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Helping Microfinance Clients to Save: Are Incentives a Solution?
La Ceiba is a microfinance institution that serves low-income clients in rural Honduras, where the combination of distance, cost and knowledge gaps discourages clients from opening and maintaining a savings account. The MFI decided to leverage small incentives and special training to address those challenges; here's how they did it and what they learned along the way.
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- Uncategorized
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Microfinance for Refugee Populations: What We’ve Learned and Where to Go Next
Currently, 21.3 million people are registered with United Nations agencies as refugees, and their financial inclusion has become a matter of importance and urgency. The Social Performance Task Force has been working to identify the refugees' needs and recently compiled some guidelines, “Serving Refugee Populations: The Next Financial Inclusion Frontier,” for financial service providers.
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- Finance
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Tools of the Recycling Trade Include … Tricycles
Lagos has a trash collection problem. A very big one. When Bilikiss Adebiyi-Abiola heard about it, she thought it represented a business opportunity. So she started a recycling firm, Wecyclers, which shuttles recyclable materials from homes to processing centers on a fleet of tricycles. In this Q&A, she talks about how she got the idea and where she hopes to take it.
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- Environment, Social Enterprise
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Can the Mobile Phone Call Youth Back to the Farm?
This post by Christopher Burns and Milani Chatterji-Len, about how mobile phones can offer youth a pathway back to the farm, was October's most popular article. It's the latest entrant in our Most Influential Post of 2016 contest. Please read or re-read the posts and then vote for your favorite(s). Voting ends Jan. 2, and we'll name the winner on Jan. 4.
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- Agriculture, Technology
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The Mobile Trap: How Safaricom and Other MNOs Prey on the Poor
Safaricom and others are "using Premium Rate Services to fleece consumers," writes Wayan Vota. "The development community prides itself on being advocates for the poor, and digital development practitioners have the added responsibility to advocate for cyber-marginalized citizens. We should not be blindly driving women to own and use mobile phones, when those devices will only impoverish them further."
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- Technology
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Next Up for Impact Investing: ‘Solve for Market Demand, Not Investor Preferences’
Pioneers in the impact investing field have always wanted to take the movement mainstream. Well, they're getting there. Attendees at the Global Impact Investing Network's Investor Forum 2016 in Amsterdam, when compared to the 2013 forum in London, included more fund managers, more wealthy family advisors and large foundations, more big money people. Now comes education for the bigger players eager to get involved.
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- Impact Assessment, Investing
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An Opportunity for Small Businesses Expanding Affordable Internet Access: Grant Applications Open
New Sun Road designed, built and operated the first 24/7 metered electricity service on an off-grid island chain in the southern part of Uganda. It's exactly the type of small business – providing a critical service, creating jobs – that Microsoft aims to support with its Affordable Access Initiative. Applications are open for a new round of grants through the initiative, and will be accepted through Jan. 31.
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- Technology
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Indian healthcare groups find a cure for higher growth
Cash-rich Indian hospital groups such as recently listed Narayana Hrudayalaya Ltd. are setting up operations in Africa to tap a growing stream of middle-class patients from the continent seeking quality health care.
- Categories
- Health Care
- Region
- South Asia
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