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How Mobile Technology Can Help BoP Women Get Ahead
“Portraits: A Glimpse into the Lives of Women at the Base of the Pyramid,” a report released at last week’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, is the first to survey the wants, needs, aspirations and mobile uses of women living at the base of the pyramid (BoP), defined as those living on less than $2 a day, according to the GSM Association.
- Categories
- Technology
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Big Idea: Why Hands-On Regulation of Mobile Money Could Be Dangerous
There’s a very simple imperative driving the tariff structure and every other decision that determines access to mobile money: cost recovery. This is more than a cold-hearted calculation by mobile network operators’ accountants. If rural mobile money agents, who generally operate as independent contractors, cannot profit from this role, there will be no rural agents and no mobile money service.
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- Technology, Telecommunications
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ADB Plans to Invest $100M in Environment Fund
The Asian Development Bank is expected to invest about $100 million in a multinational fund that will be put up to boost investments in environment-related technologies and projects in developing countries like the Philippines.
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- Energy, Technology
- Region
- Asia Pacific
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Now for some good news:Two books argue that the future is brighter than we think
The lab-on-a-chip (LOC) is a small device with a huge potential. It can run dozens of diagnostic tests on human DNA in a few minutes. Give the device a gob of spit or a drop of blood and it will tell you whether or not you are sick without any need to send your DNA to a laboratory. In poor countries LOCs could offer diagnostics to millions who lack access to expensive laboratories. In the rich world they may curb rising medical costs.
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- Health Care, Impact Assessment, Technology
- Tags
- public health
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The Big Idea: Taking Mobile Money Forward
The excitement of mobile money has been dampened by an inability of deployments to take hold outside a handful of successful markets. Driving the enthusiasm forward is the opportunity to bridge the gap between one billion people in emerging markets who have mobile phones but no bank account. On Tuesday, McKinsey & Company released a report “Mobile money: Getting to scale in emerging markets” seeking to cut through this excitement and identify critical success factors for implementation.
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- Technology, Telecommunications
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The Big Idea: (UPDATED) Simple Truths About Mobile Money
Wow, the role of mobile money has been hotly discussed across the mainstream media in recent weeks - even in Slate. There is much that I agree with in that article, and in a related critique of technology-centered development by Kentaro Toyama in CNN. So let’s unpack some of the conclusions presented in these two articles. (UPDATED: The Slate authors respond to this post).
- Categories
- Technology
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Weekly Roundup – 2-26-12: Making a Better Cookstove
Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves’ ‘100 by 20’ goal calls for 100 million homes to adopt clean and efficient stoves and fuels by 2020.
Key to reaching that goal is creating one industry standard defining what constitutes a “clean” cookstove.- Categories
- Technology
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Kenya: Total’s Solar Kits Target Poor Households
Total Kenya is banking on portable solar kits for lighting and charging of mobile phones to break into the Kenyan renewable energy market.
- Categories
- Energy, Technology
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa