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Bolivia’s First Crop Insurance Scheme Promises to Empower Farmers
Natural disasters can come with six-digit figures of damage and debt attached, even in Latin America’s poorest country. Bolivia ’s rural areas, still dependent on rain cycles, are the most financially vulnerable to drought, frost, hail, floods and other weather adversities. Lose your crops, farmers say, and you’re left with nothing but your debts. Luis Alvaro Toledo, who’s wo...
- Categories
- Health Care
- Region
- Latin America
- Tags
- nutrition
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Updated: The Ugly Truth About Famines
The drought, which spurred the UN to declare a famine for the first time since 1984, has affected the entire Horn of Africa, including much of Kenya, Somalia, Ethiopia, Eritrea and Djibouti. And yet the only areas where the UN has officially declared a "famine" are two pockets of southern Somalia controlled by the al-Shabab militia.
- Categories
- Education, Health Care
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For Nuru, Energy Applies to Products and Microfranchises
Nuru Energy uses a multi-tier approach to developing and selling renewable energy devices, while steadily building a network of entrepreneurs. In September, Nuru will open offices in Uganda and Kenya, and plans to close the year with 170 microfranchises in Rwanda alone. The growth plans do not stop there.
- Categories
- Health Care
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Exploding Malaria With Human-Sized Microwaves
Around the world almost a million people die from malaria each year, and half the planet's population, 3.3 billion people, live at risk of contracting the disease , mostly in Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. Treatments for malaria, however, have never been a high priority for pharmaceutical companies. Most victims have little or no ability to pay, and profit margins on vaccines are thin. Now, our few lines of defen...
- Categories
- Health Care
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
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Low Maintenance, Low Cost, X-Runner Redefining the Toilet
X-Runner, a social venture based in Germany and India that has designed a low-cost mobile toilet suitable for urban slum households. The portable, low-water toilet is made of light-weight PPC material and costs $30 per unit. Included in that cost is a home service to remove the waste and deliver it to local biogas plant for eventual biogas use.
- Categories
- Health Care, Impact Assessment
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Social Enterprise Spotlight: Just Markets For Ghana?s Women
Three years ago Danielle Grace Warren had gone fishing. She was part of a mission to build fish farms in Ghana. These farms, it was hoped, would help generate badly needed income and jobs. The literally graceful and ballerina-like Warren, a creative writer, knew from her experience in Haiti where she had worked on economic development projects that income and jobs were the key to lifting the Ghanaians out of poverty. But they needed to be lots of income and jobs. That simply wasn’t possib...
- Categories
- Agriculture, Health Care
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
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Friday Roundup – 8/5/11 – ?Everything is a Remix?
We often confuse innovation with invention. But nothing is ever original; any innovation is just remix of things that came before and reassembled. Our staff and guest writers had a lot to say about innovation this week, both in terms of conceptual thinking around creating something new and regarding concrete innovations to reduce poverty.
- Categories
- Health Care
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Partnerships, Private Sector, Tech Dominate SID
With an international financial system teetering, the Horn of Africa marred by famine, and aid dollars jeopardized by domestic politics, the Society for International Development’s triennial World Congress held in Washington this weekend was in no short supply of substance or imperatives.
- Categories
- Education, Health Care, Technology
- Tags
- nutrition, partnerships
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