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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...
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- Asia Pacific
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Unilever Eyes Top and Bottom-end Segments in Developing Markets
SINGAPORE : Consumer goods giant Unilever wants to straddle both the top and the bottom of the economic pyramid in developing markets. This is part of its strategy to tap Asia’s growth potential, and compensate for the slack in its European and North America units. And to support this growth, Unilever has been making invest...
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- Asia Pacific
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Social Entrepreneurs Boost Cooperation to Reduce Poverty in Asia
Innovative thinkers working for social change converged in Seoul, Monday, in a bid to boost cooperation towards alleviating poverty and other problems in Asia. Some 300 agents of change known as social entrepreneurs - those who apply fresh paradigms to solve pressing human issues - gathered in southern Seoul for the second major gathering of the Asian Social Entrepreneurs Summit. On the first of two days of dialogue at the Kyoyuk Munwha Hoekwan Hotel, tackling pove...
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- Asia Pacific
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Rural Banks’ Service in the Philippines
Rural banks do the nation a great service that people in the cities seldom give a thought to. They serve a market segment big banks don’t want to be bothered with. The money of the farmers, rural businesses and agricultural and fishery entrepreneurs that make up that market segment is too small-and therefore too expensive-for the large commercial banks to attend to. Indivi...
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- Asia Pacific
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A Fresh Start: Asian Villages Carve Out a New Life
The village of Tmatboey in the northern plains of Cambodia seemed to have little going for it. It lacked clean water; there were no real roads. The people toiled mostly at subsistence farming, barely scraping by. The villagers didn’t realize they had a valuable asset -- hiding in plain sight, so to speak: a tourist attraction that a niche group of international travelers would happily pay to see, even if it meant a stay in basic accommodations. And now they’re making money...
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- Asia Pacific
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Singapore Firm Eyes Profit in Cheap Toilet Market
SINGAPORE (AP) - Christopher Ng has a dream: Help alleviate a major global health problem by bringing toilets to the world’s poor — at a tidy profit. Ng, managing director at Singapore-based Rigel Technology, hopes to sell his state-of-the-art portable, fertilizer-making, toilets for as low as $30 beginning next year, tapping into a multibillion dollar market for proper sanitation in developing countries. It is among the exhibits at the annual World Toilet Summit in Sing...
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- Asia Pacific
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Businessweek: A Big Idea for Little Farms
In the countryside of Shanxi Province in north-central China, farmer Xie Xin has struggled for years with water shortages. The 47-year-old, who grows tomatoes and cucumbers, had to pay dearly to use the local well, since the region receives an average of only 16.5 inches of rainfall annually. But this year, Xie started participating in an experiment in which farmers use new irrigation equipment to conserve water. The equipment, similar to a garden hose with small holes every foot or so, is ex...
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- Asia Pacific
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Vietnam: Fund for Pro-Poor Businesses Debuts
The Vietnam Challenge Fund (VCF), a new financial instrument to support new business projects that directly benefit the poor was launched Tuesday in Hanoi. With an initial budget of US$3 million for 2009-2011, the fund is a major component of the "Making Markets Work Better for the Poor Phase 2" initiative. It is backed by the Ministry of Planning and Investment, the U.K.’s Department for International Development (DFID) and the Asian Development Bank (ADB), The Saigon Tim...
- Region
- Asia Pacific
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