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The Leap from Social Sector to Social Enterprise
Almost every day, I engage with professionals who are hoping to land a new type of job in a completely new discipline, region or sector. However, in our experience, you’re likely to be most successful at landing a job if you aim for roles that leverage your strengths and then seek ways to pivot into new areas of responsibility. Here are some tips for transitioning from the development, government or NGO sectors to a social business.
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- Social Enterprise
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NexThought Monday: Would You Give Up Your Cellphone to Save a Child?
Last fall, University of San Francisco professor Bruce Wydick presented his students with a confounding challenge: If everybody in the classroom were to make a $50 direct cash transfer, he said, they could potentially save a poor Ugandan child's life. In fact, he added, a donor had pledged to give $50 through GiveDirectly for every student, on one simple condition: They had to part with their cell phones for two weeks. Wydick describes the fallout in this thought-provoking post.
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- Technology
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Weekly Roundup: Big Upside of Small Farmers; Using the Bully Pulpit to Fight a Bully; It’s Good to Be Ultra-Rich
What if some of the most marginalized people on the planet – the proverbial “smallholder farmers” with a small plot and an even smaller number of livestock – could command the attention of powerful telecom and technology players? Here’s another question: What if it’s already happening?
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- Health Care, Technology
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Private Maternity Care Takes Center Stage
Is maternity care delivered by private health providers a luxury reserved for wealthy women? Not according to a new study, which shows that 40 percent of women in low- and middle-income countries receive maternal health care and family planning services from private providers.
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- Health Care
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An Eventful Year in Impact Investing – An Interview with ImpactAssets’ Fran Seegull
2015 saw the impact investing sector take some crucial steps toward the mainstream - and 2016 seems likely to build upon that momentum. We spoke with ImpactAssets' Chief Investment Officer and Managing Director Fran Seegull about this evolution and how it could play out in the year ahead.
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- Investing
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Connecting With the Customer – When the Lines of Connection Do Not Exist
We created WeFarm, a social enterprise whose target market is small-scale farmers located in remote areas without Internet access. WeFarm provides a platform for farmers to share information on agriculture with one another, which makes our business model globally scalable. Wikipedia and Google are great examples of organizations and businesses that have executed community platforms very successfully, but the model isn’t widely used in the developing world.
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- Agriculture, Technology
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App Making Noise in Africa
Hearing loss is a global epidemic; 1.23 billion people had some form of impairment in 2013. Recognizing that up to 50 percent of hearing losses could be prevented through primary and secondary preventative measures, hearScreen is designed to detect hearing loss in the developing world through use of a low-cost smartphone.
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- Health Care
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Weekly Roundup: Starting SDGs, Africa’s IT Meritocracy, Safaricom’s Setback
The United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) officially took effect on Jan. 1, with the stated goals of freeing “the human race from the tyranny of poverty and want and to heal and secure our planet” over the next 15 years. Whew. Talk about a tall order.
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- Health Care, Technology
