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How Mahindra’s ‘Spark the Rise’ is Igniting Impact
Mahindra Spark the Rise is an initiative by the Mahindra Group to provide innovators, entrepreneurs, and change agents with an open innovation platform to showcase their work and connect with like-minded people to amplify their efforts. The team’s core purpose is to drive positive change in the lives of their stakeholders and communities across the world. Spark the Rise empowers people to drive positive change by bringing them together through innovative ideas and awarding the grant money needed to put them into action.
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- Uncategorized
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- infrastructure
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Innovative Banking Strategies for the BoP in India: Exploring ‘No Frills Accounts’ and the business correspondent model
In India, commercial banks have begun to comply with financial inclusion mandates, leading to innovative—though far from perfect—strategies to bank the poor. Yet even if promoting social inclusion may not be part of a bank’s business philosophy, the potential market for banking the global informal economy—estimated to be worth around $10 trillion annually—should speak for itself.
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- Uncategorized
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A Growing Lifeline: Mobile Technologies in Agricultural Development
For farmers, mobile devices can deliver services that help them improve their production, such as weather information and technical advice. For buyers, data delivered via mobile can increase their insight into volumes harvested and processed by farmers and their organizations during the cycle.
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- Agriculture, Technology, Telecommunications
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The PeaceTXT Proposition: Stopping violence with an SMS
PeaceTXT: a global mash-up of social innovators, software designers and information technologists (to name a few) collaborating on mobile technology’s potential to prevent violence. The collaboration, spearheaded by PopTech, is aiming to create the first broadly available tested methodologies and technical platforms for using mobile phones to disrupt violence and engender more peaceful communities.
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- Impact Assessment, Technology, Telecommunications
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NexThought Monday: Unlocking Intrapreneurship with Language
Intrepreneurship, innovation and corporate social responsibility (along with all their nuanced pseudonyms) are labels for activities and values that are used in order to separate them from business as usual. Of course, the cost of that to business is high, since they have become something separate from the normal life of a corporation, and they shouldn’t.
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- Education
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Weekly Roundup: Taking a Closer Look at India’s Socent Prowess
There’s little argument that India has become the world’s testbed for both financial inclusion and social enterprise incubator exploration. Two studies that came across the NextBillion transom in recent weeks take a step back to explore the quickly germinating networks underlying both, as well as identify the gaps.
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- Uncategorized
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- incubators
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FEATURED EVENT: Join the 2012 Social Finance Forum ‘Measuring Up’ Webcast
Entering its fifth annual year, the 2012 Social Finance Forum is built around the theme of ‘Measuring up’ and tackles the opportunities and challenges surrounding impact measurement, while exploring what makes a good deal and how existing market opportunities measure up. The two-day conference will feature plenary sessions by national and global leaders in impact investing, exciting announcements, and interactive workshops, and is available via webcast.
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- Impact Assessment
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- impact investing
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(With Video) Facing Climate Change By Adapting to It
While the emphasis today is on rescue, recovery and rebuilding efforts from Hurricane Sandy, some East Coast leaders have already begun to raise the tough question for tomorrow: How do we adapt to climate change? In developing countries, this question is a part of daily life. From the Oxfam series, “Climate Change The Hardest Hit,” here are three stories from three continents where low-income people are particularly vulnerable to the effects of climate change.
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- Agriculture, Environment
