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How to Keep Clean-Burning Cookstoves From Gathering Dust: Devices that cut down on respiratory diseases too often aren’t being used
Smoky indoor cook fires and traditional stoves lead to 2 million deaths per year. In response, various programs have distributed cookstoves to 830 million people over the past 50 years. Unfortunately, many of these clean-burning cookstoves are unused. New monitoring technologies are being designed to find out why.
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- Education, Health Care, Technology
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Kiva Responds: The famed microlender replies to Hugh Sinclair’s scathing critique
On Monday, NextBillion Financial Innovation published a post by Hugh Sinclair, a prominent critic of microcredit, in which he leveled some sharp criticisms of Kiva, its microlending model and business practices. Today, Kiva’s co-founder/CEO and president give their side of the story.
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- Uncategorized
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Can Mobile Money Really Transform the Lives of the Poor?: BRAC will discuss its potential at the 2nd Frugal Innovation Forum on March 28-30
By the end of 2014, there will be more mobile phones than people in the world. This opens up a significant opportunity for new strategies to help people move out of poverty. But how big can the impact be, and what obstacles stand in the way? These and other topics will be under discussion at BRAC’s 2nd Frugal Innovation Forum on March 28-30, 2014.
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- Uncategorized
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Insuring Impact: A Q&A with the co-founder of HUGInsure, the world’s first social impact insurance
Few new products or concepts can be described as "the first of their kind." But Dalberg and Hollard Insurance recently launched what they believe to be the world’s first social impact insurance entity, HUGinsure. It applies rating methodologies and risk management principles to social impact funding, helping facilitate loans to projects that impact the poor.
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- Impact Assessment
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Gum Arabic – the Crop that Binds : The Sudanese commodity that nearly every soda, pill and candy needs
Without a magical little ingredient called gum arabic, all the sugar in your soda would sink to the bottom of the can. Made from the hardened sap of the acacia tree, gum arabic is a little-known additive and adhesive critical in foods, medicines and cosmetics. Farmers who grow gum arabic should be benefitting financially from producing such a widely used crop. Instead they suffer at the base of a supply chain that faces an incredible spread of challenges.
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- Agriculture
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Weekly Roundup 2/8/14: Why the Hult Prize is Tackling Health Care in the Slums: Social entrepreneurs tackle toughest ‘President’s Challenge’ yet
Teams of four or five students are being asked to “build sustainable and scalable social enterprises to address non-communicable disease in urban slums.” And, to top it off, the challenge calls for all this to be completed by 2019.
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- Education, Health Care
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Njambre and Arbusta: A mini case study in impact sourcing, co-creation in Latin America
When we created Njambre, a social enterprise accelerator in Buenos Aires, Our biggest added value comes from engineering things from the start: identifying a social problem, designing the solution, recruiting the entrepreneurs to lead the start-up and partnering with them. That’s what we did with Arbusta, which we believe is the first impact sourcing company in South America.
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- Technology
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A Bank Account for All Adults … By 2016: India’s Nachiket Mor committee report has made headlines – will it make an impact?
In India, 40 percent of the population doesn’t have access to financial services. But a Reserve Bank of India committee has recommended providing bank accounts for all Indian adults by 2016 - and it has an intriguing plan for doing so. Some see this as “the starting point for a new financial architecture" in India. Will the impact measure up to the ambition?
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- Uncategorized
