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What Was 2014’s Most Influential Post?: You tell us – VOTE
In 2014, we published more than 570 blog posts. Now it’s your turn. We need your vote for NextBillion’s annual Most Influential Post contest. Last year’s contest attracted more than 16,000 ballots. That was huge – we’d be thrilled to do even better this year if we can. So please vote early and vote often. You can vote once a day, and for multiple posts if you choose. Please share this link or the contest link itself with your friends, family and colleagues.
- Categories
- Agriculture
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How Gravity (And a Little Coagulant) Could Transform How Communities Clean Water
Purifying water is a problem as old as civilization. When people started living together in anything bigger than traveling bands of shepherds and hunters, potable water became a shrinking resource. The rotating belt of local oases or springs could satisfy you while you were constantly on the move but once you started needing the communal watering hole to keep your animals upright or your crops alive, cooperation became more tenuous and waterborne diseases became sundry. Getting sick from your drinking water was the tradeoff for settling down, and we’ve been repaying the debt ever since.
- Categories
- Agriculture
- Region
- Latin America
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NexThought Monday – How Latin America Can Feed the World : Our biggest challenge lies in how we work together
Family farms in Mexico and Central America average five acres, and most of these produce only enough to feed themselves. The central challenge is helping these subsistence farmers use their five acres to become small businesses and engines of the local economy.
- Categories
- Agriculture
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Cash Versus Cows (Part 2): What’s more scalable – cash transfers or in-kind transfers?
Successfully catapulting ultra-poor households over the extreme poverty line is incredibly hard work, and requires philanthropic capital and grant-based approaches. In this second part of a two-part series, BRAC’s Rod Dubitsky and Sadna Samaranayake pose a seemingly simple question: Is it better to give a cow or cash to seed sustainable livelihoods for the poorest-of-the-poor?
- Categories
- Agriculture
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Why Mobile Wallets Will Be Offered to 120,000 Zambian Farmers
MTN Chief Sales and Distribution Officer Amos Jere told journalists at the Zambia Agriculture Show that MTN Zambia plans to work with 120,000 farmers in the next farming season through the Ericsson Wallet Platform. Quoted by the Lusaka Times, he said that the company is in the process of rolling out our mobile money platform to integrate MTN Mobile Money with all banks in the country and added that some 4,000 subsistence farmers in the country have already been successfully paid through the platform for their cotton sales in Eastern Province.
- Categories
- Agriculture
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
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A Magic Wand for Nutrition and Incomes in Mozambique?
Smallholder farmers in Mozambique are growing nutritious and lucrative varieties of orange-fleshed sweet potato.
- Categories
- Agriculture, Health Care
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
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Insurance for Ethiopian Herders Aims to Combat Drought, Conflict
Nomadic livestock herders in Ethiopia have received their first payout from an insurance scheme that tracks poor pasture conditions with satellite technology.
- Categories
- Agriculture
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
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A New Milk Can for The Developing World, Funded by Bill Gates
When you buy milk in America, it generally comes from farmers with hundreds of cows. They do their own milking with mechanized equipment, and, generally, their own pasteurization and bottling. In Kenya, it's different. About 80% of the country's milk comes from small-scale farmers with a few cows, who milk by-hand. They don't do bottling and, instead of trucks to get to market, they go by bike or foot.
- Categories
- Agriculture, Health Care
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
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