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Financial Inclusion is Failing Farmers: How the Sector Can Finally Reach the $200 Billion Smallholder Market
There are 450 million smallholder farmers supporting about 2 billion people worldwide. Yet financing available to farmers lags behind the need, which is estimated in excess of $200 billion. Blaine Stephens of MIX and Mike Warmington of One Acre Fund explore the reasons why and offer potential solutions – including a new, centralized directory their organizations are building, which provides useful information on existing smallholder finance products.
- Categories
- Agriculture, Social Enterprise
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How tech-enabled agriculture ventures are offering farm related services via mobile phones
“Farmers are forced to sell immediately after harvesting,” says Kishor Kumar Jha, founder-director, Ergos. “Withproper warehousing, farmers can store their produce and sell when prices move up.”
- Categories
- Agriculture, Technology
- Region
- South Asia
- Tags
- agtech
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Do Farmers Really Want to be Paid in Mobile Money?
Do farmers really want to be paid in mobile money? To answer this question, I’ll ask you to first entertain a brief thought experiment. Imagine that your employer told you that next pay period, your company will start paying you in Bitcoin. How would you react?
- Categories
- Agriculture, Technology
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Nigerian Bank of Industry partners with Oxfam to empower 4,000 farmers
According to Oxfam, the partnership is born out of the need to target the most marginalized and hard to reach in the rural communities in line with the objectives of the Federal Government’s social intervention policy.
- Categories
- Agriculture
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
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Can Satellites Solve the Farmer Suicide Crisis in India?
Researchers from the University of California, Berkley, have found a strong correlation between rising temperatures and the rate of suicides, with an increase of 1 Celsius associated with an average of about 70 additional suicides per day. Droughts have ravaged the country’s crop yields, sharply reducing farmers’ income across the sector and disrupting the predictability of revenue.
- Categories
- Agriculture, Environment, Technology
- Region
- South Asia
- Tags
- agtech, climate change
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Why Startup Accelerators Won’t Create the Global Climate Technology Revolution
Accelerators may be a great way to launch the next Pokémon Go app or even Airbnb, but they're not as suited for climate startups in low- and middle-income countries. Jean-Louis Racine, leader of the infoDev Climate Technology Program at the World Bank Group, explores several reasons why accelerators are "at best an incomplete tool for building climate tech sectors."
- Categories
- Agriculture, Energy, Environment, Social Enterprise, Technology
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“Recovery lending” helps disaster-stricken African farmers get back on track
Accessing credit has long been a major hurdle for small-scale farmers in Africa, who produce some 70 percent of the continent’s food. Not only does this mean yields fall far below their full potential, but the ability of farmers to manage the increasingly frequent and severe weather shocks brought about by climate change is also greatly reduced.
- Categories
- Agriculture, Environment
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‘Internet Access is Like Oxygen’: Converging Connectivity and Energy Access
Microsoft’s Affordable Access Initiative is providing grants to internet access and related services companies and startups reaching underserved communities in Africa, Asia, the Caribbean and North America. In June, the tech giant announced the second year of grantees. Paul Garnett, senior director of the Affordable Access Initiative at Microsoft, explores how internet connectivity can have a ripple effect.
- Categories
- Agriculture, Energy, Technology, Telecommunications
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