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Joining Forces to Fight the Leaf Rust Epidemic Devastating Latin American Coffee
Green Mountain Coffee Roasters, Inc. (GMCR), the Multilateral Investment Fund (MIF) of the InterAmerican Development Bank and Skoll Foundation announce today support for the non-profit agricultural lender Root Capital ‘s Coffee Farmer Resilience Initiative. The initiative is a collaborative venture designed to stabilize supply chains by investing in coffee farmers at the base of the value chain, who are on the front lines of battling the leaf rust epidemic in Latin America.
- Categories
- Agriculture
- Region
- Latin America
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Cash Cows: Why making bank accounts function like livestock will help the poor
In an age of mobile banking and digital transactions, many poor people still shun basic banking services and put their extra money in livestock. Why? Cows make sense as a savings tool in ways that bank accounts don’t, says Ignacio Mas. He suggests several ways banks could create products with similar properties to livestock, helping the poor use their accounts more intuitively.
- Categories
- Agriculture
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Micro-Franchising: How Business-in-a-Box Can Change Development: Why Jibu, a clean water franchise, sees power in local ownership
Micro-franchising lends the emerged market’s corporate advantage to local, emerging market entrepreneurs - propelling local innovations and adaptation. Jibu is piloting this model for clean water distribution. Why co-founder Galen Welsch thinks they may be onto something.
- Categories
- Agriculture, Social Enterprise
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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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