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Op-ed: Marching to a Different Drummer: Social Enterprise Gains Popularity in China
Researchers Huan Chen, Juelin Yin and Florian Kohlbacher from the International Business School Suzhou (IBSS) at Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University (XJTLU) in Suzhou explain why and how the idea of “social enterprise” is beginning to gain some traction in China.
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Michael and Susan Dell Foundation Earmarks $50 Million for Indian Startups
The Michael and Susan Dell Foundation (MSDF), one the world's biggest philanthropic organisations, and an active impact investor in India, has earmarked an additional $50 million (about Rs 333 crore) towards investments in the country over the next three years.
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- philanthropy
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Africa’s Great Digital Divide: You’re More Likely to Have Access to the Internet as a Wealthy Man in a Coastal Country
Tech start-ups coming out of Africa have blossomed in the past few years, putting the continent on the digital innovation map. Two examples are Kenya’s mobile money transfer service M-Pesa which is now being offered by Vodafone in Asian markets and Ushahidi - a crowdsourcing platform that has monitored everything from disasters to elections and used the world over.
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- Sub-Saharan Africa
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Airtel to Launch Payments Bank in India in Q2 FY17
Bharti Airtel's mobile commerce subsidiary, Airtel M Commerce Services, has been renamed Airtel Payments Bank. The company plans to launch its payments bank operations in the second quarter of the current fiscal year, it said in a statement on Tuesday.
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Twenty Crore Bank Accounts Opened: Where Does Jan Dhan Yojana Go From Here? An Explainer
Duplication of accounts, account dormancy and the financial unsustainability of the Bank Mitra model. While the Jan Dhan Yojana may be one of the most exhaustive financial inclusion processes to date, there’s still more to be done.
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Want to Serve the World’s Poorest Citizens? Take Your Company Public in India
For the last 15 years or so, there has been lots of hype about “business models” that will alleviate global poverty while turning a profit. It was a premise derived from the success of the microfinance industry in providing credit to some of the poorest people in the world, who, contrary to conventional wisdom, had a higher repayment rate than the typical borrower. As the late Dr. CK Prahalad hypothesized in his landmark book, “The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid”, there are several strategies that organizations fighting global poverty need to master – and that those capabilities are in abundance in the private sector. They are better at marketing. They are better at R&D and understanding price points. And they are good at partnerships when it serves their purposes. The public and non-profit sectors, alternatively, are generally not very good at any of these things.
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What Would Happen if We Just Gave People Money?
Daniel Straub remembers the night he got hooked on basic income. He had invited Götz Werner, a billionaire owner of a German drugstore chain, to give an independent talk in Zurich, where Straub was working as a project manager for a think tank. He had read an article about the radical proposal to unconditionally guarantee citizens an income and spent a few years casually researching the idea. Straub had heard Werner was a good speaker on the topic, and that night in 2009 he was indeed excellent at connecting with the audience, a sold-out house of 200. “It was a very intense evening; people were paying attention,” Straub recalled.
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Challenging Conventional Wisdom in Social Innovation
There are no shortage of books on social entrepreneurship and innovation, but are they the books young people need? Do we have the right balance between theory and practice, or mechanics and motivation? Whose voice is dominant? What’s wrong with many of the current books on offer that drove me to publish two of my own?
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