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Healthy Foods and New Jobs, Part 1: MamaCarts learns valuable lessons while launching food cart delivery service from scratch
MamaCarts began by pitching an idea at a business plan competition and culminated with receiving a 2013 Rockefeller Foundation Centennial Innovation Challenge Award. That’s all there is to starting a food cart delivery service in Benin, West Africa, right? Wrong.
- Categories
- Agriculture, Education, Health Care, Social Enterprise
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SMART-er Ways to Plant Profitable Crops
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When you’re a subsistence farmer in drought-stricken regions of East Africa, gambling on what crop to plant is a life-and-death wager for your family. Ellen Metzger, with Village Enterprise, details the organization’s new SMART system - an Android phone enabled program designed to help farmers in Uganda and Kenya make planting decisions based on what’s likely to be most profitable.- Categories
- Agriculture, Technology
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Six Foods You Thought You Knew: The complicated past of our newly favorite foods
The latest fad foods - luscious pomegranates, nutrient-packed quinoa, and refreshing coconut water - have complicated pasts. Farmers and communities that depend on western appetites must contend with global consumption trends, international conflict and climate change. Here’s the farm-to-fork backstory for six of our favorite foods.
- Categories
- Agriculture
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USAID, Keurig Green Mountain, Cooperative Coffees, Starbucks and Root Capital Launch $23 Million Fund to Fight Coffee Rust
The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), in partnership with Keurig Green Mountain, Inc., Cooperative Coffees, Starbucks and Root Capital, today launched the Coffee Farmer Resilience Fund to leverage $23 million in financial assistance for more than 40,000 coffee farmers combatting the devastating coffee rust outbreak in Latin America and the Caribbean. Since 2012, coffee rust has affected more than two million people in Latin America, causing an estimated $1 billion in economic damages which could lead to 500,000 job losses.
- Categories
- Agriculture
- Tags
- impact investing
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The Science of Dirt (Part 2): High hopes for the scalability of $12 water micro-filters made of natural elements
Serial social entrepreneur Chandrasekaran Jayaraman is making and selling all-natural water micro-filters in India, and believes that his market might eventually include the world. This is the second of a two-part Q&A.
- Categories
- Agriculture, Health Care
- Tags
- manufacturing, product design, scale
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The Science of Dirt (Part 1): Entrepreneur building and selling affordable, electricity-free water filters made with clay, sand and sawdust in India
While traveling in India, Chandrasekaran Jayaraman saw firsthand that most villages did not have good drinking water or good toilets. After determining that the problem was fixable, he set to work refining the government’s patented technology to make water micro-filters using clay. This is the first of a two-part Q&A.
- Categories
- Agriculture, Health Care
- Tags
- manufacturing, product design, scale
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Planting for Profit, and Greater Good
A lemon tree springs from the soil in Jason Aramburu’s backyard in Berkeley, Calif., alongside rose bushes, birds of paradise, strawberry plants and squash blossoms. The garden is thriving, but its upkeep requires almost no effort from Mr. Aramburu. Instead, a foot-high soil sensor does much of the work.
- Categories
- Agriculture
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William Warshauer to Join TechnoServe as President and CEO
TechnoServe is pleased to announce that William Warshauer, an experienced nonprofit leader, has been named president and CEO. Will currently serves as chief operating officer of Pact, a $180 million development organization operating in more than 25 countries,
- Categories
- Agriculture
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