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Women Mean Business: During Global Entrepreneurship Week, Supporting Enterprising Women
In the second phase of the Women Mean Business program, TechnoServe is working to understand how to provide support to women business leaders in most efficient and effective way. In partnership with Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA), TechnoServe is comparing the impact of two approaches to business training — a “light touch” approach consisting of only classroom training, and an in-depth approach.
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- Agriculture
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Lessons in Growth From Vindhya’s En-ABLED Staff : 90% of the BPO company’s workers are physically disabled
In March 2011, Accion’s Frontier Investments Group and Michael & Susan Dell Foundation invested in Vindhya, which services a customer base of mainly IT and microfinance companies with data management and processing solutions from its state-of-the-art center in Bangalore. Vindhya’s first client was Wipro, one of India’s largest companies, and it’s still a mainstay. What makes Vindhya different, is its differently abled work force.
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- Impact Assessment, Social Enterprise
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NexThought Monday: Higher Education Solutions Network and the (Potential) Power Specialization: USAID’s ambitious new program will link universities, science and development
On Friday, USAID announced the launch of a Higher Education Solutions Network (HESN) — an ambitious five-year partnership linking seven American and foreign universities to harness the insights of students and professors in science and technology to combat a variety of global health and development challenges.
To start, USAID is providing $26 million across the seven institutions, and could supply a total ceiling $130 million over the life of the program. The universities making up the HESN include: Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), University of California – Berkeley, Michigan State University, Duke University, Texas A&M University, The College of William & Mary, and Makerere University in Uganda. The goal is to apply science and technology, as well as entrepreneurship, to define and solve key problems in areas such as global health, food security and chronic conflict. USAID said the network will consist of 22 additional funded, and 76 non-funded partners in the U.S. and overseas.- Categories
- Education
- Tags
- research
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The ‘Unconventional Collaborations’ PopTech Approach: How to turn ‘silos of excellence’ into a network
Leetha Filderman, president of PopTech, says most of the work of solving today’s most pressing challenges is carried out by specialists in specific domains, or “silos of excellence”. But this approach slows the spread of innovation from field to field, limits our awareness of what tools are even available, and throttles the pace of change. PopTech’s approach advocates a network that complements the silos.
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- Education
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New Faces and a New Way to Subscribe to NextBillion: We’re launching a new e-newsletter
Whether it’s by RSS, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn or Google+, or Google Currents app, there are plenty of ways to keep in touch with NextBillion’s blog posts, news items, events and jobs. Today, we’re offering one more with the NextBillion e-newsletter.
Our first email newsletter will go out in December, and you can sign up clicking on the button on the homepage and entering your email address. That’s it.- Categories
- Uncategorized
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How Mahindra’s ‘Spark the Rise’ is Igniting Impact
Mahindra Spark the Rise is an initiative by the Mahindra Group to provide innovators, entrepreneurs, and change agents with an open innovation platform to showcase their work and connect with like-minded people to amplify their efforts. The team’s core purpose is to drive positive change in the lives of their stakeholders and communities across the world. Spark the Rise empowers people to drive positive change by bringing them together through innovative ideas and awarding the grant money needed to put them into action.
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- Uncategorized
- Tags
- infrastructure
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Innovative Banking Strategies for the BoP in India: Exploring ‘No Frills Accounts’ and the business correspondent model
In India, commercial banks have begun to comply with financial inclusion mandates, leading to innovative—though far from perfect—strategies to bank the poor. Yet even if promoting social inclusion may not be part of a bank’s business philosophy, the potential market for banking the global informal economy—estimated to be worth around $10 trillion annually—should speak for itself.
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- Uncategorized
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A Growing Lifeline: Mobile Technologies in Agricultural Development
For farmers, mobile devices can deliver services that help them improve their production, such as weather information and technical advice. For buyers, data delivered via mobile can increase their insight into volumes harvested and processed by farmers and their organizations during the cycle.
- Categories
- Agriculture, Technology, Telecommunications
