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Digital Government: 4 Keys to Kenya’s Success with Electronic Government Payments
Kenya has long been grappling with inefficiencies in government service delivery, characterized by resource constraints, bureaucratic processes and lack of accountability. In response, the government launched an integrated service model for person-to-government and business-to-government payments, allowing digital payments via online and mobile tools. Here are four reasons Kenya is ideally suited to digitize its government functions.
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- Uncategorized
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Airtime to the Rescue: Why India Should Mobilize Telcos for Disaster Relief
Last April, when a 7.8 magnitude earthquake shook Nepal, telcos offered free mobile airtime for 48 hours to their customers based in India, so they could connect with their family members and friends in Nepal. This example illustrates the potential of utilizing the payments infrastructure to respond to natural disasters. I believe this potential could be more fully realized by channeling relief and rehabilitation funds to disaster victims using airtime as currency – and India is the ideal proving ground for the concept.
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Global Mobile Money Adoption in 2015: What the Data is Telling Us
In markets where mobile money is available, 10 percent of mobile connections are now linked to a mobile money account, compared to 8 percent in December 2014, according to the GSMA. Across Sub-Saharan Africa, the growth is even starker: one in three mobile connections were linked to a mobile money account in December 2015, up from 22 percent in December 2014. A closer look at the numbers.
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- Technology
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The Universal Clinic: A New Paradigm for Rural Health Care?
The Institute for Transformative Technologies is building Universal Clinics, a cohesive platform of integrated technologies to operationalize clinics in resource-constrained settings with high-quality primary and maternal health care in a cost-effective and scalable manner.
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- Health Care
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NexThought Monday: The Role of STEM Professionals in Global Sustainable Development
The science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) community is changing. Many passionate, hardworking students are not as excited about taking up well-paying, but arguably monotonous, jobs in large corporations. Their big question is: what do we do next? To answer this question, Khanjan Mehta of Penn State spent over three years interacting with hundreds of innovators to find new pathways toward careers in social innovation and global sustainable development.
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- Energy, Technology
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- employment, innovation
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Weekly Roundup: Healthy Debate and Unhealthy Economics at Unite for Sight
I went to a global health conference last weekend and an economics lesson broke out. OK, that’s a bit of an oversimplification. A lot more than economics was discussed at the 13th annual Unite for Sight Global Health & Innovation Conference at Yale University. It’s just that as I scurried from session to session around the campus, I kept hearing about the scarcity and/or misapplication of money.
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- Health Care, Impact Assessment
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- public health
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Pro-Women, Anti-Cash: How Cashless Economies Can Boost Women’s Empowerment
We are still a long way from a world where cash is obsolete – in fact, 85 percent of consumer transactions are still conducted in cash, and for many people, hard currency clearly remains a useful commodity. But the landscape is changing rapidly, and for the world’s poorest and most excluded communities – and for women in particular – the drive towards cashless economies offers an exciting window of opportunity.
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India’s Health Challenges and Would-Be Solutions – From Human to Artificial Intelligence
By 2030, India's population of people age 60 or older is projected to grow by 64 percent while urban areas are expected to more than double their current population levels. A massive shift from from communicable diseases to non-communicable diseases is coming, creating different health care challenges. Villgro, a Chennai-based social business incubator, sees many opportunities for social entrepreneurs developing tech-based solutions.
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- Health Care
