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Sustainable Connectivity: How Biofuels Can Boost Mobile Access, Support Small Farmers – And Fight Climate Change
Mobile connectivity is sweeping through rural Africa and Asia – but it has a major drawback. It’s dependent on cellular towers that often rely either on diesel power, which has economic and ecological costs and limited availability, or solar panels, which require clear, sunny skies. Fortunately, another solution is emerging: bioenergy. John Garrity, Dennis Garrity and James Daniel at the Evergreening Global Alliance explore its positive impact on food security, grid infrastructure and global climate change.
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- Agriculture, Energy, Environment, Technology, Telecommunications
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Helping the Digital Revolution Reach the Corner Store: Piloting Mobile Solutions for Micro-Retailers
Across the developing world, there are millions of small-scale shopkeepers who want to build their businesses. But with no training in management skills, many often struggle to run their shops. Can digital tools help address this challenge? TechnoServe sought to answer that question by piloting a smartphone platform that worked with shopkeepers in Kenya to improve the operations of their stores. Alice Waweru explores the program’s benefits and limitations.
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- Technology
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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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Inclusive Innovation: How Two Mobile Technology Startups are Changing the Game in Microfinance
Securing a bank loan is an onerous task for anyone. But for the 2.5 billion unbanked people worldwide, the obstacles can seem insurmountable. And microfinance and village savings groups both have significant limitations, particularly for people without a credit history. June Sugiyama of Vodafone Americas Foundation explains how two winners of the foundation's annual Wireless Innovation Project competition are overcoming these limitations through mobile technology.
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- Finance, Technology
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The Superplatforms are Coming … And They Will Transform Financial Inclusion
With their big brands, big budgets and big data, superplatforms like Google, Amazon, Facebook and Alibaba already know more about most banks’ customers than the banks themselves. As these internet giants make increasing inroads into financial services, what are the implications for low-income customers – and their existing providers? David Porteous of BFA and Olga Morawcynski of MasterCard Foundation explore how these platforms are reshaping the face of financial inclusion around the world.
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- Finance, Technology
- Tags
- data, financial inclusion, fintech
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A Roadmap to Food Security: Linking Geodata with Financial Inclusion to Support Smallholders
Smallholder farmers produce a staggering 70 percent of the world’s food, making them essential to food security. Geodata applications have been shown to improve these farmers’ yields and even boost their financial access – one of the main obstacles to increasing production. To help tap into these benefits, NpM’s Innovator’s Challenge brought together 17 tech companies with geodata-based solutions for smallholder financial inclusion. NpM director Josien Sluijs discusses the winning companies, and the broader potential of geodata-based innovation.
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- Agriculture, Finance, Social Enterprise, Technology
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Inexpensive Impact: The Case for Frugal Innovations
Over 4 billion people around the world lack necessities like food, water, energy, health care and housing. This represents not only a major social challenge but a major market, as low-income consumers have an annual purchasing capacity of US $5 trillion. Rajat Chabba and Sheena Raikundalia at Intellecap explore how entrepreneurs are developing innovative, frugal products to meet these customers’ needs – and why an ecosystem approach is needed to help them scale their solutions.
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- Technology
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Affordable, Scalable, Overlooked: Evaporative Cooling Can Fight Food Loss – Why isn’t the Development Sector Embracing It?
Food loss due to lack of effective storage is a global problem: In sub-Saharan Africa alone, approximately 23 percent of available food is lost or wasted. There’s increasing interest in an innovative yet old-school solution to the problem: evaporative cooling. But though the technology can be adopted with minimal training, low up-front costs and no electricity, it is not widely used. MIT D-Lab research engineer Eric Verploegen explores five ways to increase the effective production, dissemination and usage of this technology.
- Categories
- Agriculture, Energy, Technology