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’Buy Local’ Program Aims to Boost Value of Aid to Haiti
One week after the devastating quake that struck Haiti in January 2010, journalist Mark Danner wrote a New York Times op-ed that warned the outpouring of international sympathy and support, although remarkable, would buoy unrealistic expectations about the prospe...
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Africa’s Women Mean Business ? But They Need Finance
Inclusion was the big theme of the African Development Bank annual meeting in Lisbon last week, an acknowledgement that impressive economic growth numbers don’t tell the whole story. As the president of the AfDB, Donald Kaberuka, acknowledged at the start of proceedings, the bank had got it wrong in Tunisia and Egypt - although as one bank official pointed out, good things had been accomplished in Tunisia by President Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali in ...
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
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HBS Cases: Mobile Banking for the Unbanked
In many developing countries it’s common for a person to have a mobile phone but not a bank account. In fact, more than 1 billion people fit this description, and the number is only likely to increase. To that end, many companies are considering how to give residents access to banking services via their handsets. The GSM Association predicts that by 2012, nearly 300 million of the previously "unbanked" will be using some form of mobile bank...
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Counterintuitive Innovation that Works: Five Takeways from Stima Systems at SOCAP
"We don’t sell our products, we don’t market them, and we don’t take them to our clients" - CEO Konrad App of micro-leasing solar energy company Stima Systems . Showcasing at the SOCAP/Europe conference last week, members of the Stima team, Konrad App, Matt Jervis, Homayoon Shahinfar and James Kimisoi, caught my attention with their counterintuitive yet su...
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
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Stirred, But Not Shaken
Vikram Akula ’s SKS Microfinance , once the showcase company of the Indian microfinance sector, is having to re-design its business as well as salvage its reputation. Less than a year ago, in August 2010, the company w...
- Region
- South Asia
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Center for Sustainable Global Enterprise Announces BoP Essay Contest Winners
The Center for Sustainable Global Enterprise at Johnson at Cornell University is pleased to announce the winners of its fourth annual Base of the Pyramid (BoP) Short Essay Competition. Sponsored by USAID and International Finance Corporation (IFC), the competition highlights the challenges of doing business in underserved markets and identifies innovative business experiments or solutions for those challenges. "The Center for Sustainable Global Enterprise promotes applied resear...
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Bill Gates Funds Human Waste To Biofuel Project In Ghana
Waste to fuel facilities are nothing new--in the past few years, we’ve seen chicken poop-powered fuel cell plants , a scheme to use astronaut poop for fuel in space, and a ...
- Categories
- Environment
- Tags
- waste
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Vaccines Need to Reach the Poor in Middle-income Countries Too
The world’s top aid donors met on Monday in London to replenish the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunisation (Gavi), netting a remarkable $4.3bn in the midst of a historic recession, to scale up immunisation programmes in the run-up to 2015 and the mill...
- Categories
- Energy
- Tags
- solar
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