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Winners to be announced May 11
After months of preparation by participants in the inaugural Social Entrepreneurship & Innovation Competition, the finalists have officially been selected. On March 30th, fourteen semi-finalists and their teams were joined by members of the St. Louis community at a speaker event held at Washington University. Serving as keynote speaker for this event was Theresa Wilson, founder of The Blessing Basket Project, a sustainable non-profit operating in 5 countries around the world which...
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Chasing Capital
Two local microfinance nonprofits are recruiting private investors to join them in their fight against global poverty. Redmond-based Unitus Inc. recently completed a $9 million initial close on a $20 million private equity fund meant to buy stock in its microfinance partners. The new money will provide additional resources for the nonprofit’s eight microfinance partners, which are located abroad and backed by Unitus-facilitated grants and loans. Those partners currently provide s...
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Sales effort gives India’s rural poor an opportunity
CHOLLERU, India ? With its open sewers and mud-walled homes, this impoverished farming village of 2,200 in southern India did not look like fertile territory for an entrepreneur. But Srilatha Kadem was undeterred. Oblivious to the midday heat, she marched briskly along the unpaved streets, her cloth bag filled with soaps and shampoos and her heart with vaulting ambition. She stopped at a tile-roofed house, where a gray-haired woman in a green sari lounged in the shade of the small vera...
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Pilot scheme benefits migrant workers
Li Caiyun and her husband do not need to worry about expensive hospital bills now their company has joined a local government medical insurance pilot scheme, specially designed for migrant workers. It takes them only 10 minutes to walk to their local healthcare centre, where they spend as little as 20 yuan (US$2.5) for medicines for ailments such as colds and fevers, said the couple from east China’s Anhui Province. Before the scheme, they h...
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The case for social investment
Noel Wandera A Group of organisations, including the Nairobi Stock Exchange, a number of stockbrokers and fund managers, individuals, some local NGOs, corporations, and a UK-based international NGO have launched an initiative to promote social investment in Kenya. Operating under the umbrella of Kenya Social Investment Forum (KSIF), the group aims at promoting financial transactions intended to achieve social objectives and deliver financial returns to investors. KSIF has ...
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The NMB seeks to finance projects for low-income individuals.
The Middle East’s first national microfinance bank opened earlier this week amid mixed reactions from local NGOs. The National Micro-Finance Bank (NMB), launched by the Arab Gulf Programme for United Nations Development Organisations on Monday, has been hailed as the first of its kind in the region. The project’s other stakeholders include the King Abdullah II Fund for Development and members of the private sector. The NMB seeks to finance projects for low-income i...
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A Fisher of Women
The male-dominated fishing industry in Cape Town is making room for Sahra Luyt and her association of fisherwomen, giving less fortunate women the chance to cast their nets towards a better life. At the start of this century, a mere handful of fisherwomen were netting lobster along shores of the Cape Peninsula in hope of a better future. Ocean-blazer Sahra Luyt, 36, had been going to sea with her skipper and spouse Sedick Larney, 40, since the mid-1990s. My grandmother alway...
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- Embassy (Canada’s Foreign Policy Newsweekly)
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German company focuses on the triple bottom line.
The Nutrition Improvement Program, which focuses on the fortification of foods with vitamins and minerals in order to prevent disease and mortality due to malnutrition, is DSM’s first initiative in the context of the ’Base of the Pyramid’. This is a new development in the field of sustainability to which the company will increasingly be paying attention. The ’Base of the Pyramid’ concept involves the development and implementation of new, innovative business models in ...
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