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What We’re Learning Every Step of the Energy Ladder
We spent the last year at Acumen collecting impact data on companies across our portfolio using our Lean Data approach, which harnesses the power of technology to give voice to low-income customers and allows us to provide quality customer feedback to drive business decisions for our investees. From these surveys, our entrepreneurs will get real insight into their customers: who they are, how and where they utilize energy, how much energy they use, and what they spend on a weekly or monthly basis, among other valuable feedback.
- Categories
- Energy, Impact Assessment, Technology
- Tags
- renewable energy, solar
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Stopping the Spread of ‘Superbugs’: Six Promising Solutions
The use, overuse and misuse of antimicrobial drugs has created resistant strains of bacteria that could be a greater threat in poorer nations than in richer ones, due to the absence of monitoring and surveillance systems for drug resistance and lack of regulation. And if new antibiotics become available, they are likely to be expensive and unaffordable in the developing world. Here are six ways the global health community can respond.
- Categories
- Health Care
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Three Keys to Scaling Technology in Africa
Based on the success of Mama Rescue, a cloud-based transport voucher and emergency dispatch system for mothers in rural Uganda, UNICEF and the Ugandan Ministry of Health decided that the platform should be scaled up to the entire country. Here are three key lessons they've learned for successfully scaling technology.
- Categories
- Health Care, Technology
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Closing the $2.5 Trillion Gap: How blended finance can help achieve the SDGs
The UN estimates it will take $3.9 trillion a year to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals. Based on current global development spending, that implies an annual funding shortfall of $2.5 trillion. Convergence describes how blended finance can bring together private and public investors to fill that gap.
- Categories
- Investing
- Tags
- impact investing, SDGs
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It’s the Ecosystem, Stupid: Exploring the “digital poverty stack” – Part 2
In the first post in this series, we proposed that donors and governments advance digital and financial inclusion by focusing more on creating public goods that enable the broader ecosystem, rather than on peripheral innovation in service delivery. In this second post, we discuss the implications of this shift and highlight some new efforts to move the fields in the right direction.
- Categories
- Social Enterprise, Technology
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The AgTech Pedestal Problem: How to Bring Innovation Down to Earth
Without the knowledge to operate it and systems to maintain it, technology is a liability rather than an asset to a farmer. It cannot work in isolation. We must be careful not to place AgTech on a pedestal; AgTech can only be successful if it is grounded in the realities of the developing world farmer. But we're already seeing several examples of that emerging from "Silicon Plateau."
- Categories
- Agriculture, Social Enterprise, Technology
- Tags
- research
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It’s the Ecosystem, Stupid – Exploring the ‘Digital Poverty Stack,’ Part 1
Donor investments to leverage technology have largely failed to achieve their imagined potential, often producing sub-scale pilot projects which do not solve a real problem. Instead, donors should focus on building a “digital poverty stack,” a set of interoperable and reusable digital tools that can be built into a large number of applications.
- Categories
- Technology
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Weekly Roundup: Dubious Controversy, Outrageous Pricing and Angels in South Africa
Among the week's highlights (and lowlights): Grameen Foundation and Muhammad Yunus make an unwelcome entrance into U.S. presidential politics, Mylan Pharmaceuticals defends itself from price-gouging accusations, and a business angel network launches in South Africa.
- Categories
- Education, Health Care, Investing, Social Enterprise
