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Convincing Customers to Buy What’s Best for Them: How Lessons from Clean Cooking Can Increase the Adoption of ‘Merit Goods’
Despite their clear benefits, “merit goods” — products or practices that improve both individual and societal welfare — often struggle to achieve widespread adoption. As Jean-Louis Racine at the Clean Cooking Alliance explains, even when these products and behavior changes offer solutions to pressing social and environmental challenges, traditional marketing approaches often fail to build significant consumer demand for them. He examines the clean cooking sector’s experience in selling cookstoves and fuels to emerging markets customers, highlighting effective strategies that can accelerate consumer uptake of these and other merit goods.
- Categories
- Energy
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Turning Failure into Fuel: An Emerging Learning Platform Aims to Bring the Hidden Challenges in Humanitarian Energy to Light
The humanitarian energy sector is eager to learn from success. But according to clean cooking and energy access researchers Nazifa Rafa, Tash Perros, Iwona Bisaga and Ronan Ferguson, its failures are usually buried in reports or quietly brushed aside, and there's often a disconnect between what’s documented in impact reports and what practitioners experience on the ground. They argue that this dynamic is unsustainable in a sector with high risks, urgent needs and shrinking funding. In response, they share an emerging solution: the Humanitarian Energy Learning Platform, a centralized, inter-donor learning system designed to highlight what’s going wrong in humanitarian energy access, and how practitioners can systematically learn from it.
- Categories
- Energy
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Analysis: The World Bank Group Reorganization: A Retreat from Research Quality?
"In the new model, it appears that the short-term concerns of the World Bank Group’s dealmakers are likely to gain greater influence over analytical and research output, a step back from a “knowledge bank” and towards the model of economist as salesperson all too common at investment banks."
- Categories
- Education, Health Care, Investing
- Region
- Global
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Are Impact Investors Really Listening?: Why Capturing Stakeholder Insights is Key to Impactful Investment Strategies
Collecting data is easy for impact investors; acting on it is harder. As Taanya Khare at Acumen explains, most impact investment firms turn data-driven insights into action through intentional spaces like investment committees or portfolio review sessions. But she argues that listening is about more than surveys or feedback loops — it requires investors to sit down with company teams to make sense of customer insights, identify blind spots and co-create better solutions and impact strategies. She shares what Acumen has learned from embedding listening and impact management into every stage of its investment process.
- Categories
- Investing, Social Enterprise
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Africa is Done Waiting: 10 Key Takeaways from Africa HealthTech Summit 2025
NextBillion was a media partner at last week's Africa HealthTech Summit in Kigali, Rwanda, which focused on the theme: “Connected Care: Scaling Innovation Towards Universal Health Coverage.” NextBillion managing editor James Militzer shares 10 takeaways from the event — and four video interviews with key thought leaders — covering topics that range from the role of the private sector in driving healthtech innovation, to the problem of "pilotitis" and the need for a new narrative around African development.
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- Health Care
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PREO Launches New Report on Interoperability in Electric Mobility at Africa E-Mobility Week
PREO’s report draws on five years of insights from its early-stage investments in electric mobility enterprises.
- Categories
- Energy, Technology
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
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Global AgXelerate Launched to Link Indian Agri-Innovators With International Markets
The platform by AgVaya and BioSTL, supported by ICRIER and FSII, links global startups, investors, and incubators to advance regenerative agriculture solutions.
- Categories
- Agriculture, Technology
- Region
- Asia Pacific
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The Bank of Industry and Bumpa to Empower 200 Youth-led MSMEs
"The collaboration, implemented under the youth and skills thematic area of the bank, aims to address the critical challenge of market access for young entrepreneurs . . . "
- Categories
- Finance, Technology
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
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