gathered by social enterprises and other organizations, increase the usefulness of the data and enable the research process to generate benefits for communities, including improved relationships with local stakeholders and greater access to data for decision-making.
- Categories
- Impact Assessment
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Young Women Social Entrepreneurs Inspire Optimism in Sierra Leone
The Miller Center for Social Entrepreneurship's Global Social Benefit Institute works with passionate social entrepreneurs, whose work ranges from using drones to do last-mile distribution of medicines, to working with high school kids to help them solve problems they see in their communities. Pamela Roussos, senior director at the Miller Center, shares two women-led enterprises from their Sierra Leone workshop that stood out as especially inspiring.
- Categories
- Social Enterprise
- Tags
- academia
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Fruitful Entrepreneurship Training Helps Women in Tanzania’s Ag Sector Flourish
Over half of the agricultural workers in Tanzania are women. Not only do women carry out some of the most labor-intensive work, but they also have insufficient access to financial credit and face discrimination in land ownership. The Innovations in Gender Equality to Promote Household Food Security program, a joint venture between USAID and Land O’Lakes International Development launched in 2012, aims to identify, test and then scale innovations that enable female farmers to more efficiently produce agricultural products and bring them to market. The big goal: Help women spend less time in the field and more time in higher-value added activities.
- Categories
- Education
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Announcing Our New Partnership with ImpactSpace
We have long been on the lookout for a media partner that's creating deep and useful market data for the companies we cover on NextBillion. That's why today we're thrilled to announce a media partnership with our friends at ImpactSpace, a new open data platform created to fill the information gap in impact investing.
- Categories
- Impact Assessment, Investing
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NexThought Monday: Impact Investing ‘Skeptics Have Been Defeated’ – Our Q&A With LeapFrog CEO
LeapFrog Investments' portfolio of companies make insurance and financial services their business, and their clientele are those who earn $10 or less a day. With a recent investment from development organization OPIC, LeapFrog has raised more than $1 billion. In an interview with NextBillion, CEO Andrew Kuper details LeapFrog's trajectory, the shakiness of emerging markets, and the challenges of reaching consumers for whom insurance can provide both a safety net and an economic springboard.
- Categories
- Health Care, Impact Assessment, Investing
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Building Efficient Social Sector Initiatives Through New Generation Impact Measurement
The social sector is going through a massive change never seen before. Thanks to the advocacy of innovative foundations, impact investments are now becoming mainstream, along with collective impact programs and other initiatives like social impact bonds and Pay for Success programs. As these trends spread, we are witnessing the rise of thousands of collective impact ecosystems accompanied by improved impact investment models. These ecosystems incorporate different catalysts to impact measurement, when what we really need is a unified strategy of metrics.
- Categories
- Impact Assessment, Technology
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Adapting to Climate Change (Part 1): Health Care
Climate change has led to an increase in vector-borne diseases, primarily impacting the world's poor. The Asian Cities Climate Change Resilience Network supports various private-sector solutions to this problem, and Intellecap is supporting these interventions and mapping pilot project results across various sectors.
- Categories
- Health Care
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