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Housing Series: Why Dow Corning Sends Employees to Serve BoP Projects around the World
What would happen if major global companies sent their employees to work with people in emerging economies for weeks at a time to get to know their cultures, needs and daily patterns of life? Not as "poverty tourism," but rather part of a strategy to see all that is happening and and then to think how that translates to product innovations.
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- Uncategorized
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Housing Series: Building a Strong Foundation, When Earthquakes Hurricanes Hit Affordable Housing
"Earthquakes don’t kill people, poorly built buildings do," says Elizabeth Hausler, an engineer who turned her passion and know-how for building into an international non-profit social enterprise. Creating strategies and best practices to build safe and affordable housing became her life’s work and sparked her to found Build Change.
- Categories
- Social Enterprise
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NextThought Monday: Wisdom From on High
Our PopTech Social Innovation Fellows Boot Camp takes place on top a mountain, and the symbolism is not lost on any of us. It’s an intense five days of shared ascent for fellows and faculty alike. The goal of this conversation is to give the new entrepreneurs the benefit of what these fellows already learned about managing and launching a startup.
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- Technology
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- innovation
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Housing Series: Strategies to Add Quality and Value to Incremental Home Improvement
Various stakeholders are working together with BoP communities to innovate new, inclusive and market-driven strategies to raise quality, lower costs and add technical assistance - assistance that leaves citizens not only with a sturdier roof overhead, but with increased confidence, skills and a good credit track record to build on for the future.
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- Uncategorized
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- housing
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Watch: With Smartphones, Software, Building Better Agricultural Value Chains
Funded by the Gates Foundation, African Cashew Initiative is a $48 million project that aims to raise the incomes of 150,000 smallholder farmers. From Ghana, business software giant SAP is researching how ICT software coupled with smartphones is improving efficiency and trust in the cashew value chain, from farmers to buyers/traders. (With video)
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- Agriculture, Technology, Telecommunications
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Affordable Housing for All Series: In the Race for Affordable Housing, Who Has the Head Start?
In the race for affordable housing for all, is there a clear leader? Is government the biggest player in BoP affordable housing? Are NGOs? Private construction firms? The answer might surprise you. Far ahead of the pack in resources mobilized, progress made and sheer numbers of BoP housing solutions implemented, are the BoP households themselves.
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- Uncategorized
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Affordable Housing Series: The Rights to the Land Under Your Home
The migration of millions from rural areas as a result of global urbanization has created informal, and often chaotic, growth. Social business Terra Nova, based in the southern Brazilian state of Paran?, marks a new, unprecedented initiative to solve the lack of land ownership in favelas and to bring "squatter" communities into the formal economy.
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- Uncategorized
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- housing
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Bridging the Investor-Entrepreneur Gap
India has developed a well-deserved reputation as a hotbed of social enterprise activity. Yet, India’s wealth of ventures face significant challenges in their efforts to build and then scale. Guidance from seasoned investors who have analyzed countless enterprises is critical, and the driving force behind the Sankalp Investor-Entrepreneur Clinics.
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- Investing, Social Enterprise
- Tags
- venture capital
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