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Sweetening the Deal: Empowering Peruvian Chocolatiers
From Oct. 2011 to July 2012, I worked in Tarapoto, a small Peruvian jungle town in the San Martin province. San Martin was known in the 1980s and ’90s as a hotbed of illicit coca production feeding the drug trade, but years of development efforts have since helped to make legitimate agriculture the engine keying the region’s rapid economic growth.
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- Agriculture
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Accion’s Venture Lab: Open Ideas, Open for Business
Launched in April, the US $10 million seed-stage initiative is focused on for-profit enterprises with new products or business models that expand the range of high-quality financial services for people at the base of the pyramid.
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- Technology
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A 5 Billion Mobile Workforce
This past month, in Armenia, Kenya, Nepal, South Africa, and Vietnam, the World Bank organized hackathons bringing together over 300 mobile phone technologists and entrepreneurs. The gatherings focused on leveraging the spread of mobile phones to three-quarters of the world to connect excluded populations to the digital economy.
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- Technology
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Reasonably Big Changes at the Unreasonable Insitute : Disruption is our business, which is why we’re shaking things up
Unreasonable’s aim is to positively impact billions of lives, not thousands. To do this, we need to scale and then scale some more, we need to make sure we continuously improve as an organization to provide the best possible blueprint for the program to be reproduced all over the world. So for the 2013 institute we are working to deepen the quality of our program for those who participate and we’re making a few changes:
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- Uncategorized
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From Lab to Clinic to Patient: The second practitioners’ workshop on Bringing Medicines to Low-income Markets explores the pipelines to access
The “Bringing Medicines to Low-Income Markets” workshop, set for Oct.18-19 in Berlin, is a great way to take the first step toward an inclusive business model in the pharmaceutical market, to expand current efforts, or find a suitable partner.
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- Health Care
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THE BIG IDEA: Global Spread of Affordable Housing – Now Available in Spanish: Our e-book with Ashoka is available to download and focuses on solutions in Latin America and the Caribbean
The release of "THE BIG IDEA: Global Spread of Affordable Housing" as an e-book earlier this year, was among the most-read projects for NextBillion and our partner, Ashoka. After receiving many requests for a Spanish version, we are proud to bring it to readers.
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- Uncategorized
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- housing
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Being the Change…. and Making a Profit: Agora Partnerships is recruiting its largest class yet
Agora has worked with 18 companies over the past two years, some of which operate in the most destitute regions of the Western Hemisphere. Over 70 percent of Agora’s Accelerator class of 2011 received millions in investment, propelling impact companies to an average 80-percent growth rate. With this year’s recruitment effort, however, Agora is getting even more ambitious: expanding from its base in Central America, the organization is seeking out a total of 30 new companies from across all of Latin America.
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- Uncategorized
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- incubators, partnerships
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NexThought Monday: (With Video) Moving Out of Orbit : Investment in emerging market small businesses is growing, like private space travel, it’s still early days
This is my third trip to the Aspen Network of Development Entrepreneurs’ conference. The shift that I’ve noticed is the steady move from interest to excitement to action, at least on the part of big investors to finance small and growing business. I had a chance to talk with ANDE Executive Director Randall Kempner.
- Categories
- Investing
