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The Cookstove Conundrum
Cooking the family meal can be a dangerous business for poor people in developing countries. According to a study by the World Health Organization, indoor air pollution from “primitive household cooking fires” is the leading environmental cause of death in the world. In most rural homes, which lack electricity, a stove can be an open fire and the fuel as basic as wood, dried animal dung or agricultural residue, together known as “biomass” fuels. The result is nearly 2 million deaths a year, worldwide, almost as many as are caused by malaria and tuberculosis combined. What’s worse, cooking with biomass releases carbon dioxide and “black carbon” into the atmosphere and consequently is a significant contributor to climate change.
- Region
- South Asia
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In Rural India, Manufacturing Is Booming
When you think rural India, think factories and cell phones, rather than fields and bullock carts.Rural India, says a Credit Suisse report, is no longer an agrarian economy whose fortunes are dependent upon an erratic monsoon. Rather, they are now increasingly tied to the national economic cycle, something they had been largely immune from so far, as it gradually shifts away from agriculture.
- Region
- South Asia
- Tags
- manufacturing
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India’s Aadhaar ID Project Turns Nation’s Poor into Economic Players
Power Shift India: Nation turns to technology to extend a guaranteed identity to its poor
- Categories
- Impact Assessment
- Region
- South Asia
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First Fund to Help Smallholder Farmers with Long-Term Loans
Incofin Investment Management, Fairtrade International (FLO) and Grameen Foundation will establish a ‘First Fund’ to focus on the unmet demand of smallholder farmers for long-term loans.
- Categories
- Agriculture
- Region
- Latin America
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Buy More and Better Bednets for the Money, Says New Report
On World Malaria Day, a new report analysis the anti-malarial bednet market and concludes that we could get better value, more innovation and even more nets from the same amount of funds.
- Categories
- Health Care
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
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Transformational Entrepreneurship: Where Technology Meets Societal Impact
The slow decline of industrial manufacturing in developed nations and recent failures of financial capitalism across the globe have sent us searching for a new model of economic growth. I see the two movements of Technology Entrepreneurship and Social Entrepreneurship beginning to converge into a promising solution.
- Categories
- Impact Assessment, Technology
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B Corps Go Global: Sistema B Certifies South American Social Enterprise
Last fall, a small group of social entrepreneurs from South America met to discuss how to foster more social enterprise in the region and create more bang for the buck at existing enterprise. The result was Sistema B, the first effort to adapt the American system of B Corporations—which ease operations for companies that combine profit and social good—to a foreign setting.
- Categories
- Impact Assessment
- Region
- Latin America
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Get an MBA, Save the World
If you want to work in international development, go work for a big, bad multinational company.
- Categories
- Education
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