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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
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- 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
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Wanted: Smart, Creative Capital
Last month’s “Cracking the Nut” conference, hosted by the development consulting firm AZMJ, focused on “Attracting Private Sector Investment to Rural and Agricultural Markets.” Throughout the sessions, it became clear that investment alone on the part of the private sector isn’t sufficient to transform these markets; private sector capital must be applied intelligently and creatively if it is to wield that power.
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- Agriculture
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Focusing on a Virtuous Circle Around Business Strategy and Impact Assessment
As a first-timer at the Aspen Network of Development Entrepreneurs (ANDE) Metrics Conference in Washington D.C. last month, I was surprised to see a packed room on the first morning of the conference. After all, this was a conference about a very niche topic – the techniques used to measure social and environmental impact within the embryonic industry of impact investing. Impact investing is a broad term that describes profit-seeking investments that also generate positive social and/or environmental impact.
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- Impact Assessment, Social Enterprise
