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The Best of May on NextBillion: Challenging Assumptions
In May, our most-read posts had a common theme: challenging assumptions. Specifically, we featured voices and counterpoints that ran against the mainstream, both supporting our sector and questioning it. So it seems fitting that we also announce a new staff writer who has dueled conventional wisdom on the subject of BoP marketing and advertising.
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- Education
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Thinking About the Box – Not Just Outside of It
’Think outside of the box’ is one of the most clich?d expressions in English. But when’s the last time we actually defined the box? In her book, Poverty Capital: Microfinance and the Making of Development, Cal-Berkeley Professor Ananya Roy not only defines the dominant boxes of development, but unpacks their paradoxes, hypocrisy, and absurdities.
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What Contests, Soda, and the Internet Have to do With Distributing Solar Power in Tanzania
Angaza, a runner up in the 2010 Harvard Social Enterprise Pitch for Change Competition, is an enterprise aiming to illuminate the world through modular solar home lighting and battery charging systems. Building on success and challenges of others, we studied a broad range of distribution models to avoid challenges that befall many social startups.
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An Emerging Platform: From Money Transfer System to Mobile Money Ecosystem
Mobile money is becoming an infrastructure backbone connecting clients with myriad financial service providers. Our investigation documented over 90 financial institutions - from small MFIs, and savings and credit cooperatives, to large banks and insurers - that are adding mobile money as a service delivery channel; and zero that were not.
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’The Price is Wrong’ (For Some Things) at the BoP
The Jameel Poverty Action Lab’s latest bulletin, "The Price Is Wrong," suggests charging small fees to balance access can dramatically reduce uptake, while raising little revenue. While this seems to contradict the entire development through enterprise agenda, a closer look suggests this view isn’t far from what we already know about BoP markets.
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Charting the Future at Women’s World Banking
In the final post of a wide-ranging interview, Mary Ellen Iskenderian, president and CEO of Women’s World Banking, discusses expansion at the organization to include multi-product servcies to individuals and explains why consolidation in would benefit the microfinance sector in the long term.
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Mobilizing Savings Through Insurance
Mary Ellen Iskenderian, President and CEO of Women’s World Banking, discusses the challenges and opportunities of match-savings programs and micro-insurance, and the importance of understanding clients. In Jordan, WWB is piloting a health insurance program where insurance products are coupled with loans, resulting in strong customer relationships.
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- Health Care
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Can Microfinance Ignite a Good Governance Epidemic?
By serving as examples of effective corporate governance, microfinance providers could succeed where so many financial institutions have failed and in ’infect’ their client and community networks with the ’disease’ of strong corporate governance. With almost 3 billion unbanked people still to reach, those are huge potential networks to infect.
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