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Bringing the Private Sector to Public Health: How Business Innovation Can Improve Health Care Access
Engaging the private sector is an increasingly critical theme in global health, because there is no clear way to achieve universal health coverage without it. Perhaps that's why four of the five winners of the first-ever USAID Inclusive Health Access Prize are for-profit companies. Marian W. Wentworth, President and CEO of Management Sciences for Health, discusses the prize, and the movement toward private solutions to provide scalable innovation in global health.
- Categories
- Health Care
- Tags
- innovation, public health
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From Heritage to Habit: Why Digital Remittances Languish in Some Cultures But Surge in Others
Thirty years after their introduction, digital remittances have failed to take off. Some 90% of remittances still begin as cash and end as cash - even when banks are the intermediary. Lack of trust, access and interoperability - to name just a few challenges - are keeping lower-income people tied to costlier cash transfers. However, remittance providers and related fintech entities are exploring many new avenues to encourage recipients to keep remittances in the digital ecosystem and possibly use them for other financial products, writes Steven Davidson with Mondato.
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- Finance, Technology
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What’s Really Driving Africa’s ‘Investment Frenzy’?: An Entrepreneur Responds to Investor Concerns
In her much-discussed NextBillion article about avoiding “the Africa investment frenzy,” impact investor Lauren Cochran urged entrepreneurs to forego the “growth-at-all-costs” approach to scaling and “the ego-boost of big rounds and press releases.” But Zoona co-founder Mike Quinn argues that her advice ignores a reality that many investors don’t recognize. Quinn pushes back on Cochran's argument from an entrepreneur's perspective in this compelling counterpoint.
- Categories
- Finance, Investing, Social Enterprise
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Delivering Family Planning to Rural Customers: Are Mobile Pharmacies ‘Just What the Doctor Ordered’?
Pharmacies serve as key access points for family planning products in many emerging markets. In countries like Malawi, the number of pharmacies has ballooned by nearly 100% in the past 10 years. Yet it can be difficult to run a sustainable pharmacy business, especially in rural areas. Andrea Bare and Erika Beidelman at the William Davidson Institute discuss potential solutions – including an innovative mobile pharmacy – based on conversations with Malawian entrepreneurs.
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- Health Care, Telecommunications
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Finding Partners in Uncharted Territory: How to Harness Network Effects to Build Relationships When You’re Starting from Scratch
Learning how to navigate a complex and changing stakeholder landscape is an essential skill for anyone in the social impact space. But how do you go about identifying and building relationships with new partners when you’re charting new geographic or thematic territory? Mari-Lise du Preez at insight2impact discusses network science-based tactics to identify key actors and cultivate strong relationships among them.
- Categories
- Finance
- Tags
- data, financial inclusion, fintech
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Beyond the Bottom Line: How Changing the Supplier-Distributor Dynamic Creates Better Products for People Living in Poverty
A good relationship between suppliers and distributors is crucial when doing business in challenging markets. But in too many cases, these relationships are purely transactional, one-way and unresponsive, say Sahil Khanna at Greenlight Planet and Murli Padmanabhan at Pollinate Group. They explore how their organizations have avoided this pitfall in creating a true partnership that allows them to distribute solar products more effectively to their customers.
- Categories
- Energy
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Three Key Sessions from Three Days of Discussion at European Microfinance Week
European Microfinance Week is always a whirlwind of activity and insights, and this year was no exception. As a media partner at the event, NextBillion covered some of the key sessions. Here we highlight three of them, one from each day of the event – starting with Friday's must-see plenary, which was streamed live and can now be viewed in a video embedded in this article.
- Categories
- Finance
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How Can We Stop Losing Our Minds?: Producing a Legacy From Development Projects, Not Just a Document
Have you ever run, funded or been part of a development project? Have you ever thought: “We should definitely share what we learned?” But then someone wrote a report and that was the end of that. Gavin Starks, the founder of dgen.net, argues that shouldn’t be the end, but the beginning. The power of an open approach to development has many benefits, he says. Done well, it changes the way people collaborate during projects — and helps them produce a legacy, not just a document.
- Categories
- Finance, Technology
