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(With Video) Tenda Atacado: Providing Credit, Business Services to a Network of BoP-Focused Stores Across São Paulo
In São Paulo, more than 60 percent of microenterprises fail within the first five years—often due to lack of access to credit. The failure rate for small businesses in developed countries is about the same, but not for the same reasons, of course. Most small entrepreneurs in Brazil are excluded from the financial system: banks are reluctant to lend them in the absence of credit history, depriving them from access to financial services or credit to grow their businesses.
This is where Tenda Atacado Ltda, a retailer and wholesale distributor in the state of Sao Paulo, enters this story.- Categories
- Uncategorized
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When Dairy is ‘Woman’s Work,’ But a Man’s Market: Improving Livelihoods, Female Empowerment in Tanzania
Four months and more than 100 stakeholder interviews later, what was once a side note on a scope of work now has great impact on how TechnoServe looks at dairy interventions. In traditional Tanzanian culture, masculinity takes a front seat. are still flashes of female empowerment.
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- Agriculture, Education
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Guest Post: Sounding Off On Scale – At Rio+20, Big Energy Companies Talk Barriers to Access for All
Business Action for Sustainable Development (BASD 2012), a temporary coalition of 13 international business organizations, hosted more than 800 leaders of government, business, United Nations, NGOs, and other organizations at the BASD 2012 Business Day on June 19 in Rio de Janeiro. The event was held under the theme “Achieving Scale”, and formed the culmination of a year-long process to ensure the business input to the Rio conference was heard.
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- Uncategorized
- Tags
- scale
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Say Hola to the Nuevo NextBillion en Español
We’re really excited to share what is the most substantial overhaul of NextBillion en Espanol (NextBillion Spanish) since its launch in 2008. Our sister site focuses on social enterprise development and BoP best practices across Latin America.
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- Uncategorized
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Replicating M-Pesa: Mobile and Cloud Technology Spur Innovation in Financial Inclusion
Mobile technology and cloud computing are opening doors for low-income individuals and rural communities to financial services. Today, firms like M-Pesa and Ekgaon are paving the way for affordable banking products tailored to the needs of the BoP. But the question is: Can M-Pesa be replicated elsewhere.
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- Uncategorized
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From the Slums in Delhi to the Villages in Takeo: How Operation ASHA Scaled Up Across the Borders
In December 2010, Operation ASHA (OpASHA) opened its first DOTS center in the capital city of Phnom Penh. After encouraging results in India, Cambodia was the first foreign country to test the model of providing DOTS to tuberculosis patients in urban slums and rural communities. The organization arrived in Cambodia with the aim to replicate its model used in India, but it struggled to replicate the success.
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- Health Care
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- public health
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How ‘farmerbook’ Brings Transparency and Networking to the BoP
The new ‘farmerbook’, an initiative from Digital Green aims to bring transparency and networking to rural India, by allowing users to see how best practices in farming promoted by Digital Green are shared and adapted.
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- Agriculture, Technology
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NexThought Monday: European Impact Investing – Poised to Grow or Largely Irrelevant?
Last year, Ashoka’s Germany Director, Felix Oldenburg, took on – and took apart – impact investing as we currently know it, challenging it on a few specific points. Now, we share a telephonic debate between Oldenburg and Johannes Weber, founder of Social Venture Fund, the first pan-European social venture capital fund, who contests Oldenburg’s assumptions to push forward the dialogue on our much-discussed, much-anticipated new space of impact investing.
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- Impact Assessment, Social Enterprise
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- impact investing










