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Marketing the ‘Real Cool Honey’ Sachets: Launch lessons from Asali Poa in Kenya
Find a product-market fit and then execute flawlessly. Both are tough and have high risks that you need to overcome with the launch process. Here are a few big lessons from Honey Care Africa’s little sachet of honey, which we call Asali Poa (translated as "real cool honey"). We launched the product commercially in 2014 in Nairobi and currently reach 3,000 points of purchase.
- Categories
- Technology
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Announcing the Most-Influential Post of 2014
Our most-influential post of the year, as voted by our readers, was by a first-time NextBillion contributor in 2014. One might be tempted to declare beginner’s luck, but not in this case.
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- Uncategorized
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Incubating Expertise: Fostering partnerships within the community – part 4 in a series of BoP fundamentals
There are many potential pitfalls for businesses in emerging markets but, to some extent, these issues can be mitigated by partnering and collaborating with local organizations and experts.
- Categories
- Education
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Assessing ROI in Educational Development: In India, assessment tools are still lacking, but change is coming
In India, there is a growing realization that quality of school education has to significantly improve in India, particularly for underprivileged students. Prachi Windlass at the Michael & Susan Dell Foundation says a wider dialogue on applying a robust assessment framework to education in India is needed.
- Categories
- Education, Impact Assessment
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NexThought Monday – Second Chances in Global Development: How savings and lending groups can achieve what microcredit hasn’t
Jeffrey Ashe’s early research on behalf of USAID helped make microfinance a global development phenomenon. He now believes that savings and lending groups could have an impact that’s just as profound, but with a key difference: while microfinance struggles to reach the very poor, he says, savings and lending groups are expressly designed to meet their needs.
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- Uncategorized
- Tags
- savings
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Cash Versus Cows (Part 1): Looking at the benefits of asset versus cash transfer programs
Is it better to give a cow or cash? Are cash and asset transfers hand-outs or a hand up for the extreme poor? BRAC examined the two approaches, and in the first installment of a two-part post, it compares the impact of cash transfers versus physical productive assets like livestock, seed and agricultural inputs, or a bundle of goods for petty sales.
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- Agriculture
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Curbing the “Impact Impostors”: The growing movement toward transparency in impact investing
Impact investing’s rising popularity has spawned some unfortunate side effects. For instance, as demand for a social component has grown among investors, so have efforts to brand standard equity investments with the impact label – even when their actual impact is negligible. In the final post of his series, Bill Burckart details the efforts of policy makers, regulators and investors to address this issue.
- Categories
- Impact Assessment, Social Enterprise
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NexThought Monday – Why Did Vittana Close Down?: The real question: why don’t more organizations pull the plug?
Kate Cochran was part of a small team that decided to close Vittana, a nonprofit crowdfunding organization that aimed to spark student loan markets in the developing world. Cochran argues that more social enterprises, be they nonprofit or for-profit, should know when it’s time to call it quits.
- Categories
- Education
- Tags
- crowdfunding
