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Latest ‘Lemelson Foundation’ Report Spotlights Indian Inventors
A recent report by the Lemelson Foundation highlights financing, technical assistance, mentoring that offers concrete solutions to help invention based businesses thrive. World’s leading funder of invention in service of social and economic change, Lemelson Foundation examines India’s impact ecosystem that caters to the broad network of businesses, funders, and intermediaries that enable social enterprise and inventors potential to grow.
- Categories
- Agriculture, Health Care
- Region
- South Asia
- Tags
- impact investing
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How Unilever Is Harnessing Its Brand and Consumer Know-How to Tackle Hygiene
It’s one of the most cost effective public health interventions and it could prevent disease, death and also improve education outcomes, but the challenge for hand-washing is convincing people to actually do it. Unilever, a powerful global brand, is working both through its business and with partners to leverage the company’s skills to help tackle the issue, both because it will grow markets but also because there’s a clear moral case for doing so.
- Categories
- Agriculture, Education, Health Care
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Indian American Social Entrepreneur Bhagwati Agrawal in CNN’s Top 10 Heroes List
Bhagwati Agrawal, an Indian American social entrepreneur, has advanced into CNN’s Top Ten Heroes of 2015 for creating a rainwater harvesting system that provided safe drinking water to more than 10,000 people across six villages in Rajasthan.
- Categories
- Agriculture, Health Care
- Region
- South Asia
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These Solar-Powered Machines Help Farmers Dry Their Food Instead of Letting It Rot
A lot of food grown in developing countries never makes it to the people's bellies. Because of a lack of refrigeration, it rots during transport or when farmers fail to sell it immediately at markets. Every year, 1.3 billion tons of food (with a value of more than $1 trillion) is wasted in this way, according to the U.N.'s Food and Agriculture Organization.
- Categories
- Agriculture, Energy
- Tags
- solar
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MasterCard Foundation Investing $47M in Agricultural Finance Projects Across Africa
The Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) has commended the MasterCard Foundation's pronouncement of investing $47 million in agricultural finance projects across Africa, including $15 million for a partnership with AGRA that will deliver financial support to 730,000 farming households.
- Categories
- Agriculture
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
- Tags
- impact investing
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MIT-USAID Program Releases Evaluation of Water Filters
The United Nations now estimates that 90 percent of the world’s population has access to improved drinking water. But the story of access to safe drinking water is more complex, especially when it comes to the 2.7 billion people who live on less than $2 a day: In developing countries around the world, tens of millions of people rely on water filtration and purification products each year to improve their drinking water in the absence of proper infrastructure providing clean water.
- Categories
- Agriculture, Health Care
- Region
- South Asia
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Pacific-Rim Nations Led by U.S. Agree to Historic Trade Deal
A dozen Pacific-rim nations agreed to an historic pact that would cut trade barriers on items ranging from cars to rice, setting up a potentially contentious ratification vote before a skeptical U.S. Congress.
- Categories
- Agriculture
- Region
- Asia Pacific
- Tags
- public policy
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IDB Loans $10M to Paraguay’s Vision Banco to Fund Water, Sanitation Facilities for Low-Income Populations
The Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), a US-based multilateral finance institution that operates in Latin America and the Caribbean, recently approved a loan of USD 10 million to Vision Banco, a microfinance institution (MFI) in Paraguay. The loan will be disbursed from IDB’s Opportunities for the Majority Sector facility, which lends, invests equity, offers technical advice and provides partial guarantees and risk-sharing facilities to “companies, financial intermediaries … [and] non-profits that are willing to engage with the base of the socioeconomic pyramid”[4].
- Categories
- Agriculture, Health Care
- Region
- Latin America
- Tags
- lending, microfinance
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