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Vodacom’s M-Pesa Relaunch Is a Flop
A second attempt by Vodacom to launch the M-Pesa mobile payments platform in South Africa has flopped.
- Categories
- Uncategorized
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
- Tags
- digital payments
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Building the Business Case for Health Sector Strengthening
As the Ebola virus in West Africa wanes, multilateral and bilateral donors along with NGOs and country governments are making a concerted push to strengthen health systems across the developing world to protect against future health crises.
- Categories
- Health Care
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
- Tags
- infrastructure
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Findex: Sub-Saharan Africa Continues to Be the Leading Frontier of Financial Inclusion
Half of the world's population lives and works in the informal economy - not by choice, but by necessity. In the language of economists, poor families in developing countries are consumption-smoothing households and capital-consuming, self-employed entrepreneurs at the same time. As a result, they need a broader range of financial services to manage inevitably irregular income and expense spikes, accumulate working capital, build assets, and mitigate risks. Lacking better alternatives, they often resort to informal financial mechanisms, such as moneylenders, pawnbrokers, and rotating savings clubs, which can be very unreliable and expensive.
- Categories
- Uncategorized
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
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India’s Street Dentists Filling Gap for the Poor
Ignoring noisy buses and curious onlookers, street dentist Allah Baksh plunges his hands into a patient's mouth to fit a sparkling set of dentures for $12 (S$16) in the Indian city of Bangalore.
- Categories
- Health Care
- Region
- South Asia
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Angel Investing 2.0 – Will Angel Investing Go Online in India?
The last one year has seen a huge surge in angel investing in the Indian startup ecosystem. As a platform that has now become the largest marketplace for startup funding; we have been witnessing how the ecosystem has evolved over the last 18 months. In early 2013 when LetsVenture was founded, startup funding was traditionally done through offline networks and fundraise was challenging; our intent was to make fundraising faster and efficient for the founders.
- Categories
- Uncategorized
- Region
- South Asia
- Tags
- impact investing
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The Key to a Global Nutritional Crisis Might Be a Simple Iron Fish
In 2009, Christopher Charles came up with a surprisingly simple and astonishingly effective tool to increase dietary iron intake without resorting to pills: A small metal fish – a symbol of luck in Cambodian culture – that can infuse food with the proper amount of necessary iron to ensure better overall nutrition.
- Categories
- Education, Health Care
- Region
- South Asia
- Tags
- nutrition, public health
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OPINION: Surgery so simple a gardener can do it – but he probably shouldn’t
The poorest one-third of the world’s population receives about 4 percent of surgical care. Africa has roughly 1 percent of the number of surgeons in the United States. Liberia has three surgeons for a population of 4 million. Failure to address this inequity is economically and politically reckless.
- Categories
- Education, Health Care
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Bitcoin Microfinance Can ‘Reach Anyone with a Cell Phone Who Wants a Friggin’ Loan’
How bitcoin — or other cryptocurrencies — along with microfinance and mobile technology could form a new platform that would make it easier to dole out loans and charity.
- Categories
- Uncategorized
- Tags
- lending, microfinance
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