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Technology Meets the ‘Loo’: Women-led business utilizes bio-toilets to overcome infrastructure challenges
Namita Banka, a former jewelry designer, took a course in social entreprepreneurship in 2009 and emerged ready to make a difference in her community. A few years later, she incorporated Banka BioLoo to produce environmentally friendly bio-toilets. Here, Sanjay Banka, Namita's husband, talks about the business and the cultural obstacles it's working to overcome.
- Categories
- Agriculture, Environment, Health Care, Technology
- Tags
- public health
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WHO Promotes Water, Sanitation to Battle Neglected Tropical Diseases
Water, sanitation and hygiene are part of a new World Health Organisation strategy to fight neglected tropical diseases which afflict more than 1.5 billion people, the WHO said on Thursday.
- Categories
- Agriculture, Health Care
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Viewpoint: Drinkable Book: The Pages Contain Instructions and Can Be Used as High-Tech Water Filters
Here's a very clever idea: A book that not only contains information about clean drinking water printed on its pages, but the actual pages themselves can be torn off and used as high-tech filters that will remove 99% of bacteria from the filtered water. The idea came out of Dr. Theresa Dankovich's chemistry PhD work at McGill University in Montreal, during which she invented a new bactericidal silver nanoparticle paper and a green method of producing it using cheap and benign processes. She and her team are now trying to make the Drinkable Book a reality to contribute to the effort to bring clean water to the 663 million people who don't have access to it, according to the World Health Organization/ UNICEF Joint Monitoring Project.
- Categories
- Agriculture, Environment, Health Care, Impact Assessment
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34 Indigenous Crops Promoting Health and Feeding the World
Every day, plant species across the globe are disappearing. The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) reports that approximately 75 percent of the Earth’s plant genetic resources are now extinct, and another third of plant biodiversity is expected to disappear by 2050. Up to 100,000 plant varieties are currently endangered worldwide.
- Categories
- Agriculture, Health Care
- Tags
- nutrition
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Cocoa Farmers Embrace Telemedicine
Kuapa Kokoo Farmers' Union - a farmers' cooperative, has introduced a telemedicine project to help effectively tackle the health needs of the Ghanaian cocoa farmer.
- Categories
- Agriculture, Health Care
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
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Reaching the Base of the Pyramid — and cutting carbon in the process
Ghana’s per capita income is $31 a week, according to the World Bank. But the roughly 500 female farmers who cultivate and harvest the leaves of moringa oleifera trees in the Tamale region of the West African nation earn five times that amount. That's because the women supply ground leaves of the nutrient-rich moringa plant to Oakland-based Kuli Kuli Foods, which markets and sells energy bars, teas and nutrition supplement powders made from the "superfood" at stores including Whole Foods.
- Categories
- Agriculture
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
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Smartphones help Tanzanian women secure land rights
In an effort to help Tanzania's authorities secure village land rights, USAID launched a project to map geographic and demographic data using mobile phone technology, with the aim of speeding up land rights registration.
- Categories
- Agriculture, Technology
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
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PRESS RELEASE: Tech-based social solutions competition looking for nominations
The competition, organized by Siemens Stiftung, seeks to identify innovative technical solutions to tackle global challenges in basic supply in the developing world.
- Categories
- Agriculture, Energy, Health Care, Technology
- Tags
- infrastructure
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