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NexThought Monday: How Innovative Financing Mechanisms Are Helping Afghanistan’s Farmers
It’s not easy to improve farmers’ livelihoods in any developing country. Add in ongoing violence, feeble institutions, and some of the lowest living standards in the world, and the task can seem nearly impossible. But in August 2010, a project team from DAI landed in Afghanistan to do just that—by implementing USAID’s Agricultural Credit Enhancement (ACE) program, which aimed to lend $100 million to farmers and agribusinesses to invest in agriculture across the country.
- Categories
- Agriculture, Education
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A Profit-Driven Approach to Affordable Education: A Review of HippoCampus Learning Centers
In 2003, Indian private schools accounted for 23 percent of total enrollment, today they’re 30 percent. However, what still proves illusive is a mechanism to help poor families afford to send their children to private schools. In 2011, Grameen Koota and HippoCampus Learning Centers teamed up to address this through a plan that minimized fixed costs per student rural villages in India.
- Categories
- Education, Impact Assessment
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Guest Post: Lifting Africa Up By Empowering its Youth
Voices on Society, an online publication from McKinsey & Company’s Social Sector Office, launched last week. In its first edition, Fred Swaniker, founder and CEO of the African Leadership Academy, writes that Africa is sitting on a time bomb unless it creates its own jobs through the ingenuity, ability, and skill of its own people.
- Categories
- Education, Impact Assessment
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NexThought Monday: Complexity is the New Black
NYT columnist David Brooks recently called on social enterprise types to take a dose of realism. I argue it’s time to accept full responsibility for changing politics as part of social impact. If in attempting to improve some economic or social aspect of people’s lives we aren’t also improving their political standing and the rule of law, any economic or social impact remains temporary.
- Categories
- Education, Social Enterprise
- Tags
- impact investing
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Have an Innovative Idea in Data, Irrigation, and/or Farming? Rockefeller Wants to Hear It
The Rockefeller Foundation has launched the 2012 Innovation Challenges to source innovative ideas that will have the potential to create long-term impact. The Innovation Challenges, which run through May 25, expect to gather ideas from around the globe in three issue areas: data, irrigation, and farming.
- Categories
- Education
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From Potential to Market – the Microinsurance Explosion
The new microinsurance compendium, published six years after the initial volume, is an impressive effort of the microinsurance sector to reflect its progress and lessons learned over time. The total number of “risks covered” has increased from just 78 in 2006 to 500 million in 2011, but the story behind that growth is nuanced.
- Categories
- Education
- Tags
- research
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BoP Career Paths: Working with TechnoServe, Coca-Cola and Others Toward Sustainable Development
More than three years have passed since I returned to the U.S., but my work with TechnoServe has had a profound influence on my career path. The organization affirmed my commitment to “Business Solutions to Poverty,” and I have since earned an MBA from Duke University focused on social entrepreneurship and international development.
- Categories
- Agriculture, Education
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Get an MBA, Save the World
If you want to work in international development, go work for a big, bad multinational company.
- Categories
- Education
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