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Tanzania’s Controversial Mobile Phone Tax Could Grow Revenues, At The Expense Of The Poor
A controversial new tax policy in the East African country of Tanzania could have an outsized effect on its low-income citizens -- the very people the tax revenues are intended to benefit.
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- Technology
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
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Imagining a ‘Smart Country’ – Such as Rwanda
Everyone is talking about “smart development” and “smart solutions” – the use of information and communication technologies (ICTs) to tackle the most pressing development problems such as poverty, access to basic services, and job creation. But if a whole country decided to become “smart” what would that look like to its citizens, government, and private sector?
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- Education, Technology
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
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RuralShores: Bringing jobs to rural India
RuralShores is a business process outsourcing (BPO) company focused on generating rural employment. The Bangalore, India based firm hopes to provide employment to more than 100,000 rural youth by setting up centers in each of India’s 500 rural districts. To help stem the tide of rural young people who migrate to cities in search of jobs, RuralShores creates employment opportunities in small villages.
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- Education, Technology
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Eye on Emerging Markets, Firm Invests in Start-Up
As the world awaited the next pope in March, Peter Bale, the vice president and general manager for digital at CNN International in London, wanted to know how Africans would react if the pope were from their continent.Instead of commissioning telephone pollsters or gleaning insights from social media, Mr. Bale used a mobile platform called Jana, which rewards users with free airtime if they take a survey.
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- Technology
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Weekly Roundup: Moore’s Law vs. the Law of the Jungle
The last telegram in India will go out on Monday. For many Indians, this is a little more than a nostalgic goodbye, much like the end of Kodak’s Kodachrome film here a few years ago. For others, particularly those across the rural landscape, there is no cell tower, there is no Internet connection - at least not yet. These are the folks caught between the old and the new worlds, and despite massive adoption of mobile technology, about 74 percent of the country is still without a cell phone.
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- Technology
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Crowdsourced microlending platform Milaap raises $1.1M from Jungle Ventures, Skype co-founder & others
Singapore- and Bangalore-based online microlending platform Milaap Social Ventures has raised $1.1 million (around Rs 6.6 crore) from Singapore-based Jungle Ventures and others for development of the platform and scale up its operations with more marketing and engineering, according to a company statement.
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- Technology
- Region
- South Asia
- Tags
- microfinance
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Beijing’s Great Leap Forward
One man, Kai-Fu Lee, did more than anyone else to turn the Chinese capital into a technology powerhouse.
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- Technology
- Region
- Asia Pacific
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Towards global food security
Early this year, a team of five MBA students from ESADE Business School, Spain, beat 56 other competitors from top-ranking business schools to win the regional finals of the fourth annual Hult prize in Dubai. The Hult prize is a student competition and crowd-sourcing platform for social enterprise, recently named one of the top five ideas changing the world by President Bill Clinton and TIME Magazine.
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- Technology