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NexThought Monday – Moving Beyond Capital: Designing Technical Assistance that Works as Hard as Entrepreneurs
Technical assistance can be extremely valuable to early-stage enterprises, but they are a diverse group with different priorities, with limits on the amount of technical assistance they can absorb. Development partners have a responsibility to listen to the entrepreneurs they support and to think creatively about how to best deliver demand-driven, flexible technical assistance.
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- Health Care
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Cancer Vaccines Move From ‘Far-fetched’ to Reality
The significant differences in cost of treatment versus vaccination make the HPV and hepatitis B vaccines highly cost effective in the developing world. And while there have been improvements in global vaccine coverage in the past decade, disparities still result from competing health priorities, limited resources, poor health systems, inadequate monitoring and supervision, among other things.
- Categories
- Health Care
- Tags
- vaccines
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Small Farmers Meet Big Data: How the data revolution could transform smallholder finance
The enormous gap between the supply and demand of formal credit for smallholder farmers has been well documented. Among the varied causes of this mismatch is the extreme lack of information on potential borrowers that’s available to lenders. Two recent data-focused innovations, however, could dramatically reduce these information challenges and the associated lending risks, which could help open up pools of capital for previously underserved populations.
- Categories
- Agriculture
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Mapping the Path to Full Financial Inclusion
When attempting to solve a complex development challenge, we often jump from creating ambitious goals to making plans, without first identifying who we need to reach with our goals, where those people reside, and what challenge and opportunities they face. That’s why one of the underappreciated keys to meeting a development goal is to draw a map - and why maps provide the theme for this year's State of the Microcredit Summit Campaign Report: Mapping Pathways out of Poverty.
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- Finance
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Big Data isn’t Enough: We Need an ‘All of the Above’ Strategy to Drive Innovation in Financial Inclusion
Researchers love talking about their data and methods as a “toolbox,” and with the rise of big data, they’ve got a fancy new tool. However, the reason for carrying a toolbox is that there are very few projects where just one tool, no matter how powerful, is sufficient to get the job done. It’s necessary to recognize the weaknesses of big data as well as its strengths, and to think about what other types of data are needed to complement it.
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- Technology
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Turning Global Targets into Action
For the first time, the global health community is being called to act against the rise of NCDs, the root cause of 38 million of the 56 million deaths in 2012. What may come as a shock, given that NCDs are generally thought of as diseases of affluence, is that Africa as a whole is poised to bear the bulk of the NCD burden in the coming years.
- Categories
- Health Care
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NexThought Monday: Why Digital Wallets Stay Empty – and Six Ways Providers Can Help
In emerging economies throughout the world, people have flocked to mobile payment solutions, whether it’s to send money home, facilitate informal business transactions or pay bills. Yet most digital accounts are empty and serve mainly as a pass-through for such payments, which limits the transformational potential of mobile money. Here are several factors which make digital accounts an illogical store of value for people with low and uncertain incomes, and six ways providers can address this issue.
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- Uncategorized
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Kiva’s New Fund Targets 1 Million Women Entrepreneurs – But How Much Impact Should We Expect?
Last week, the Inter-American Development Bank and the U.S. State Department joined microfinance pioneer Kiva to launch the Women’s Entrepreneurship Fund. The fund matches the contributions of lenders who respond to a woman entrepreneur’s loan request on Kiva’s online platform, and hopes to crowdfund loans for 1 million entrepreneurs. But in spite of the excitement around the announcement, questions about both Kiva’s approach and the broader microfinance model remain.
- Categories
- Investing
