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Group mitigates poverty with alternative building technology
JSE-listed energy and chemicals group Sasol’s enterprise development vehicle, ChemCity, believes alternative building technology (ABT) has the potential to curtail unemployment and poverty – two of South Africa’s most pressing issues.
- Categories
- Technology
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
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Testing Assumptions About Women and Technology
Many at LifeSpring, including outreach workers themselves, agree that the hospital could benefit from digitally collecting information about its clients. But nobody was very excited about trying it. The reason: Most existing mobile health (mhealth) solutions are built on SMS (short message services, or simply text message) platforms, and LifeSpring was not confident about its outreach workers’ ability to use text messaging – or even about their ability to navigate and comprehend a text-based data collection system.
- Categories
- Education, Technology
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Somalia’s ambitions online could bring Mogadishu to the world
At The Village Restaurant, a popular open-air hangout for Mogadishu's returning diaspora community, a charcoal-powered Italian espresso machine brews Somalia's best cappuccino.
- Categories
- Technology
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
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Technology a pathway out of poverty
It will take a century for a poor household to tweet its way out of poverty. That’s a very long time for anyone wondering where their next meal is coming from. But it’s a significant new finding because it proves once and for all that social media and access to information and communication technology (ICT) is a pathway out of poverty.
- Categories
- Technology
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
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The Dashboard Shift: A New Way to Present Data, Impact: Several new dashboards are blending data and storytelling in new ways
Data from which nothing is learned is wasted. At SOCAP 2011, Steve Wright, director of Social Performance Management at Grameen Foundation, shared his “8 rules of (social) enterprise efficacy measurement.” One of these rules is: metrics should be made public to encourage cooperation, alignment and emergence. In recent months, several dashboards have emerged as a popular way to share metrics.
- Categories
- Impact Assessment, Technology
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Science and Technology: The Next Frontier of Inclusive Business
Latin America and the world have already demonstrated that inclusive businesses not only exist, but are capable of growing accelerated and profitably. What is missing is showing rates of return that exceed that of the market to attract investors and the traditional actors of economic and entrepreneurial development. Science and technology might be the solution.
- Categories
- Technology
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Handheld Poverty Fighters: Building the Killer Apps of Global Prosperity
Among many in the development space, connective technologies are either the cheat code to global prosperity or a false prophet obscuring the real challenges effecting the world’s poor. Officials as high-ranking as Secretary Hillary Clinton have called the spread of cheap cell phones and laptops a driving force against poverty even as many of their most promising applications are failing to deliver on scale.
- Categories
- Impact Assessment, Technology
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
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Good Cloud, Bad Cloud: Multinational ICT vendors are pushing services in Africa, why the solutions are in Africans’ hands
While global multinational companies are pushing private cloud computing services, the only viable solution for most enterprises in Africa, then, is the public cloud. The hope for Africa lies in the rapidly decreasing cost of broadband Internet and smaller, homegrown cloud service providers (CSPs) that are willing to invest in cloud data centers in Africa.
- Categories
- Technology, Telecommunications