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Another Inconvenient Truth: Vice Pays
The politically correct and socially sustainable is, though certainly laudable, not particularly profitable. Investors shunning sin stocks manage portfolios that are, on average, significantly less profitable than those possessed by shareholders without similar scruples.
- Categories
- Technology
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Investing in Airtime: How an unlikely financial innovation is promoting economic security for girls in South Africa
Only 37 percent of women In the developing world have bank accounts, yet research has shown that poor women are inherent savers. Stellar has created an open source payments platform that’s being used to provide a mobile wallet in South Africa focused on promoting savings among girls. The wallet has a unique feature: along with cash deposits, it lets users deposit mobile airtime, and withdraw it later as cash.
- Categories
- Technology
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January’s Most Viewed, Most Shared Posts: Forward progress in inclusion – from finance to the crowd
January’s most-read and most-shared posts on NextBillion took a decidedly forward-looking posture to financial access. And why not? It’s the start of a new year and we have several reasons to be excited for 2015.
- Categories
- Technology
- Tags
- savings
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Going Mobile in Sub-Saharan Africa to Save Lives – And Change The Future
Mobile technology is rapidly transforming communications and culture in Africa. More than half the continent’s population has a mobile device, up from just one percent in 15 years, according the United Nations. Of course, cities and developed regions are as connected as their counterpart elsewhere, but remote and undeveloped areas where people live on little more than a dollar a day are usually poorly served. That is beginning to change, and healthcare providers are using technology to improve and save lives.
- Categories
- Health Care, Technology
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
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Bridging the ‘Know-Do’ Gap: New initiative seeks to integrate digital health into national systems
There are more than 2,000 pilot eHealth and mHealth projects in low- and middle-income countries, but much confusion about how best to realize the potential of these technologies to transform health systems. HealthEnabled hopes to change that.
- Categories
- Health Care, Technology
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Facebook’s Internet.org Now Offering Free Connectivity to Millions in India
Internet.org is now available in India, Facebook said late Monday, potentially bringing Internet access to tens of millions of new users for the first time.
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- Health Care, Technology
- Region
- South Asia
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iHub Partners with Chase Bank for Innovation in Kenya’s Financial Services
Kenyan incubator the iHub has partnered Chase Bank in an arrangement that will see the two organisations collaborate on advancing the country’s tech ecosystem and offering more innovative services to the bank’s customers and the general public.
- Categories
- Technology
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
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The Technology Trade-off: Mobile tech boosts financial access but limits engagement. Can it also help build banking relationships?
Financial access is at an all-time high, and it’s growing fast. Yet account dormancy rates for the newly banked range from 60-90 percent. And though mobile technology has made more services scalable, it has also limited banks’ ability to build deeper relationships with their customers. But Juntos Finanzas believes mobile tech may also hold a solution to this problem.
- Categories
- Technology, Telecommunications
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