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Connecting With the Customer – When the Lines of Connection Do Not Exist
We created WeFarm, a social enterprise whose target market is small-scale farmers located in remote areas without Internet access. WeFarm provides a platform for farmers to share information on agriculture with one another, which makes our business model globally scalable. Wikipedia and Google are great examples of organizations and businesses that have executed community platforms very successfully, but the model isn’t widely used in the developing world.
- Categories
- Agriculture, Technology
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Mobile Payments Ecosystem Comes of Age in India
Although being young with only a dozen mobile wallet players in the field, India's mobile payment ecosystem has witnessed steady growth and a rapid adoption of path-breaking innovations as people started realising the benefits of technology in online payments space in 2015 -- the most popular being the "mobile wallet".
- Categories
- Technology
- Region
- South Asia
- Tags
- digital payments, fintech
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Weekly Roundup: Starting SDGs, Africa’s IT Meritocracy, Safaricom’s Setback
The United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) officially took effect on Jan. 1, with the stated goals of freeing “the human race from the tyranny of poverty and want and to heal and secure our planet” over the next 15 years. Whew. Talk about a tall order.
- Categories
- Health Care, Technology
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Sidestepping M-Pesa, BitPesa Partners With Airtel and MTN Money Mobile Wallets
Kenyan based Pan African bitcoin trading platform, BitPesa has partnered with Airtel and MTN Money mobile wallets weeks after Safaricom asked third party integrator Lipisha Consortium to sever ties with BitPesa.
- Categories
- Technology
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
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In 2016, Intel’s Entire Supply Chain Will Be Conflict-Free
Seven years ago, if you bought a new iPhone or a laptop, you were probably also inadvertently supporting warlords and mass rapists in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The country has some of the world's largest deposits of many of the tiny bits of metal, like tin and tungsten, that make up electronics, and they often came from mines whose profits were used to fund the country's ongoing, devastating civil war. Luckily, that's starting to change.
- Categories
- Environment, Technology
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
- Tags
- supply chains
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Kenya’s Mobile Penetration Hits 88 Percent
According to the quarterly sector statistics report by the Communications Authority of Kenya (CA), the uptake of mobile services by Kenyans continued to grow leading to mobile penetration growing to 88.1per cent with 37.8million subscribers up from 36.1 million in the previous quarter.
- Categories
- Technology
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
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Will 2016 Be the Year of FinTech in India?
Has Financial Technology or FinTech finally come of age in India? While, FinTech accounted only for 13.3% of the total funding raised by Indian startups in 2015, the gross investment into it was up 8 times over the equivalent 2014 number of $145.1 million. While that looks amazing at first glance, it has to be noted that m-commerce platform One97 (Paytm) accounted for about 74% of the money raised by FinTech companies this year. Nonetheless, even if one were to exclude this number, Indian FinTech investment has doubled over the 2014 number. India’s FinTech sector has been a far cry from its global peers, accounting only for 6% of the total global FinTech space (by funding), but clearly as the numbers above show, that is changing fairly rapidly.
- Categories
- Technology
- Region
- South Asia
- Tags
- digital payments, fintech
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Mobile Money and Other Kenyan Tech Trends to Watch Out for in 2016
If there is one tech lesson we (hopefully) learned in 2015 is that the average Kenyan knows what they want and will go the extra length to glean the most value at the best possible price. We saw consumers emerge big winners in 2015 at the height of mobile data wars, the digital migration tussle, mobile manufacturers introducing smarter, cheaper smart phones in the market and financial institutions customizing mobile services.
- Categories
- Technology
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
- Tags
- digital payments
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