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How Do Consumers React to Psychometric-Based Credit Scoring?
Nearly 50 million Americans and literally billions more around the world have limited access to affordable credit – primarily due to a lack of credit histories. What's worse, many of these underbanked individuals are actually in decent financial standing – they simply do not have sufficiently mature credit scores. Psychometric (ie: personality-based) credit scores can address this issue – but how do customers feel about it? Saul Fine at Innovative Assessments shares results from recent surveys that aim to answer that question.
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- Finance, Technology
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Smallholders as Customers, Not Pupils: Making the Case for Good Agricultural Practices
Good agricultural practices offer smallholders the promise of improved food safety, food quality and environmental stewardship. But they also bring the risks of implementing costly new methods and standards. To overcome farmers' reluctance to adopt these practices, Ben Fowler of MarketShare Associates and Clara Yoon at MEDA write that agricultural organizations should adopt a customer-centric approach – treating smallholders as customers rather than beneficiaries of know-how.
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- Agriculture, Entrepreneurship
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What Nigeria Can Teach the U.S. About a Green New Deal
Tackling a host of huge challenges – from climate change to economic inequality – the Green New Deal has provoked passion and resistance in equal measure. But as Damilola Ogunbiyi at Sustainable Energy for All asks, what if the solution is not to think big, but to think small? Instead of a vast new energy grid, what if the U.S. created efficient, resilient and job-creating decentralized grids – along the lines of what's currently happening in countries like Nigeria?
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- Energy, Environment
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Five Ways the Private Sector Can Align with the Sustainable Development Goals
How can the private sector advance the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, and what’s the best way to measure the success of these efforts? Those questions were among the topics explored at the recent Sustainability and Development Conference at the University of Michigan. Yaquta Kanchwala Fatehi and Dana Gorodetsky at the William Davidson Institute attended the event, and they share some essential insights on the private sector’s role in supporting the SDGs.
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- Agriculture, Entrepreneurship, Environment, Impact Assessment
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Creating Jobs While Fighting Poverty: An Innovative Social Micro-Franchise Model Gains Traction in Haiti
All too many global development efforts fail to appreciate the value of a steady paycheck – or the role of small businesses as job creators in poor communities, says Marc Blumenthal at Social Ventures Foundation (SVF). This has stagnated poverty reduction campaigns, leaving vulnerable populations in need after government and NGO funds dry up. He shares SVF's efforts to reverse this dynamic, through social micro-franchise business models that address poverty-related issues, while also creating sustainable jobs in low-income communities.
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- Entrepreneurship, Investing
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Navigating the Informal Economy Is Vital for Africa’s Rural Youth: How Do We Help Them Do That?
Growing the formal employment sector is vital to the long-term health of African economies, but it’s not generating jobs fast enough for young people just entering the workforce. A partnership between the Mastercard Foundation and TechnoServe has provided training and mentorship to nearly 69,000 young people across rural Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania and Uganda by helping them navigate existing opportunities in the informal sector. Chris Donohue at TechnoServe shares how helping young people build multiple sources of income is creating meaningful change in their lives.
- Categories
- Entrepreneurship
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Unite Behind the Science: When it Comes to Cooking, it’s Time for ‘Clean’ to Mean Something
Nearly 3 billion people still live in homes where someone burns sticks, charcoal or dung to cook, devastating their health, their local environments and the climate. Yet thousands of projects have failed to deliver truly clean cooking to the masses, doing a disservice to customers and damaging the sector's credibility with funders. Eric Reynolds, CEO of the cookstove company Inyenyeri, argues that there's only one way to turn this around: "deliver dramatically improved outcomes, and be able to prove it." He outlines a straightforward way the industry can make that happen.
- Categories
- Energy, Environment, Health Care
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Delivering Online Skills Training in Africa: Three Keys to a Successful Program
The shortage of data science skills is a major challenge for Africa. With relatively few local institutions offering degrees in the subject, African data scientists must often acquire their skills via online courses, leaving some unable to fully participate in the continent's emerging digital future. Dumisani Dube at Insight2Impact shares insights from a successful online course offered to its DataHack4FI participants, which could help other organizations better leverage digital learning in Africa.
- Categories
- Finance, Technology
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