-
Five Years In, Gauging Impact of Gates Grants
SEATTLE - Five years ago, Bill Gates made an extraordinary offer: he invited the world’s scientists to submit ideas for tackling the biggest problems in global health, including the lack of vaccines for ...
-
Poor Communities to Benefit from Poverty Alleviation Project
GWERU - The European Commission and Heifer Netherlands have funded a US$2.3 million poverty alleviation project through the Heifer Project International that is set to benefit 33 000 people in the Midlands province. The project will see cattle farmers in the province receiving heifers as a pass on gift project. In an interview with The Zimbabwean On Thursday at the launch of the project, the Heifer International Zimbabwe Country Director Bongani Ngwenya said his organisation wa...
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
-
Facebook for Farmers: Technology Empowers China’s Rural Workers
China Mobile’s Nongxintong - or farming information service - launched four years ago. The company is currently focusing on expanding its delivery in China’s west and south-west regions. "Building the mobile network and covering most of the country’s administrative villages, we realised that there was only a network signal. In rural areas, this is not enough," explains Liu Jing, a local manager for the service at China Mobile. "It’s like havi...
- Region
- Asia Pacific
-
Mobile Phones for Women: A New Approach for Social Welfare in the Developing World
Telecoms, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and nonprofits are pushing to put mobile phones directly in the hands of women in low- and middle-income countries A 2010 report by London-based telecom industry advocacy group GSMA (for Groupe Speciale Mobile Association) and the Cherie Blair Foundation for Women found a "mobile gender gap" in low- and middle-income countries: women are 21 percent less likely than men t...
-
What the NHS could learn from the Grameen Eye Hospital
By Sam Conniff I have learnt that arguing about introducing pay at the point of service charging to the (National Health Service) NHS, with your wine glass fully loaded, with people who sell life saving pharmaceuticals at a tidy profit, is not an ideal technique for getting invited back to dinner parties. Health is one of those topics that p...
-
Social Networks Meant for Social Good, but at a Price
Over the last year or so, there has been an explosion of online intermediaries promising to help nonprofit groups raise money and awareness. ...
-
GE Health-Embrace to Distribute Infant Warmer in Early 2011
MUMBAI: GE Healthcare, in partnership with NGO ’Embrace’ will distribute a low-cost ’infant warmer’ that looks like a small sleeping bag to rural Indian children early next year. Costing less than one per cent of the traditional incubators, th...
- Region
- South Asia
-
Could Microcarbon Finance Help Eliminate Poverty?
By Thomas Lyon Lately, I’ve been exploring microcarbon finance, an emerging hybrid of carbon offset and microloan strategy that has the potential to be endlessly confusing to a non-specialist. But when you get past the details, microcarbon finance has the potential to ignite direct environmental action and social transformation for the one billion people at the "Base of the Pyramid" who live on less than $1 a day. Microfinance programs, which match poor entrepreneurs in develo...