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Seven Billion: The Real Population Scare Is Not What You Think
The Earth’s resources that underpin our modern lifestyles are deteriorating. This is not to suggest that hard-earned middle class lifestyles must be curbed or that Africans and Asians should be denied the chance to own laptops and iPods. Far from it. Rather, as the middle class grows, business needs to find ways to shrink natural resource use.
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- Environment, Health Care
- Tags
- nutrition
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Venturing into Growth Industries with High-Impact Capital
23rd in a series of excerpts from the book "The HIP Investor" (John Wiley & Sons, 2010). See other published articles in the series here ( bit.ly/gSJMtU ). How do impact investors spur long-term innovation? Through garage startups, which can also be sexy. That’s where William Hewlett and David Packard originated what’s now known as HP, or Hewlett-Packard (NYSE: HPQ). Google’s Larry Page and Sergey Brin followed in that tradition ...
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- Health Care
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Green Businesses in Developing World Get $60M Boost, Along With Microfinance
The International Finance Corp. (IFC), a member of the World Bank group, is launching a $60 million equity financing mechanism to "promote homegrown green innovation in developing countries while encouraging the transfer of clean technologies from developed countries to developing countries." The Cleantech Innovation Facility will help small, highly innovative start-up companies that offer products or services that mitigate carbon emissions. It will n...
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- Health Care
- Region
- Latin America
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Creating Demand With Social Marketing: ColaLife’s Approach
Too often ventures forget they need endeavor to create demand for the products they offer in BoP markets. ColaLife is a rare example, as it thought this through this early in the design phase. Fitting into the unused spaced between crated bottles, ColaLife’s "AidPods" contain Anti-Diarrhea Kits (ADKs) for home use by mothers and caregivers.
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- Health Care, Social Enterprise
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Malaria Scientist Celebrates Success After 24 Years
For Joe Cohen, a GlaxoSmithKline research scientist who has spent 24 years trying to create the world's first malaria vaccine, Tuesday, October 18, 2011 goes down as a fabulous day.
- Categories
- Energy, Health Care
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
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- solar
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W/Video Via ViewChange, Oxfam: This World Food Day, Making it Africa’s Last Famine
In 2009, 200 households in the northern Ethiopian farming village Adi Ha enrolled in an Oxfam America program letting them trade work for insurance against draught. This year over 13,000 families in 45 villages enrolled. As draught threatens East Africa, this 1/2 hour documentary from ViewChange and Oxfam shows how investments can break the cycle.
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- Health Care
- Tags
- nutrition
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Finding Value in Waste
As the number one exporter of Brazil nuts, Bolivia cultivates approximately 20,000 tons a year. Only 0.8 percent of the Brazil nuts are exported with their shell; the rest are cracked and their nutshells are discarded as waste. But the founders of PelletBol, developed a method to compress the Brazil nutshells into pellets as a source of biofuel.
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- Health Care
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Addressing Dynamic Public Health Concerns: LifeStraw and Beyond
UNICEF and the WHO estimate that approximately 1.5 million children die every year from diarrheal diseases. While these statistics are striking and cause for concern, knowledge and experience about treating diarrheal disease is one advantage we have when addressing this public health concern.
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- Health Care
- Tags
- product design