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Weekly Roundup – The BoP Beer Business
SABMiller wants to sell more beer to Africans, wants to source much more agricultural inputs from African farmers, and wants to generate much, much more revenue in Africa. The company forecasts it will grow revenue by 10 percent over the next three to five years in Africa. To achieve that goal it will use differentiated pricing to attract low-income customers across Africa.
- Categories
- Agriculture
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Lending to Poor Farmers: Seeding the Market
“Coffee is our gateway drug,” jokes Willy Foote, founder of Root Capital. “Then we move on to harder stuff, like cocoa, cashews, quinoa and sorghum.” That is how the firm got started in 1999, after Mr Foote quit his job as a Wall Street analyst, lending $73,000 to a coffee (and cardamom) co-operative in Guatemala. It has since expanded to 25 countries in Latin America and Africa, and in December set up shop in Indonesia, with a loan of $550,000 to an organic coffee co-operative.
- Categories
- Agriculture
- Tags
- lending
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Who Moved My Cheese?: A social enterprise discovers that the dairy business is harder than it looks
In a poor region of Bolivia, goat milk producers often drink their own product, for lack of a market. Pro-Milk was launched to help them make and sell cheese instead. But the company was soon undermined by challenges in its business model and region. Fundación IES, a development institution that supported Pro-Milk, tells the story in the latest post in our business failure series.
- Categories
- Agriculture, Social Enterprise
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A Quest to End Seasonal Hunger in Coffee Lands: How major companies are working with farmers during scarce times
When specialty coffee buyers visit coffee bean farmers, they usually want to taste the coffee for the flavor nuances, discuss price differentials, volumes, and delivery months. They don’t usually ask whether the kids are going hungry. Keurig Green Mountain doesn’t want to leave that question unasked anymore. And the company is not alone.
- Categories
- Agriculture
- Tags
- supply chains
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Toilet Could Turn Urine Into Electricity at Refugee Camps
An innovative urinal could turn pee into a source of electricity. Driven to find a way to protect women and girls in refugee camps who are often assaulted when they go to the bathroom at night, researchers at the University of the West of England (UWE Bristol) have devised a urinal that lights up when a person uses it.
- Categories
- Agriculture, Energy, Health Care
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Phone Camera Checks Water for Arsenic
UK scientists have developed a mobile phone-based system to help people avoid drinking water contaminated with arsenic.1 The phone’s camera measures quantum dot fluorescence in response to arsenic, achieving a limit of detection as low as 5µM.
- Categories
- Agriculture, Health Care, Technology
- Region
- Europe & Eurasia
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Creating an Efficient Funnel for Inclusive Business: How agri-processors, farmers, food banks and the government are blending an alliance
Minka-Dev helped a growing food ingredients company in Colombia connect with smallholder farmers. The authors, both from Minka-Dev, detail the process, which involves not only farmers, but also food banks, government and business players.
- Categories
- Agriculture
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NexThought Monday – Test Tubers: Why potatoes in Bangladesh are turning heads in the Andes
If you’re a subsistence farmer of potatoes, cassava or bananas, you’ll often sow your crops by taking cuttings from other plants. An alternative method of in vitro micro-propagation involves cloning plantlets in a laboratory setting. This can lead to dramatic gains in crop yields, but it’s expensive. But there may be a low-tech solution.
- Categories
- Agriculture, Education, Technology
- Tags
- research