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NexThought Monday – Unlocking Mobile Data: Regulatory and privacy issues prevent metadata use from realizing its full potential
African countries are not data-rich environments but, because of high mobile phone use, they could be. And that data could be used to track, among other things, importation routes for infectious disease, patterns of migration or economic transactions.
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- Health Care, Technology
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Twitter Top Ten – 11/23/14: Our favorite tweets of the week
Here are our favorite Tweets of the week.
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- Uncategorized
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Weekly Roundup, 11/22/14 – Going Postal: Is postal banking a key to financial inclusion?
The U.S. Postal Service is losing some $5 billion a year. Bank branches are closing throughout low-income and rural areas. Could both problems be solved by converting the Post Office into a bank? Many countries in the developed and developing world have already done it. We highlight two opinions on whether the U.S. should follow suit in this Roundup.
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- Uncategorized
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At Echoing Green’s Inaugural Global Conference in Mumbai: With 400 million without electricity, you can’t talk in small numbers here
For the first time ever, Echoing Green’s annual Fellows conference – five days that bring together fellows from all over the world to collaborate and learn from each other – was not held in the U.S. Instead, it took place, in the words Cheryl Dorsey, president of the social finance and support organization, in Mumbai, India - the “exciting global center for social enterprise.”
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- Uncategorized
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- impact investing
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Learning from What Works: IFC’s new report on inclusive business includes lessons for each phase of the value chain
In its latest report, Shared Prosperity through Inclusive Business: How Successful Companies Reach the Base of the Pyramid, the IFC summarizes practical lessons from clients that successfully reach low-income people as suppliers or customers. There are lessons for each phase of the value chain that can be adapted to the context of a particular sector or region.
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- Education, Social Enterprise
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You Probably Don’t Know Your Customers: Harnessing mobile to connect for product development
Customer feedback provides information and insight for developing new products and refines innovation and clarifies routes to social impact. But too often connecting with customers, particularly low-income customers, is daunting. P.R. Ganapathy of Villgro and Jessica Seddon of Okapi detail new ways around this dilemma using mobile technology, including one they teamed up with the Lemelson Foundation to build.
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- Technology
- Tags
- product design
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Moving the Sanitation Needle: On World Toilet Day, it’s time to talk about some creative, unlikely collaborations
There is perhaps no time like right now to “celebrate” World Toilet Day in India, where the new government’s efforts to crack the open defecation problem have generated a lot of incredibly promising initial commitments.
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- Health Care, Technology
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Blurring the Boundaries: How impact investing is shifting paradigms in the public, philanthropic and nonprofit sectors
As impact investing has grown, it has begun to reshape traditional approaches to financing socially focused initiatives – sometimes to the point where paradigms start to shift. In part two of his series on new frontiers in impact investing, William Burckart discusses the implications of these changes for the public, philanthropic and nonprofit sectors.
- Categories
- Impact Assessment, Social Enterprise
