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Cutting Edge Agriculture: How Artificial Intelligence, Satellites and Big Data are Transforming Farmers’ Access to Finance
There are many reasons for the $450 billion global agricultural finance gap. But much of the challenge stems from lenders' inability to monitor farmers' output, estimate their income and assess their risk of default, says Ruchit G Garg of Harvesting Inc. He explores how artificial intelligence and satellites are addressing that data imbalance, helping lenders reach many of the world’s 500 million smallholder farmers for the first time.
- Categories
- Agriculture, Technology
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Viewpoint: Big Tech is an extractive industry, it must be regulated as such
Web activists have long bemoaned the dangers to privacy posed by these firms. But now the squeaky clean liberal image of Big Tech has been shattered by the scandal around Cambridge Analytica's use of personal Facebook data to help win the Brexit and Trump votes.
- Categories
- Technology
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Serving Smallholder Farmers in the Digital Age: Why it Requires Treating Data Like an Asset
As mobile technology becomes nearly ubiquitous, the next wave of users is expected to come from rural regions, where smallholder farmers produce the majority of the food yet often live in poverty. In these areas, data-driven agriculture is already creating a new economy – one in which data itself is the currency that can help lift farmers out of poverty. Bobbi Gray and Ellen Galdava discuss an upcoming Grameen Foundation paper, supported by USAID and FHI 360, on this quickly shifting dynamic.
- Categories
- Agriculture
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The Teacher-Researcher Divide: How Can Educators in Emerging Markets Make Better Use of Data?
Despite an explosion of high-quality research into K-12 learning outcomes in emerging markets, the data from those studies can be hard to interpret, leading educators to defer to their own experience and/or that of their peers instead. As a result, the best evidence on methods and strategies often goes unused by teachers. Sean Geraghty of the private school operator Bridge International Academies considers a recent partnership with the Liberian government and asks: How can educators truly incorporate the latest research into their lessons?
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- Education, Impact Assessment
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‘Socially responsible’ investors reassess Facebook ownership
“The lid is being opened on the black box of Facebook’s data practices, and the picture is not pretty,” said Frank Pasquale, a University of Maryland law professor who has written about Silicon Valley’s use of data.
- Categories
- Investing
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Deciphering the Data Deluge: Making Data More Useful for Financial Inclusion
Data can have a transformative impact on financial inclusion efforts. But it will reach its full potential only if industry stakeholders can truly understand and utilize it for the benefit of customers. In this Q&A, Camilla Nestor, CEO of MIX, discusses how MIX's FINClusion Lab is making data available to financial services providers, regulators, policymakers and others in a format they can actually use.
- Categories
- Inclusive Fintech, Technology
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Malware threatens India’s mobile banking revolution
Digital transactions, currently running around 900 billion rupees ($14 billion) a month, are a tempting target for cyberthieves, who have created malware targeting digital banking customers.
- Categories
- Inclusive Fintech, Technology
- Region
- South Asia
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World Economic Forum tackles financial inclusion
"Financial inclusion is at a turning point. Due to advances in technology, the unprecedented advent of transactional and behavioural big data and greater multi stakeholder collaboration, there is a realistic opportunity to reach the financially excluded - estimated to be two billion - and the many more who are underserved", the group says in a report.
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