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NexThought Monday – Social Enterprise Startup Lessons from Burkina Faso: Doing business at the bottom of the World Bank’s ‘Doing Business Index’
Social enterprises are tackling the most challenging problems facing the BoP, but, in truth, we have not fully developed specific strategies or approaches for BoP-oriented start-ups in those crucial early months, writes Andrew Lala, co-founder of startup Clair de Lune. He offers several lessons from his social enterprise’s first three months on the ground in the heart of West Africa.
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- Energy
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Twitter Top Ten – 11-9-14: Our favorite tweets of the week
As our Twitter Top Ten "pilot feature" enters its fourth week, we’ve got a wide array of eye-catching tweets served up by NextBillion’s editorial staff.
This week’s selections cover everything from entrepreneur-focused TED talks to Facebook and Ebola - along with plenty of maps.- Categories
- Health Care
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Weekly Roundup 11-8-14: Alibaba is now bigger than Walmart, but will it benefit the still unconnected masses
Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba is now more valuable than Walmart. At the same time, Google, Mozilla and mobile operators are making a big push to connect people in emerging markets with content in local languages. Are we finally seeing connectivity, content and dialects finally align for the BoP?
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- Technology
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At the Columbia Social Enterprise Conference, Millennials Rising
Millennials: who are we and how do we want to change the world? The key themes of this year’s Columbia Social Enterprise Conference sought to address these fundamental questions. Loosely described as adults born from 1980 to 2000, the millennial generation sees things very differently, said Professor Bruce Usher, conference organizer and director of the Social Enterprise Program at Columbia Business School.
- Categories
- Environment
- Tags
- impact investing
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Most Viewed, Most Shared Posts for September: Why Vitanna called it quits, Yunus unvarnished and the SME puzzle
The trend on NextBillion during September was authors speaking the plain truth: a social entrepreneur sending out a clarion call for honesty; Muhammad Yunus chastising those who would benefit personally from microfinance; and an inside look at the inability of small firms to access adequate financing.
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- Technology
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Launching a Roadmap for the Base of the Pyramid Domain
The BoP Roadmap asks us to not only act for today, but to build for tomorrow, in order to truly achieve the promise of building a community of sustainable, scalable BoP enterprises focused on the alleviation of poverty. It is intended to create a stronger and more robust community that shares and learns together. As the old African proverb goes - “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together”.
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- Education
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Shaping the Market for Global Health Data: Why collecting information on lower-income countries should be ‘first order of business’
The most valuable currency in global health programs today is accurate and reliable data, but such data doesn’t exist for most low-income and lower-middle-income countries – primarily because it’s expensive. The authors discuss why, and how, more data might become available.
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- Health Care
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One Size Doesn’t Fit All: Understanding the shifting dynamics of BoP clients’ demand for financial services
As the need to better serve BoP markets has become a business imperative, both the context and our knowledge about low-income consumers’ use of financial services have changed. For that reason, Monique Cohen argues, we need an approach to customer service and product development that recognizes customers’ different - and evolving - financial needs.
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- Uncategorized
