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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
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- venture capital
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NextThought Monday: Market, Government and Finding Synergies Between the Two
It’s easy to let advocacy - the process of scaling a solution through policy change - slip into the distance and focus on the market-based approach to scale. Social change has swung toward the market-based approach to scale and largely lost sight of the other method, which involves those sometimes taboo words: institutions, lobbying, and policy.
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- Environment
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- scale
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Creating Demand With Social Marketing: ColaLife’s Approach
Too often ventures forget they need endeavor to create demand for the products they offer in BoP markets. ColaLife is a rare example, as it thought this through this early in the design phase. Fitting into the unused spaced between crated bottles, ColaLife’s "AidPods" contain Anti-Diarrhea Kits (ADKs) for home use by mothers and caregivers.
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- Health Care, Social Enterprise
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What Global Development Needs to Make an iPhone? Start With Storytelling
Esther Duflo. Abhijit Bhanerjee. Dean Karlan. These are household names in global development thanks to their leadership for more evidence-based project design and implementation. Here’s another name: Marc Maxson, a consultant with GlobalGiving who helped create and implement its Storytelling Project, which goes beyond eliminating selection bias.
- Categories
- Impact Assessment, Social Enterprise
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