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Rural banks partner with telcos to boost microfinance
Rural banks will soon have their own set of “killer apps” to better compete with bigger banks and, more importantly, expand their microfinance services in the Philippines.
- Categories
- Technology
- Region
- Asia Pacific
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Wanted: World Changing Inventors (At Least One Reference Required): The $100,000 Lemelson-MIT Award for Global Innovation, is a call to action
Are you or someone you know an inventor who is developing technological inventions to address challenges in developing countries? Perhaps someone like Ashok Gadgil, whose fuel efficient cook stove, is saving women’s lives in Darfur? Then we want to honor them with the 2013 $100,000 Lemelson-MIT Award for Global Innovation.
- Categories
- Technology
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Can Better Data Sharing Help Solve Pakistan’s Education Emergency?: Developyst’s platform is for NGOs, policy makers and educators to make better decisions
Developyst is Pakistan’s first social enterprise in education with a vision to champion data-driven development. The Developyst platform, which will be launched in 2013, seeks to be a space for education stakeholders to grow and develop their network by providing access to data in interactive and visually diverse ways.
- Categories
- Education, Technology
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With $2M from Eric Schmidt, biNu brings smartphone apps to dumb phones
Eric Schmidt’s Tomorrow Ventures is leading a $2 million Series A round in biNu, an Australian startup that enables feature phones to run cloud-based smartphone apps such as Facebook, Twitter, Wikipedia and Google. BiNu highlights the opportunity in developing markets where smartphone penetration is low.
- Categories
- Technology
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Nigeria’s low-cost tablet computer
Nigeria's Saheed Adepoju is a young man with big dreams. He is the inventor of the Inye, a tablet computer designed for the African market.According to the 29-year-old entrepreneur, his machine's key selling point is its price - $350 (£225) opposed to around $700 for an iPad.
- Categories
- Technology
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
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New Data Reveals Massive (Potential) Mobile Money Market for the Poor : Across Africa millions are sending huge volumes of domestic remittances – mostly in cash
A few months back I wrote this quick piece highlighting some preliminary findings from data that was just coming in from a major study the Gallup organization did for us.
Now, the full data set is in and the results are quite interesting.
In collaboration with Gallup, we surveyed 11 countries in Africa (including Kenya) on the payment habits of the adult population. To my knowledge, this is the largest study of its kind – tracking money transfer and payment behavior in the developing world.- Categories
- Education, Technology
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Test-driving the ‘World’s Cheapest Computer’
India’s “Aakash” project, a tablet billed as the cheapest computer in the world, hopes to revolutionize learning in Indian colleges and universities. We’ve been following the ups and downs of the Aakash project closely here at India Ink and were delighted when we were allowed to test drive the new, improved version, known as the Aakash-2, at the ministry of Human Resources Development.
- Categories
- Technology
- Region
- South Asia
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Waste Not, Want Not: Eco-Fuel Africa
Sanga Moses, is the founder of Eco-Fuel Moses recently applied for the WWF Switzerland Tropical Forest Challenge – a challenge that is working to identify the best for-profit solutions having a positive impact on tropical forest biodiversity in any of the 75 tropical forest-rich countries around the world.
- Categories
- Energy, Environment, Technology
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