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Reliable Access to Energy in Slums: There’s Hope
For the past months I’ve been researching market-based solutions for access to energy for low-income communities. I’ve come across everything from efficient cookstoves to rural cooperatives that have the potential to replicate and serve billions of people. Most exciting for me are the models that connect slum residents to power and gas grids...
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Emerging Markets Emerging Models Conference
Greetings from Delhi, where tomorrow I will attend the Emerging Markets, Emerging Models conference convened by the Monitor Group. If you have not yet heard of Monitor’s eponymous report, I urge you to take the time to read it. Staff writer Allen Hammond agrees, calling it "a must read!" Why is it a must read - and why is there a whole...
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Interview: Vijay Mishra Takes Sanitation Seriously
Recently, Vijay combined his interest in social causes with his writing ambitions to enter the BOP Learning Lab?s base of the pyramid essay competition with an essay entitled Promoting Sanitation, Empowering Communities. Vijay and co-author Amit Gupta took 3rd place in the competition; more importantly, they took a great step...
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Can Big Companies Drive Development through Enterprise? President Clinton and CEOs Weigh In
Yesterday I heard former US President Bill Clinton, as well as Coca Cola and ADM’s CEOs talk about ways big companies can "create value for business and society" on a panel moderated by Brookings Institution VP and former UNDP Administrator Kemal Dervi?. The panel was hosted by Brookings and the Clinton Global Initiative in Washington DC.
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BoP Career Paths: A Different Way to Educate India
In December 2008, I left my job at Barclays Capital to volunteer with Deepti Doshi, former Talent Manager at Acumen Fund and current CEO of an educational social venture called Ziqitza Education. The mission pursued by Ziqitza Education is to ensure that the innovative, participative and efficient teaching methods used in some elite schools...
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Portfolios of the Poor: Financial Diaries of the Bottom Billion
Last night I had the pleasure of attending a book discussion for Portfolios of the Poor: How the World?s Poor Live on $2 a Day. The recently released book focuses on methodology and new ways of thinking about the bottom billion. They focused on roughly 300 urban and rural households...
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“Can we make money and be good? Really?”
Sounds like a familiar question that drives people to sites like NextBillion.net, right? It is also one of the questions to be tackled during TED’s first conference in India, this coming November.
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Book Review: In the River They Swim
Where does this title come from? Why rivers and swimming? I wondered about these questions as I opened a copy of "In the River They Swim: Essays from Around the World on Enterprise Solutions to Poverty", a new book edited by Michael Fairbanks, Malik Fal, Marcela Escobari-Rose and Elizabeth Hooper. The answer to my question came pretty soon...
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