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Weekly Roundup: Bringing Broadband to the BoP and Other Insights From OMJ’s BoP Week
Like housing, expanding broadband requires close collaboration with public and private stakeholders, and a willingness to build trust across them. Building that trust was part of the mission of the Opportunities for the Majority’s Strategic Partners Dialogue, which brought together government officials, financers, NGOs, and, of course, entrepreneurs to discuss how policy innovation can be a catalyst for market-based solutions to poverty in both broadband and housing.
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- Technology, Telecommunications
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Scratch it Off the Public Health Wish-list: A menu of IT solutions for global health challenges
Observing the widespread use of ICT, coupled with intense interest from the global health community—witness, a few of my colleagues at the Center for Health Market Innovations set out to figure out why programs used technology. To answer this question, they analyzed more than 600 programs in over 100 countries—the contents of CHMI’s database at the time. Their findings, published in this month’s WHO Bulletin, highlight six key reasons health program managers adopt ICT.
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- Health Care, Social Enterprise, Technology
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In Telemedicine, Often Old Habits Prove Bigger Challenge Than Technology Hurdles
In the rural town of Juvvalapalem, most residents seek the local Rural Medical Practitioners (also known as quacks) when they need medical treatment. This is just one of the challenges we’re dealing with at GloCare, an initiative to provide market-driven quality healthcare solutions to underserved populations through telemedicine.
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- Health Care, Technology, Telecommunications
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Will Lower Mobile Money Fees in Kenya, Tanzania be Enough to Stimulate Micropayments?
Many cite the high cost of electronic transfers as a key market barrier to leveraging mobile money platforms and enabling retail payments or other financial services to the poor. (See a previous post on that subject here). But recently, two leading mobile money providers in Kenya and Tanzania lowered their prices for small-value transfers.
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- Technology, Telecommunications
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Unleashing Innovation: The Story Behind the Low-Cost Incubator ‘Embrace’
As some of the world’s leading social innovators come together this week at the Skoll World Forum on Social Entrepreneurship, Link TV’s ViewChange project is looking at some of the most exciting social innovations taking place around the world. Guest Writer Linus Liang, COO of Embrace, shares the story on the low-cost incubator.
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- Health Care, Social Enterprise, Technology
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From ‘A-Ha’ to Impact: Making it to Market
But like many “breakthrough” innovations such as digital cameras, tablets, and Apple’s pinch-and-zoom screen function (born in 1983), social impact technologies often languish before really reaching the market.
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- Social Enterprise, Technology
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MobiPrize: Moving Minds, Moving the Urban Poor
If you are a social entrepreneur who has an innovative and replicable solution to local and global transportation challenges, you are eligible to win the MobiPrize: US $5,000 and a trip to Rio+20 (the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development, June 20-22, in Rio de Janeiro) and top-notch mentorship sessions with global experts in sectors relevant to transportation, livable and sustainable communities, business and social enterprise.
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- Technology, Transportation
- Tags
- transportation
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Big Idea: Why Hands-On Regulation of Mobile Money Could Be Dangerous
There’s a very simple imperative driving the tariff structure and every other decision that determines access to mobile money: cost recovery. This is more than a cold-hearted calculation by mobile network operators’ accountants. If rural mobile money agents, who generally operate as independent contractors, cannot profit from this role, there will be no rural agents and no mobile money service.
- Categories
- Technology, Telecommunications