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Why Business of Building Toliets Depends on Debunking Sanitation Myths
Sanergy is successfully using a variety of strategies to unwind people’s habits of using unhygienic sanitation and adopting Fresh Life toilets.
- Categories
- Health Care
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NexThought Monday – Choosing Your End-Game : Alternatives to the fund-raising merry-go-round for impact-driven nonprofits
Nonprofits typically set out on the “elusive quest for scale” with a desire to have greater impact. Does this mean that a failure to achieve scale in funding implies a failure to achieve scale in impact? Yes and no. A new article shows several alternatives to the fund-raising merry-go-round for impact.
- Categories
- Health Care, Impact Assessment
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Weekly Roundup – 3/1/14: A digital heist, mobile money power-plays and controversy in Africa cap a turbulent week in finance
This week, a major Bitcoin exchange filed for bankruptcy, after almost half a billion dollars of the virtual currency went missing. Safaricom continued taking M-Pesa global, while new competition emerged on its home front. And the World Bank postponed a $90 million loan to Uganda in response to a controversial new law. We explore these issues in the Roundup.
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- Uncategorized
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Beyond Opinion: Understanding Consumer Demand in Developing Countries: A March 7 USAID forum will showcase new techniques
Why do pro-poor technologies fail to achieve scale — even when they offer proven benefits?
Part of the problem is that we aren’t getting reliable information about what poor people actually want. And as a result, we make lots of assumptions. On March 7, USAID’s Office of Science and Technology will be showcasing some very innovative techniques for measuring consumer demand in low-income communities.- Categories
- Uncategorized
- Tags
- product design
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Quick Wins in Mobile Money: How simple usability tweaks can significantly increase mobile money usage
Mobile finance has great potential to serve the poor, but many existing services are not designed around their needs, behaviors and capabilities. New research from Grameen Foundation reveals simple usability fixes that mobile money providers could incorporate to help their products better meet the needs of the BoP, and reach scale and commercial viability.
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- Uncategorized
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From Operating Rooms to Dust Tracks, Part 2: How Operation ASHA moved beyond rhetoric to action
After serving Delhi’s slum dwellers for more than a decade with free surgeries, Dr. Shelly Batra realized her work wasn’t sustainable. That’s when she and Sandeep Ahuja decided to start an organization focused on only one health problem in India: TB.
- Categories
- Education, Health Care, Social Enterprise
- Tags
- public health
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Tasting the Fruits of One’s Labor (For the First Time): Highlights from ‘Lets Talk Coffee Rwanda’
Let’s Talk Coffee is an event series organized by coffee importer Sustainable Harvest to demonstrate Relationship Coffee - an inclusive business model that stresses transparency between all links of the supply chain. Last week’s Let’s Talk Coffee Rwanda coincided with the launch of Sustainable Harvest’s nonprofit entity, the Relationship Coffee Institute.
- Categories
- Agriculture
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No Silver Bullet: While microfinance alone won’t end poverty, it is making an impact – so let’s re-focus it to serve the poor
The debate about microfinance is getting a little tedious, says Freedom from Hunger CEO Steve Hollingworth. Instead of arguing over whether microfinance alone is lifting most clients out of poverty (it’s not), we should be having a transparent discussion of its strengths and limitations.
- Categories
- Impact Assessment
