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How Africa Can Extract Big Benefits for Everyone from Natural Resources
As the Natural Resource Charter holds its third annual workshop at the University Oxford, in the UK, this week, the combination of rising commodity prices and falling costs of communication technology presents Africa with an unprecedented opportunity to reduce poverty and fight corruption at the same time. T...
- Categories
- Uncategorized
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
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World Bank Offers Farmers Money to Hedge Against Volatile Food Prices
The World Bank has teamed up with JP Morgan to offer farmers and food manufacturers in poor countries access to financial derivatives to hedge their risk from volatile food prices. Two other banks, one in sub-Saharan Africa and one in Europe with Middle East partnerships, as yet unidentified, are expected to launch similar products with the World Bank shortly. Excessive speculation ...
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
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Activate 2011: Mobiles Look Set to Play a Big Role in Africa’s Development
The mobile phone will have a dramatic impact on development in Africa over the next five years, declared Rakesh Rajani of Twaweza at the Activate conference this week on technology and social change in London. The technology industry has a track record of hype, but Rajani’s comments sound plausible given the huge number of pilot projects for mobiles in Africa in all areas of development. A race is on to find what...
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- Sub-Saharan Africa
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Can Matt Damon Bring Clean Water to Africa?
Once upon a time, Matt Damon went for a long walk in rural Zambia. The devoted family man and method philanthropist was accompanying a 14-year-old Zambian girl who had no idea that her hiking companion was an Academy Award-winning international heartthrob. The walk came toward the end of a 10-day African journey, a systematic primer on the complexities of the continent’s extreme poverty that had been organized for Damon by staffers from his friend Bono’s ONE campaign. Damon was ...
- Categories
- Agriculture
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
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Slideshow: Inzozi Nziza, a Social Enterprise, Creates a Market for Ice Cream in Rwanda
It’s an unlikely place for an ice cream shop, and an even more unlikely batch of people to be running it. Inzozi Nziza, or "Sweet Dreams" in Kinyarwanda, is Rwanda’s first and only local ice cream shop. Located in the small university town of Butare, it celebrated its one year anniversary this week. While its struggles have been great, from importing a soft-serve ice cream machine into this tiny landlocked country where only one person knows (kind-of) how to fix it,&...
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
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Energy is Central to Development
Energy , it seems, is the Cinderella of development policy. Listen to governments, aid agencies and the big foundations, and the priorities have been malaria, maternal mortality, vaccinations, HIV - health has hoovered up attention and aid dollars in the last decade. Education has come a close second. Now attention is slowly moving to include agriculture and food security, but the rhetoric is ...
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
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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 ...
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- Sub-Saharan Africa
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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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