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Find Good Partners and Don’t Quit: Lessons from a Water-Ag Innovator
Bart A.J. de Jonge and Si Technologies came up with a way to protect farmers around the world and their crops against increasingly common droughts that devastate local communities. He wanted to get the product in the hands of hands of millions of subsistence farmers quickly, but it took years, for a variety of reasons. Here, he offers advice to other social entrepreneurs, including this: "Change is a long haul, but don’t give up."
- Categories
- Agriculture
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Contest For Biz Students Is All About Umbilical Cords
Business students are used to thinking about how to sell a new shampoo or a new app for a phone. Last week they were asked to put their strategic brains to another use: Figuring out the best way to convince health workers and new parents in Nigeria to apply a potentially life-saving antiseptic to the baby's umbilical cord stump.
- Categories
- Health Care
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For refugee camps, a waterless toilet to improve health and safety
Now, an MIT spinout, change:WATER Labs (is) developing a compact, evaporative toilet for homes without power or plumbing. Because sewage is mostly water, it’s possible to rapidly vaporize it, eliminating up to 95 percent of daily sewage volumes.
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- Health Care
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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.
- Categories
- 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.
- Categories
- 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."
- Categories
- Technology