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The Best of 2013: What’s Game-Changing in Latin America?: How new financial technologies and business models are powering financial inclusion in the region
Latin America has a long way to go in achieving financial inclusion, despite generally positive trends. Its residents often struggle with lack of savings and credit access, limited credit histories, and high interest rates - and they often avoid formal financial institutions. Accion Venture Lab describes some innovative business models and technologies that are addressing these issues.
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- Education, Technology
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The Best of 2013: NextThought Monday – Opening the Curtain on the New 2.0 Era of Impact Investing
Impact investing has not been growing as quickly as many practitioners might have hoped, and knowledge of what does and does not work remains closely held. But in what they bill as "an unprecedented exercise in disclosure," Pacific Community Ventures and its partners are sharing the inner workings of 12 high-performing funds, hoping to spark a new era in impact investing.
- Categories
- Education
- Tags
- impact investing, research
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Best of 2013: Product Development for the Poor: A crash course in human-centered design
Nearly 95 percent of new product launches fail every year. That’s 95 percent of the ideas that were considered pretty good by smart marketing executives in boardrooms who make decisions about what products to launch. These product ideas withstood hundreds of hours of focus group testing and strategic planning sessions, and they represent millions of failed investment dollars. So what’s wrong?
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- Uncategorized
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The Best of 2013: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly: Mobile money as a retail payment system
You may be tired of hearing about mobile money, but the world is not. For instance, the GSMA keeps ramping up its count of mobile money deployments across the world: today’s number is 191. Let me dig under the hype and give a personal assessment of where things are - be it good, bad or ugly.
- Categories
- Technology
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8 Defining Milestones in India’s Social Enterprise Landscape
As India celebrates its 67th year of freedom on Thursday (Aug. 15), it seems poignant to pause and reflect on eight milestones that have played an important role in shaping India’s social enterprise landscape and the lessons they teach us.
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- Energy, Social Enterprise
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The Best of 2013: Measure for Measure: Eight tips to optimize your data collection and maximize your impact
So, you want to learn more about your impact, or about the preferences of your customers at the BoP. It’s time for you to run a household-level survey. But how do you get started? Part 2 of our Measure for Measure series lays out eight things to keep in mind when developing survey content and processes for impact assessment.
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- Education, Impact Assessment
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- research
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Best of 2013: Geeks vs. Quacks: How Swasth Health Centers is out-competing informal providers
In India, trained doctors face stiff competition from informal providers, whose services are affordable and popular despite their lack of qualifications. But in Mumbai, Swasth Health Centers is out-competing the quacks, using technology and management savvy to offer superior services at surprisingly low prices. CHMI’s Rose Reis visited them to see how they’re doing it.
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- Health Care
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- public health
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The Best of 2013: Do the 4 P’s of Marketing work for BoP Businesses?: Solutions, Access, Value, Education (SAVE) might be a better guide
The famous 4 P’s of the marketing mix (product, price, promotion and place) has been a little limiting for businesses looking to sell to the BoP, as it puts more emphasis on product strategies than on the current trend of "selling solutions." Instead a Solutions, Access, Value, Education (SAVE) model might have a bigger impact.
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- Uncategorized
