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Teatulia: A Tea Company Helps Lift a Village Out of Poverty
NEW YORK (CNNMoney) -- For some businesses, giving back means making a tax-deductible donation to a local little league team. But for Teatulia, an organic tea company, giving back means creating a better life for a community halfway around the globe. The two-year-old startup has done what many companies cannot or will not, which is marry a revenue-growing business with a thriving social responsibility program. The Denver company sells organic tea that is now sold in Whole Foods an...
- Region
- South Asia
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Microfinance Firms Asked to be ?Fair? to the Poor
Mumbai: It’s back to basics for the Rs. 20,000 crore Indian microfinance sector as industry lobby group Sa-Dhan, which counts at least 250 microfinance institutions (MFIs) as members, has asked all such firms to deal "fairly" with debtors and avoid coercion in collecting dues. The association will in the next few weeks discuss compliance issues with individual MFIs, Sa-Dhan executive director Mathew Titus said. "The effort is to move towards a new regulatory regime," he added. ...
- Region
- South Asia
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Invest in Agriculture to Tackle Food Crisis in East Africa, says IFAD
In the face of a prolonged drought in East Africa that is threatening the lives of an estimated 10 million people across the region, Geoffrey Livingston, Regional Economist for East and Southern Africa at the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) said: "We need to act now and step up investment in agriculture and smallholder farmers if we want to prevent a major food crisis." The effects of climate change have been becoming more and more apparent in the region including...
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
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Inc. 5000 Applicant of the Week: World Centric
As we process applications for the 2011 Inc. 500 5000, we thought it would be worthwhile to shine a spotlight on some of the companies that are vying to appear on our ranking of the fastest-growing private companies in the United States . One that caught our eye was Palo Alto , California
- Categories
- Education
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A New Way To Aid The Poor: Ask Them To Pay
In the last three years, a largely unnoticed foreign aid project has delivered sanitation to 5.4 million people around the world, helping prevent thousands dying from cholera, dysentery and other diseases. And it achieved all of this without paying for a single toilet. The Global Scaling-Up Sanitation Initiative , a marriage of Madison Avenue marketing and Main Street self-reliance, aims t...
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An ?MBA? for the Bottom of the Pyramid
By Tripti Lahiri Tara Thiagarajan, the chairwoman of Tamil Nadu-based Madura Micro Finance Ltd. , has been browsing U.S. microfinance blogs in the U.S. and she doesn’t like what she sees. "The question people are focusing on is not really the right one," she said. Even though it’s been over two decades since formal microlenders have existed, Ms. Thiagarajan says it’s still early days to ask, "Does it work?" Ins...
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Mobile Banking to Help 2 Billion People by 2020: Study
FRANKFURT (Reuters) - Mobile financial services are expected to improve the lives of around 2 billion people in developing countries within a decade and boost economies, a Boston Consulting Group study found. "Overall, mobile financial services can reduce financial exclusion by 5 percent to 20 percent through 2020 and increase gross domestic product (GDP) by up to 5 percent, with Pakistan, for instance, potentially seeing a 3 percent uplift," the study said. It added that imp...
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Nestl? to Continue (BoP) Expansion in Philippines
Consumer goods giant Nestlé Philippines Inc. will be investing more in the country in the coming years, in a bid to offer new products to more markets, particularly consumers on the extreme top and bottom of the economic pyramid. In an interview with the Inquirer on Thursday, Nestlé Philippines chairman and chief executive John Martin Miller said the company, while already serving a wide spectrum of Filipino consumers, still had markets that were largely untapped. "W...
- Region
- Asia Pacific