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Weekly Roundup (8/16/14) – Empowering the BoP. Or Not: When the few drown out the many
Most people on the planet are poor, but one could argue that their many voices are too often drowned out by the few. We dive into the debate.
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- Health Care
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Risky Business: How financial vulnerability exacerbates traditional business risk
About half of all businesses in the U.S. will fail within their first five years. And the fewer resources and options business owners have, the more they stand to lose if their business goes under. CFED studied U.S. microbusiness owners to learn about their financial behavior and challenges - and how financial capability could help them succeed. Here’s what they found.
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- Uncategorized
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Shifting the Paradigm in Indian Health Care: Results will follow when delivery, drug, device and diagnosis innovations occur simultaneously
Indian health care continues to face challenges of affordability, availability and quality, but a growing number of enterprises are changing the landscape by addressing inefficiencies in the market. When delivery, drug, device and diagnosis innovations occur simultaneously, the Indian health care market will witness a paradigm shift.
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- Environment, Health Care
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FEATURED EVENT – SOCAP14
SOCAP14 is the world’s leading conference on impact investing and social enterprise. Held at San Francisco’s Fort Mason Center from Sept. 2-5, SOCAP14 will unite innovators in business, tech, the sharing economy, health, philanthropy, and more to advance environmental and social causes.
This year’s theme "Igniting Vibrant Communities" challenges us all to look for vibrant communities when seeking evidence of successful impact.- Categories
- Uncategorized
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- impact investing
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Three Steps to Jumpstart Agriculture Mobile Payments: Step 2 – forming strategic alliances
In the second of a three-part series laying out three steps for embedding mobile money into agriculture development at the BoP, Lee Babcock explores the importance of strategically aligning large commodity buyers with mobile financial services providers and other supporting entities that work with smallholder farmers.
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- Agriculture, Technology
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Israeli Innovation Meets Rwandan Entrepreneurship: High-tech for Western markets is still the main focus of Israeli startups, but that’s slowly changing
Israel has the second-highest concentration of start-up companies after Silicon Valley, but most of this entrepreneurial energy has been focused on Western markets. This is slowly changing, with projects like kLab in Rwanda, writes Caylee Talpert, deputy director of the Pears Innovation for International Development Program at Tel Aviv University.
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- Technology, Telecommunications
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Make Your Clothes Worth Wearing: How global brands are (finally) investing in factory workers
Business for Social Responsibility (BSR), a nonprofit that encourages social responsibility in business, has made the case that teaching economic and health skills to workers goes beyond a nice corporate social responsibility campaign: it actually improves a company’s bottom line. In 2007 created HERproject, a training program for garment factory workers that has caught on among big manufacturers.
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- Uncategorized
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Achieving ‘Resilience’: Financial services beyond the scramble to survive
Since the Microcredit Summit Campaign began in 1997, the world of financial services for the poor has shifted from microcredit to microfinance—a broader range of formal and informal products and services. Resilience: The State of the Microcredit Summit Campaign Report 2014 reflects these changes with an interesting discussion of innovations that go beyond credit.
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- Education
