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Meat Every Day: How a Rwandan Entrepreneur Aims to Satisfy Africa’s Changing Appetites
Some predict that, by the end of the century, 13 African cities will surpass New York City in population. As African economies grow and their citizens become more urbanized, their standards of living and meat consumption are also likely to increase. This shift will reshape the continent's agriculture industry – and entrepreneurs like Herve Tuyishime are responding. Tuyishime explains how his two interrelated businesses are helping satisfy Africans' growing appetite for meat, and bringing Rwandan farmers into the supply chain.
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- Agriculture, Social Enterprise
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The Path to 100 Gigawatts: How India Has Emerged as a Global Leader in Solar Energy
India has displaced Japan as the third-largest market for solar power and is poised to bump the U.S. from the No. 2 spot, as it works toward boosting its renewable capacity to 100 gigawatts by the end of 2022. Though it still relies on coal plants and has dangerous air pollution levels, the landscape is changing fast, with 14 new solar parks planned – including one that's set to become the world’s largest. Sahaj Desai outlines the momentum and challenges behind India's renewable energy revolution.
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- Energy
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The Funder Problem: Good Intentions Aren’t Enough
Despite their good intentions, funders are often the biggest barriers to social enterprises or nonprofits achieving impact. Open Road Alliance, a philanthropic initiative that gives emergency grants to impact-focused organizations, gathered and analyzed five years of data about roadblocks faced by over 100 grantees. Nearly half of the problems the group found were caused by funders. Laurie Michaels describes the three categories of funder-related barriers that account for the most frequent challenges – and offers some surprisingly easy fixes.
- Categories
- Social Enterprise
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Is Financial Inclusion Stalling? The 2017 Findex Results Raise Several Red Flags
The Global Financial Inclusion Database (Findex) - one of the most authoritative yardsticks on the state of financial inclusion - finds that 69 percent of the world’s adults now have bank or mobile money accounts. But while that's an exciting headline, it's also misleading, as millions of those newly opened accounts are lying dormant. And that's just one reason why industry stakeholders have found the latest Findex data underwhelming. Elisabeth Rhyne and Sonja Kelly at the Center for Financial Inclusion at Accion unpack some of the troubling stats – and highlight a few bright spots.
- Categories
- Finance
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Internalizing Innovation: It’s About Creating a Culture, Not a Product
Innovation holds the key to expanding financial health for low- and moderate-income households—but how can organizations foster a culture of innovation, rather than treating it as a one-off event or a process fix? MetLife Foundation and UNCDF are launching two new innovation hubs in China and Malaysia that aim to promote this cultural shift. Krishna Thacker and Jaspreet Singh discuss the program's unique approach.
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Cutting Edge Agriculture: How Artificial Intelligence, Satellites and Big Data are Transforming Farmers’ Access to Finance
There are many reasons for the $450 billion global agricultural finance gap. But much of the challenge stems from lenders' inability to monitor farmers' output, estimate their income and assess their risk of default, says Ruchit G Garg of Harvesting Inc. He explores how artificial intelligence and satellites are addressing that data imbalance, helping lenders reach many of the world’s 500 million smallholder farmers for the first time.
- Categories
- Agriculture, Technology, Telecommunications
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Hardware Innovation is … Hard: How These Entrepreneurs Overcame the Challenges
Compared with the creators of app-based products, hardware-focused innovators face a much more difficult and expensive journey, says Villgro CTO Arun Venkatesan. The resources and time required to perfect hardware iterations are larger, the lack of a mature ecosystem is a problem, and the buyer is often distinctly different from the user or beneficiary. Venkatesan profiles four hardware innovators in agriculture and health care, discussing how they worked through these obstacles.
- Categories
- Agriculture, Health Care, Investing, Social Enterprise, Technology
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The Partnership Nightmare: What’s Wrong with the Social Sector’s Approach to Funding – And How to Fix It
Whether it's due to misaligned expectations, mutual distrust or power imbalances, interactions between social impact organizations and their funders can be nightmarish – for both sides. Social sector advocates Jessamyn Shams-Lau, Jane Leu and Vu Le have written a new book about these challenges, called "Unicorns Unite." In this Q&A, they discuss what's gone wrong – and how to make it better. Subscribers to NextBillion’s weekly e-newsletter can read an excerpt of the book throughout June.
- Categories
- Investing, Social Enterprise