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Helping Smallholders Grow a Pharmacy on their Farms
Eliminating hidden hunger is not easy, but with resources in the right place, with governments, donors and civil society working together and with the right policies developed, BRAC believes it can introduce poor children in developing countries to a nutritious vegetable – the orange-fleshed sweet potato – they will come to favor.
- Categories
- Agriculture, Health Care
- Tags
- nutrition
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NexThought Monday: Sprinters vs. Limpers – Three Critical Success Factors for Digital Finance Deployments
According to the GSMA, there are 271 mobile money services in operation across 93 countries, and digital financial services are now available in over 60 percent of developing markets. An increasing number of services are reaching scale, as 30 services now have more than one million active accounts. But 241 have failed to do so. So what separates these 30 “sprinters” from those deployments that are merely limping along?
- Categories
- Uncategorized
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From Radio Jingles to Cricket Matches – You Have to Pass the Word to Heal the World
It is often assumed that if there is a health care problem and a solution, people who are suffering will clamour for the solution. However, the reality is that people need to be educated about the risks and benefits before their buy-in can be obtained. Therefore, effective communication is a critical part of any public health program.
- Categories
- Health Care
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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.
- Categories
- 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.
- Categories
- 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.
- Categories
- Technology
