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Saving Mothers and Their Babies: Innovators working to solve problems in the hardest-to-reach regions of the world
Saving Lives at Birth recently nominated 17 promising ideas to add to its impressive and growing group of innovators. These newest innovations rose to the top from a pool of more than 750 submissions, more than half of which came from low- and middle-income countries. The program will be announcing additional nominees for transition-to-scale awards (up to $2 million) later this year.
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- Health Care, Technology
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Gender Mobility: A deeper dive into female-friendly business, economic programs harnessing cell technology
Women are 21 percent less likely to own a phone than a man in developing nations.The mobile development community is aware of this gender gap and has kickstarted a number of programs to help. Global Envision profiles a few of the mobile providers that are ahead of the game with female-targeted programs.
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- Technology
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The Power of Texting: How a Simple Text Message Can Make the Difference Between Success and Failure for Social Initiatives
Mobile phones are increasingly prevalent throughout the world, and researchers have found that sending text message reminders can help people follow through with their intentions, significantly increasing the success of development interventions. Roxanne Bauer explores the impact of text reminders on malaria treatment and savings initiatives, and discusses the science behind the approach.
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- Health Care, Impact Assessment, Technology, Telecommunications
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Texting Toward a Better Business: What happened when women in three countries were offered bite-sized bits of business know-how via mobile phones
The Business Women mobile service, developed by the Cherie Blair Foundation for Women, the ExxonMobil Foundation and Nokia, offered women bite-sized bits of business know-how via their mobile phones. Every week, thousands of women in Nigeria, Indonesia, and Tanzania received five or six business tips as part of a year-long curriculum.
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- Education, Technology
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NexThought Monday – Test Tubers: Why potatoes in Bangladesh are turning heads in the Andes
If you’re a subsistence farmer of potatoes, cassava or bananas, you’ll often sow your crops by taking cuttings from other plants. An alternative method of in vitro micro-propagation involves cloning plantlets in a laboratory setting. This can lead to dramatic gains in crop yields, but it’s expensive. But there may be a low-tech solution.
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- Agriculture, Education, Technology
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- research
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The Technology Trade-off: Mobile tech boosts financial access but limits engagement. Can it also help build banking relationships?
Financial access is at an all-time high, and it’s growing fast. Yet account dormancy rates for the newly banked range from 60-90 percent. And though mobile technology has made more services scalable, it has also limited banks’ ability to build deeper relationships with their customers. But Juntos Finanzas believes mobile tech may also hold a solution to this problem.
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- Technology, Telecommunications
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The Rise of the Cheap Smartphone : And what it could mean for BoP finance, connectivity
According an estimate from Gartner, by 2018 nine out of ten phones will be smartphones. If this comes to pass, it may require a substantial rethink about the delivery of mobile financial services to consumers in developing markets, where up until now the feature phone has dominated.
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- Technology, Telecommunications
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Marketing the ‘Real Cool Honey’ Sachets: Launch lessons from Asali Poa in Kenya
Find a product-market fit and then execute flawlessly. Both are tough and have high risks that you need to overcome with the launch process. Here are a few big lessons from Honey Care Africa’s little sachet of honey, which we call Asali Poa (translated as "real cool honey"). We launched the product commercially in 2014 in Nairobi and currently reach 3,000 points of purchase.
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- Technology