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Acumen Fund Launches Blog
We?ve talked about Acumen Fund before here at NextBillion ? the non-profit venture fund that supports BOP enterprises delivering critical goods and services to the world?s low-income communities through investments. Like us, they too believe in using entrepreneurial, private-sector...
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Small Grants from a Big Institute
Thirty Chinese NGOs recently won awards totaling $650,000 from the World Bank. The winning ideas included projects that supply environmentally sustainable bio-gas to single mothers, create support networks for waste collectors, and establish community service centers to teach deaf youngsters...
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Ms. Smith Goes to the BOP – To Design
Interested in design for the base of the pyramid? MIT?s Amy Smith is your kind of person. Ethan reminded me about Dr. Smith?s work designing ?really simple things needed by an enormous number of people? with his blog post from the TED Global conference in California.I was lucky...
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New Report on the Socio-Economic Impact of Mobile Phones in the Arab World
Earlier this week I wrote about the rapid rise in mobile phone penetration in emerging markets and the resulting impact on poverty reduction. Now a first-of-its-kind report titled ?Mobility for One Language, Diverse Cultures? details the socio-economic impact of mobile phones in the Arab...
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Who Said It? A New Manifesto for Sustainable Business
Let?s play a game of name-that-quote. I?ll reproduce a quote below, and you guess who said it. Ready? No cheating...Business does good by doing businessDid anyone guess Milton Friedman? Heck, how about Adam Smith? Maybe Martin Feldstein? Wrong. Here?s another excerpt from the...
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Cellular Growth and Poverty Alleviation
Hardly a day goes by where I don?t read something about the rapid expansion of mobile phone services in emerging markets. According to one recent article, ?industry analysts forecast that 80% of the next billion mobile phone customers will come from emerging markets. Africa, for example,...
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Greening the Base of the Pyramid? SustainAbility Weighs In.
What does green look like at the base of the economic pyramid? SustainAbility?s John Elkington and Mark Lee take that question on in a recent article, Fatigue of Nations, published by Grist. Elkington and Lee write in the engaging, tongue-in-cheek style embraced by Grist, and the result is...
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EarthTrends Announces Environmental Essay Competition
Here at NextBillion, we know the importance of good data to good research, which is why we have nothing but the deepest respect for our WRI cousins working on EarthTrends: The Environmental Information Portal. Now, they?ve gone and upped the ante ? literally. EarthTrends has opened up an...
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