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On Earth Day, a Good Time to Celebrate Wangari Maathai Vision
Before she passed on, the Nobel Laureate Wangari Maathai left an enduring legacy. The Green Belt Movement, a grassroots organisation she founded to eradicate poverty through environmental conservation, reached a significant milestone: planting over 50 million trees in Africa. But in spite of that incredible achievement, her life’s work was more about human regeneration.
- Categories
- Agriculture, Environment
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Village Women Run Safe Water Franchises in Arsenic-Hit India, Bangladesh
Rural housewives in countries such as India and Bangladesh, where ground water has high levels of arsenic, are being encouraged to set up businesses to sell safe water to save lives in their communities and earn some income.
- Categories
- Agriculture
- Region
- South Asia
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Why Water Is Key to Beating Poverty
Extreme poverty is one of humanity's grave injustices. Across the world, more than 1 billion people live on less than $1.50 a day for all their needs -- food, housing, medicine, water, sanitation, everything. What's more astonishing is that 748 million people around the world do not have access to clean water. And 2.5 billion people do not have access to basic sanitation -- that's one out of every three individuals on the planet. Think about that for a second.
- Categories
- Agriculture, Health Care
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GM Giants VS Seed Saviors: Food security, contested commercial interests and a host of hot button issues are germinating
Genetically modified seeds have been hailed as the key to ending global hunger, reducing pesticide use and transforming underproductive agriculture. But in the developing world, where those benefits are critically needed, smallholder farmers are also losing their livelihoods to huge industrial farms that outcompete them in the global marketplace. Who wins?
- Categories
- Agriculture
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Twitter Top 10: 4-12-15
New resources. New partnerships. Even a cool new toilet. This week’s Twitter Top 10 is full of fascinating ideas and useful info, and you can help us get a head start on next week’s list. If you see anything interesting in the Twitterverse, you’re welcome to tweet it to our editors.
- Categories
- Agriculture, Education, Energy, Health Care
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The Value of ‘Waste’: Waste Capital Partners Sees Value in Impact Bonds, Franchising
Parag Gupta, CEO of Waste Capital Partners, has a vivid example of how much solid waste is produced each week across urban India: twice the weight of the Empire State Building. Only about half of that garbage is actually collected by municipalities for processing. The for-profit and nonprofit organization hopes to expand with impact bonds and franchises to help both farmers and trash pickers.
- Categories
- Agriculture, Education, Social Enterprise
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Heifer Awarded $750,000 From Starbucks Foundation to Support Coffee Farmers in Tanzania
Heifer International was awarded a Starbucks Foundation grant of $750,000 to help fund the Mbozi Farmer Livelihood Improvement Project in Tanzania, which will help improve livelihoods and quality of life for smallholder coffee growing communities in the East African country.
- Categories
- Agriculture, Environment
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
- Tags
- impact investing
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Activists Protest Gates Foundation Plan for African Farmers
Activists in Seattle and London held demonstrations on Monday to protest efforts by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and others to privatize seeds as part of a push to industrialize farming in Africa.
- Categories
- Agriculture
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
- Tags
- philanthropy
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