NextBillion - An Initiative of the William Davidson Institute at the University of Michigan

Recruiting Women To The Burgeoning (But Mostly Male) Host Of Angel Investors

Women philanthropists have traditionally stood back from venture capital startups and angel investing; only 13% of angel investors in the U.S. are women. That’s why Natalia Oberti Noguera, a 2005 Yale graduate, founded an angel-investing bootcamp for women. Created to increase the ratio of women angel investors in the social good category, Oberti Noguera’s Pipeline Fellowship is announcing a call for applications for women philanthropists who want to be angel investors in s...

Source

Fast Company (link opens in a new window)

Categories

Agriculture, Health Care

Miniature Lab Can Diagnose Disease in the Field

People who live in the poorest and remotest parts of the developing world often have their lives cut short by disease -- preventable or curable disease. The first essential step to fighting these diseases is correctly identifying them. But in the developing world, disease detection is often prohibitively expensive. In a brilliant cross-pollination of engineering, physics and ...

Source

Guardian.co.uk (link opens in a new window)

Region

Sub-Saharan Africa

Innovations in the Fight Against Famine

The famine in Somalia has shed new light on world hunger and the efforts individuals and organizations are undertaking to combat it. Aside from airlifting food and providing IVs, there is a larger problem in need of solving. Organizations such as ...

Source

The Washington Post (link opens in a new window)

Region

Sub-Saharan Africa

Haitians Return to Africa, Bringing Solar Energy

SEATTLE, U.S., Aug 2, 2011 (IPS) - Jean Ronel Noël, a young Haitian engineer, stood in a centuries-old fort on a small island just off Dakar and looked out at the Atlantic through a portal that once led enslaved Africans to the ships of the Middle Passage. "Finally we come to ’the door of the voyage of no return’," he wrote in a blog . "My blood wouldn’t stop boiling, wave after wave of...

Source

IPS (link opens in a new window)

Region

Latin America

The Mirage at the Bottom of the Pyramid

Gravity defying, shooting star aged IRRs and other return ratios of Microfinance (MFIs) have led to a lustful gold rush for the mythical Incan fortune to be discovered by doing business at the proverbial BoP (bottom of the pyramid). Everyone is joining the bandwagon, Tier 2 Management Consulting Firms, "Social" Entrepreneurs, "Social" Venture Capitalists, Jhollawalahs, Professionals, all panning for gold across diverse sectors from education, energy, health, housing, sanitation to water etc. ...

Source

Microfinance Focus (link opens in a new window)

Citi, OPIC, Bank Danamon Back Indonesia?s Microfinance with USD20 Million Loan

Citi Indonesia, the Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC) and Bank Danamon will extend a USD20 million term loan to fund the growth of Bank Danamon’s microfinance programme, Danamon Simpan Pinjam (DSP), and to promote the financial inclusion of microentrepreneurs and small businesses in Indonesia. This loan will be the first from Citi and OPIC for the microfinance sector in Indonesia, and is part of Citi’s and OPIC’s USD250 million joint global initiative to support micro...

Source

The Asset (link opens in a new window)

Categories

Technology

Region

South Asia

Tags

telecommunications

A Smart New Way to Rate Socially Responsible Businesses

Better World Books sells used books. Nothing special there. But how it does it deserve more praise. Better World is a social enterprise that has put over $9 million in literacy and library programs around the world , minimized its carbon footprint with clever offset incentives to customers, and has been able to trea...

Source

GOOD (link opens in a new window)

Rural Chinese Shake Off Poverty Through Self-Development

BEIJING, July 31 (Xinhua) -- On a muggy summer day in Xiuning County of central Anhui Province, Wu Fengfeng still chops wood with a five-kilogram carpenter axe in a workshop of the non-profit Desheng Carpentry School. The 18-year-old boy, who is from a poor rural family in Xiuning, said his only task now is to master the techniques of making the four-sided "immortal eight" table and palace chair -- two types of traditional Chinese furniture -- so that he can "graduate soon and make mone...

Source

Xinhua (link opens in a new window)

Region

Asia Pacific