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Serving the Trillion Dollar BoP Energy Market
Not everyone wants to spend their weekend in a conference room discussing challenges like benchmarking low-cost solar home lighting systems, finding the right business model, and raising the seed capital. But for the 11 social entrepreneurs gathered with experts and the CSTS Clean Energy Sector team, there’s no place else we would have rather been.
- Categories
- Energy, Environment
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Heating Homes With Human Waste is Saving Lives and Tigers in Nepal
Dirt gets a bad rap. I’m sitting on a dirt floor in Badreni, Nepal, in a home built largely of dirt (waddle and daub) and there’s nothing dirty at all about this place. I’m a guest in a biogas home--one of 7,500 the WWF has helped build to date and one of 40,000 that will dot this Nepalese landscape five years from now. A small but powerful blue flame whispers in the corner and brings light to the faces of my host family. That flame lights and heats the home; it also warms t...
- Categories
- Environment
- Tags
- waste
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INNOVARE or the Phenomenon of the Unprecedented Question
Alejandro Aravena is one of the most internationally successful Chilean architects for his work in ELEMENTAL, a for profit "Do Tank" project with social interests that works on public impact projects at the Catholic University of Chile and COPEC. Aravena did what few can do: focus on asking the right questions to clearly define a problem to solve.
- Categories
- Environment, Impact Assessment
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For Piramal Fellows, Innovation Comes Naturally
The Piramal Fellowship for Sustainable Business is an opportunity for aspiring business and community leaders to engage where business and social impact meet. Fellows are placed in leadership roles with for-profit ventures designed for social and environmental change. As the organization recruits its next class, two fellows share their experiences.
- Categories
- Education, Environment, Impact Assessment
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Fairfax Enters India to Invest in Local Firms
Fairfax Financial Holdings Ltd, a $30 billion (Rs.1.3 trillion)-plus diversified financial services company that owns stakes in Kraft Foods Inc. and Dell Inc., is entering India to invest in listed and unlisted Indian companies, a senior company official said. It will buy both minority as well as controlling stakes. Founded by Indian-born Prem Watsa , 61, popularly known as the Warren Buffett of Canada, Fairfax has appointed Harsha Raghavan, former India head of private equ...
- Categories
- Environment
- Region
- South Asia
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Making the Global Ad Market Work for the BoP, One Bike At a Time
Global advertising spending is forecast to surpass $500 billion in 2011. When Coca Cola paints a roadside kiosk in Kikuyu, they’re paying someone. Why doesn’t that someone include you? That’s the question social entrepreneur Magali Bongrand asked in founding INSTINCT - a social enterprise leveraging corporate ad money to finance social ventures.
- Categories
- Environment
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A Kenyan Pedal Power Solution for Charging Mobile Phones
In rural Kenya, electricity sockets are hard to find but pedal power is everywhere, which is why inventor Pascal Katana has come up with an ingenious method to charge mobile phones using the energy generated by bicycles.
- Categories
- Environment, Technology
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Bill Gates Funds Human Waste To Biofuel Project In Ghana
Waste to fuel facilities are nothing new--in the past few years, we’ve seen chicken poop-powered fuel cell plants , a scheme to use astronaut poop for fuel in space, and a ...
- Categories
- Environment
- Tags
- waste