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Mapping Bhopal and Chandigarh: A social enterprise push for jobs, a non-profit culture looks toward business
In second in a series of articles provided by Villgro’s Unconvention|L team and Okapi Research, which are visiting nine tier III cities in India, Lina Sonne explores the potential of Bhopal and Chandigarh. Both cities have strong potential to build on their educational and NGO roots to emerge as regional social enterprise ecosystems hubs.
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College Credit: How U.S. university students are helping the underbanked build credit in their campus communities
In the U.S., good credit is a basic requirement for entrepreneurs and average consumers alike, and a lack of good credit is a major problem – especially for those with lower incomes. But while service providers are often reluctant to lend to the underbanked, college students across the country are filling the gap with campus microfinance institutions.
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Competitive Co-Advantage: In an iDE initiative ‘farm business advisors’ help deliver products and profits to Cambodian farmers
Lors Thmey, which means "new growth" in Khmer, teaches local entrepreneurs to become farm business advisors (FBAs). That means that in addition to selling products to farmers, they’re trained to be consultants, too. As a result, farmers produce better crops and make more money, and the FBAs expand their businesses and boost their incomes, too.
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- Agriculture
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Digitizing Savings Circles for the Base of the Pyramid: Bringing a centuries-old concept into the digital age
Traditional savings circles have existed in different forms for centuries, and are popular in immigrant communities in the U.S. and emerging markets around the world. Accion Venture Lab discusses how the Internet and social media are allowing companies to formalize and digitize them to make them more accessible to a greater number of people.
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The Ticket to Ride a ‘Smart’ Bus Includes Public Health Info: Engaging, educating and learning from Nairobi commuters via SMS
A recent project shows that public transit can be a great platform for research and education, and has the potential to give small businesses an effective communication and marketing facility that previously only large companies could afford.
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- Health Care, Technology
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Why Business of Building Toliets Depends on Debunking Sanitation Myths
Sanergy is successfully using a variety of strategies to unwind people’s habits of using unhygienic sanitation and adopting Fresh Life toilets.
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- Health Care
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NexThought Monday – Choosing Your End-Game : Alternatives to the fund-raising merry-go-round for impact-driven nonprofits
Nonprofits typically set out on the “elusive quest for scale” with a desire to have greater impact. Does this mean that a failure to achieve scale in funding implies a failure to achieve scale in impact? Yes and no. A new article shows several alternatives to the fund-raising merry-go-round for impact.
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- Health Care, Impact Assessment
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Weekly Roundup – 3/1/14: A digital heist, mobile money power-plays and controversy in Africa cap a turbulent week in finance
This week, a major Bitcoin exchange filed for bankruptcy, after almost half a billion dollars of the virtual currency went missing. Safaricom continued taking M-Pesa global, while new competition emerged on its home front. And the World Bank postponed a $90 million loan to Uganda in response to a controversial new law. We explore these issues in the Roundup.
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