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Drugs Take Back Seat to Seeds at Bayer With Monsanto Acquisition
In the wake of its $66 billion-acquisition of Monsanto, Bayer risks starving its lucrative drugs business of the resources it needs to grow.
- Categories
- Agriculture, Health Care
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MTN Shuts Down Mobile Money Service in South Africa, Plans to Start Selling Insurance
In a country where more than 75 percent of people have bank accounts, South Africa-based mobile phone operator MTN Group has pulled the plug on its mobile money service there, saying it’s not viable.
- Categories
- Uncategorized
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
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One Solution to Keeping India’s Girls in School: Cheap Maxi Pads
In many stores across India, shopkeepers wrap maxi pads in black polythene. If they don’t have that, the products go in a small carton or brown paper bag. Absent those, “we try hiding it while walking down the road because of how people would react," says Khushboo Navani, a 23-year-old woman who lives in Bikaner. "People give you weird looks," she adds.
- Categories
- Health Care
- Region
- South Asia
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The One-Rupee Trick: How Banks Cut Their Zero-Balance Jan Dhan Accounts
In August 2014, a few weeks after the launch of Jan Dhan, the government’s flagship scheme under which the unbanked get bank accounts, Kamlesh, a housewife at Purnapur village in Uttar Pradesh’s Bareilly, opened an account at the Punjab and Sind Bank’s local branch. Wife of a farmer, the opening balance in her account was zero. This wasn’t unusual — in fact, accounts like Kamlesh’s, called zero-balance accounts, made up almost half of all the 17.90 crore Jan Dhan accounts a year later given that most of the holders were poor and had little by way of savings.
- Categories
- Uncategorized
- Region
- South Asia
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The 9 Best Countries to Be a Social Entrepreneur
Social entrepreneurs using businesses as a way to tackle social problems are emerging across the world.
- Categories
- Uncategorized
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India’s Microfinance Industry Clocked 60% Growth in Fiscal 2016
After years of subdued growth, the Indian microfinance (MFI) industry expanded more than 60% to Rs54,329 crore in 2015-16 compared to the previous year, according to a report prepared by Sa-Dhan, the self regulatory organisation of MFIs.
- Categories
- Uncategorized
- Region
- South Asia
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WHO Asks India to Engage Private Healthcare Sector to Tackle Dengue and Chikungunya
The WHO called for strengthening India's disease surveillance network by engaging private healthcare sector more for reliable counts of cases of dengue and chikungunya, which have claimed over 80 lives and affected more than 50,000 people across the country. Terming engagement with private healthcare sector as "critical", WHO said that even probable dengue cases during outbreaks need to be reported to get more effective estimates while noting that strong surveillance, vector control, early diagnosis and case management and public awareness are key to control these vector-borne diseases.
- Categories
- Health Care
- Region
- South Asia
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Visa Begins Mobile-Money Service to Rival Safaricom’s M-Pesa
Visa Inc., the world’s largest payments network, introduced a mobile-phone application to enable cashless transactions in Kenya, where the majority of wireless payments are being done through the nation’s biggest telecommunications company, Safaricom Ltd.
- Categories
- Technology
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
- Tags
- digital payments, fintech
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