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NexThought Monday – Why Exiting Our MFI was the Best Way to Ramp Up Impact
In 2009 Sammie Rayner co-founded a microfinance nonprofit called Lumana, which was designed to provide loans and financial services in rural Ghana. Four years later Lumana’s MFI operations were spun off in a deal with a Ghanian NGO. In discussing their decision to exit, she cautions nonprofits against getting too attached to the ongoing survival of their mission.
- Categories
- Agriculture
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Twitter Top Ten – 2-8-15
We rooted through the Twitterverse again this week and emerged with some excellent nuggets. In fact, the only hard part of the exercise was – as usual – narrowing the list to 10.
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- Health Care
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Weekly Roundup – 2/7/15: Debt and Forgiveness: A drastic solution to over-indebtedness among the poor
Seven years after a financial crisis caused in part by excess debt, all the world’s major economies have higher levels of borrowing than they did in 2007, said a report released this week. Meanwhile, one country has responded to excess debt among the poor by forcing lenders to forgive it. We discuss these developments, and some great financial inclusion news coming out of India, in this Roundup.
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- Agriculture
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Power of the User: Lessons learned from mHealth usability testing and tips for your innovation
The Institute for Reproductive Health, working with iHub, has been doing research on its family planning products, focusing on the human element and the user experience. They compiled some lessons learned and tips for integrating usability testing to improve technology.
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- Health Care
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The Technology Trade-off: Mobile tech boosts financial access but limits engagement. Can it also help build banking relationships?
Financial access is at an all-time high, and it’s growing fast. Yet account dormancy rates for the newly banked range from 60-90 percent. And though mobile technology has made more services scalable, it has also limited banks’ ability to build deeper relationships with their customers. But Juntos Finanzas believes mobile tech may also hold a solution to this problem.
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- Technology, Telecommunications
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The True Measure of Land’s Value
In working with women to increase family income, we might launch initiatives that increase household income and help the family out of the poverty trap. But women, the primary stakeholders of these initiatives, will still be trapped in their underprivileged status within the family and society.
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- Agriculture
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The Rise of the Cheap Smartphone : And what it could mean for BoP finance, connectivity
According an estimate from Gartner, by 2018 nine out of ten phones will be smartphones. If this comes to pass, it may require a substantial rethink about the delivery of mobile financial services to consumers in developing markets, where up until now the feature phone has dominated.
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- Technology, Telecommunications
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When Awards and Idealism Aren’t Enough: My social enterprise earned a ton of public acclaim – but it was missing something even more important
In her early 20s, Leticia Gasca launched a social enterprise to help some of Mexico’s poorest people. Powered by idealism and some promising early results, the company garnered both national and international acclaim. But behind the scenes, it was struggling with the harsh realities of doing business. Gasca shares the story in this frank post, the first in our series with F*ckUp Nights on failure in social enterprise.
- Categories
- Social Enterprise
