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Housing Series: Strategies to Add Quality and Value to Incremental Home Improvement
Various stakeholders are working together with BoP communities to innovate new, inclusive and market-driven strategies to raise quality, lower costs and add technical assistance - assistance that leaves citizens not only with a sturdier roof overhead, but with increased confidence, skills and a good credit track record to build on for the future.
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- Uncategorized
- Tags
- housing
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Watch: With Smartphones, Software, Building Better Agricultural Value Chains
Funded by the Gates Foundation, African Cashew Initiative is a $48 million project that aims to raise the incomes of 150,000 smallholder farmers. From Ghana, business software giant SAP is researching how ICT software coupled with smartphones is improving efficiency and trust in the cashew value chain, from farmers to buyers/traders. (With video)
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- Agriculture, Technology, Telecommunications
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Affordable Housing for All Series: In the Race for Affordable Housing, Who Has the Head Start?
In the race for affordable housing for all, is there a clear leader? Is government the biggest player in BoP affordable housing? Are NGOs? Private construction firms? The answer might surprise you. Far ahead of the pack in resources mobilized, progress made and sheer numbers of BoP housing solutions implemented, are the BoP households themselves.
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- Uncategorized
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At the Tipping Point: How Can Global Financiers Create a Sustainable World Economy?
Last week’s UNEP FI conference, ?The Tipping Point: Sustained Stability in the Next Economy? considered the emerging role of sustainable finance in reforming the financial sector for the long term. As we reach a different tipping point, the 7 billionth person on Earth, it’s just the sort open and strategic conversation we need.
- Categories
- Environment
- Tags
- impact investing
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Two Ways to Kill Potential: Liberia and Cameroon
Earlier this month, two western African countries held presidential elections. On the surface, they have little in common ? one country recently emerged from a brutal civil war and has an abysmal economy; the other has been peaceful for decades and enjoys abundant revenue streams. And yet both countries are classic stories of wasted potential.
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- Impact Assessment
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In Ahmedabad, Dharavi’s Redevelopment Model of a ’Slum-free’ City
In keeping with the forward-looking innovation that runs through the city’s blood, a new project launched in July aims to make Ahmedabad a "slum-free city." But a top-down approach leaping from slums to high-rises misses the need for incremental steps to integrate the urban poor - how they live, work and socialize - into the formal housing market.
- Categories
- Impact Assessment
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Affordable Housing Series: The Rights to the Land Under Your Home
The migration of millions from rural areas as a result of global urbanization has created informal, and often chaotic, growth. Social business Terra Nova, based in the southern Brazilian state of Paran?, marks a new, unprecedented initiative to solve the lack of land ownership in favelas and to bring "squatter" communities into the formal economy.
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- Uncategorized
- Tags
- housing
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The FOUND Middle: Arogyam Organics
As part the "FOUND Middle" series, we share this interview with Kanmani Arumugasamy of Arogyam Organics Pvt. Ltd. Based in India, Arogyam works to promote organic products and improve the quality of life of local farmers by reducing middle man costs. This video is one of many highlighting businesses and organizations making up the "missing middle."
- Categories
- Agriculture, Investing
