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Can data-driven solutions change Africa’s agriculture sector?
Despite accounting for 65 percent of the labor force and making up 32 percent of its gross domestic product, Africa’s agricultural sector gets less than one percent of commercial bank loans.
- Categories
- Agriculture
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Weekly Roundup – 10/26/13: Guiding the “invisible hand” of the Base of the Pyramid market
Sometimes the invisible hand of the market needs, well, a helping hand. Consider the cases of Honey Care Africa, General Electric, and Coca Cola as they attempt establish new markets at the BoP. Each mini-case was reflected by company representatives during this week’s BoP Summit.
- Categories
- Agriculture
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Coca-Cola, Partners Team up to Solve Major Global Problem
Coca-Cola recently announced a cross-industry collaboration to deliver safe drinking water to global communities that struggle to access this most basic resource. A partnership with Qualcomm subsidiary Qualcomm Technologies, IBM, and NRG Energy, among others, the new EKOCENTER partnership will provide a fundamental necessity to rural communities around the world. That's great for people, but is it any good for business?
- Categories
- Agriculture
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Agricultural Mobile Finance: Understanding patterns of daily life at the BoP to leverage market solutions
The growth of mobile technology can lead to disruptive business model innovations in many sectors. One such innovation is agricultural mobile finance that can benefit all the participants in the field-to-fork value chain. But connecting farmers to formal banking on their mobile phones will require multi-stakeholder alliances, market research and an end-user design approach, says Lee Babcock.
- Categories
- Agriculture, Education
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Financial inclusion: India too may learn from US weather insurance firm ClimateCorp’s model
ClimateCorp is actually a very interesting company which straddles an intersection between technology and retail financial services in an innovative way. Moreover, its approach holds an important lesson for us in India. ClimateCorp is a provider of weather insurance. However, it does so in a retail, online, productised and data-driven way.
- Categories
- Agriculture
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How to Make Markets Work for the Poor: … And measure the results
There is little hope of escaping poverty if markets don’t provide the poor with opportunities to increase their income through access to goods, services and employment opportunities. Making Markets Work for the Poor (M4P) is a facilitative approach to poverty reduction that seeks to understand where market systems are failing to benefit the poor, and how to take action to set them right.
- Categories
- Agriculture, Impact Assessment
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‘Market Relationships’ that Stand the Test of Time: A Q&A with TechnoServe’s Simon Winter on progress and peril in Ag development
TechnoServe is a nonprofit that is squarely focused on profits ... for low-income farmers and small businesses, that is. Simon Winter, senior vice president of development, says once market relationships are built and skill-building strengthened, sourcing costs from smallholders can absorbed in the cost of the goods being sold.
- Categories
- Agriculture, Education
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Sustainability Certification Dramatically Improves Smallholder Farms’ Access to Credit, New Study Finds
Smallholder farmers suffer from a lack of credit access, but sustainability certification can help change that, according to a new study published by the Rainforest Alliance and funded by the Citi Foundation.
- Categories
- Agriculture
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