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Reaching the Hardest-to-Reach: Financial Services for Overlooked Populations
The growth of microfinance solutions to address pressing development challenges has brought many of the world's formerly "unbanked" into formal financial systems. However, one group continually remains outside the system -- the poorest of the poor. Even some microfinance programs and deliberately inclusive financial policies remain unaffordable for segments of the population. Across the Global South, a number of initiatives have emerged with the notion that, although access to financial services has expanded in recent years, the remaining need demands innovative actions. We take a look at examples in Lagos, Bogotá, Cairo, and Bangalore.
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Pooling Public-Private Partnership Best Practices
Government leaders today have recognized the need to engage the private sector in development. While in the past, federal agencies supplied the majority of funding going toward developing countries, that percentage has continued to decrease over time — it is now down to around 9 percent. With 91 percent of global development funding now provided by nongovernment sources, the private sector has become a major player in the global development effort, and it is becoming increasingly important to find common objectives that garner their investment.
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Twitter Confirms Acquisition of India’s Missed Call Marketing Platform ZipDial
Last week TechCrunch reported Twitter was in final talks to acquire ZipDial for between $30 million and $40 million, and today the company announced the deal has closed. ZipDial allows people to call a special phone number for a business, hang up before they incur a charge, and then receive a phone call or SMS with information about the business. This “missed call” marketing platform allows people to access content for free, which is especially useful in the developing world where many can’t afford data plans.
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- Technology
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Schneider Electric Introduces Innovative Solar Street Lights
Schneider Electric has announced the introduction of a new range of innovative energy efficient maintenance-free Solar Streetlights popularly known as Villaya.
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- Energy
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Bed Nets and Vaccines: Some Combinations May Worsen Malaria
Combining insecticide-treated bed nets with vaccines and other control measures may provide the best chance at eliminating malaria, which killed nearly 600,000 people worldwide in 2013, most of them African children.
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- Health Care
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
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- vaccines
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Report: Richest 1% Will Soon Own More Than the Other 99 Combined
The richest 1 percent of the population will own more than half the world's wealth by 2016, Oxfam International said in a report released as the World Economic Forum begins in Davos, Switzerland.
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MSF Slams Expensive Vaccines, Urges GSK and Pfizer To Cut Prices
The international charity Medecins Sans Frontieres urged drugmakers GlaxoSmithKline and Pfizer on Tuesday to slash the price of their pneumococcal vaccines to $5 per child in poor countries.
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- Health Care
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- vaccines
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Press Release: WorldRemit and MTN Agree to Major Mobile Money Partnership
Online money transfer service WorldRemit and telecoms operator MTN have signed a global partnership that will enable WorldRemit customers to send remittances instantly to MTN’s Mobile Money customers.
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- Technology
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa