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Disruptive Sanitation: Can 3-Wheeled Carts and Better Septic Tanks Add Value to the Supply Chain AND Clean Up Jakarta?
A Mercy Corps project titled PUSH (Program of Urban Sanitation and Hygiene Promotion) undertook a market analysis of Jakarta’s sanitation industry. Funded by the Suez Environment Foundation, the project found a massive untapped market of potential customers in urban Indonesia. Around 94 million Indonesians live without access to sanitation services and 22 million people—more than two and a half times the population of New York City.
- Categories
- Health Care, Impact Assessment
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The Microinsurance Revolution
Six years ago David Patient felt his immune system slipping. He had been H.I.V.-positive for a long time, but now he made two decisions: He started on antiretroviral medicines to protect himself, and he began trying to buy life insurance to provide for his partner.
- Categories
- Health Care
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
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Remote Control: Three Innovative Solutions to Healthcare Distribution in Rural Areas
To ensure health products retain their quality means the entire supply chain – from storage conditions to distribution channels – must be considered. But distribution costs of health products and their associated service provisions in particular are one component of healthcare supply chains that’s often under-considered and therefore ineffectively budgeted. However, this is a new area of focus for many social enterprises that are looking to bridge the logistical gap.
- Categories
- Health Care
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Obama turns to private sector to feed world’s poor
WASHINGTON — US President Barack Obama on Friday reached out to the private sector in hopes of lifting 50 million people in the developing world from poverty, as wealthy nations grapple with a budget crunch.
- Categories
- Agriculture, Health Care
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
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What’s Hindering the Growth of Health Businesses in Ghana and Kenya
A new paper focuses on constraints to growth among private health firms in Ghana and Kenya.
I spoke with lead author Nicholas Burger, an economist at the nonprofit RAND Corporation, about the study’s findings: What hinders growth and how expanded engagement between the public and private health sectors could strengthen health care in Africa.- Categories
- Education, Health Care
- Tags
- public health, research
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Nachiket Mor: The Business Of Morality
In India, businesses and businessmen, particularly from the private sector, have always been viewed with some suspicion. Given our underlying socialist ethos, this is perhaps not surprising, but in recent times, this has worsened with reportage about the various means that some businesses have used to gain an advantage, be it bribing government officials and elected representatives, indulging in coercive practices with their customers, misusing monopoly power, concealing information, or ill-treating employees.
- Categories
- Health Care
- Region
- South Asia
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Scratch it Off the Public Health Wish-list: A menu of IT solutions for global health challenges
Observing the widespread use of ICT, coupled with intense interest from the global health community—witness, a few of my colleagues at the Center for Health Market Innovations set out to figure out why programs used technology. To answer this question, they analyzed more than 600 programs in over 100 countries—the contents of CHMI’s database at the time. Their findings, published in this month’s WHO Bulletin, highlight six key reasons health program managers adopt ICT.
- Categories
- Health Care, Social Enterprise, Technology
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What Impact Investing Could Do For Health Care
In his TedMed talk last week, where he called for a renewed focus on improving root causes of health problems rather than waiting until they cause full blown illnesses, Sandeep Kishore noted this somewhat startling statistic: Of the 30 years of average life-expectancy gains the United States made in the last century, a surprisingly small amount of that average increase--just five years--stems from improvements in the sort of medical care we get in hospitals. The rest of those gains came from other sources, like improvements in water quality and sanitation, vaccinations, and other improvements in public health.
- Categories
- Health Care
- Tags
- impact investing