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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
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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...
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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...
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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. ...
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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
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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...
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NGO Wants to Put City?s Cycle Rickshaws on a Fast Track
GURGAON: His business concept has changed the lives of 5,00,000 rickshaw pullers in north India. He wants US president Barack Obama to ride a rickshaw. Irfan Alam, the 35-year-old IIM-Ahmedabad graduate from Bihar who has kicked off a rickshaw revolution across eight states, wants Gurgaon to love his rickshaws. Alam’s ’smart’ rickshaws are sleek, have shelves that can stock mineral water, soft drinks, newspapers and other ’small items of necessity and is, the bit which most Gu...
- Region
- South Asia
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World Bank Boosts Lending to Poor
The World Bank said it had expanded by about 18 per cent its capacity to give grants and loans to the world’s poorest countries over the next three years. The $49.3bn funding package for the International Development Association, the bank’s grant and soft-loan arm, will increase the bank’s support to low-income countries despite worldwide pressure on aid budgets as the result of shaky government finan...