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A New How-To Guide Chronicles Food and Water Innovators
It's challenging enough to start a business in mature markets, but just try running one in a rural community in a developing country with poor roads and customers who can't pay you. “Innovator Guidebook: Navigating Business Models for the Base of the Pyramid in Water and Energy for Food," highlights lessons from innovators funded by the five-year Securing Water for Food Grand Challenge. The online resource was unveiled today at SOCAP.
- Categories
- Agriculture, Education, Energy, Entrepreneurship, Technology
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A Roadmap to Food Security: Linking Geodata with Financial Inclusion to Support Smallholders
Smallholder farmers produce a staggering 70 percent of the world’s food, making them essential to food security. Geodata applications have been shown to improve these farmers’ yields and even boost their financial access – one of the main obstacles to increasing production. To help tap into these benefits, NpM’s Innovator’s Challenge brought together 17 tech companies with geodata-based solutions for smallholder financial inclusion. NpM director Josien Sluijs discusses the winning companies, and the broader potential of geodata-based innovation.
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- Agriculture, Finance, Technology
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Refrigeration Off the Grid: An Innovative Solution to Food Spoilage for the Billions Without Electricity
Home refrigerators, essential appliances in much of the world, remain out of reach to over one billion people who, as social entrepreneur Quang Truong puts it, must plan their lives around eating rather than vice versa. Without access to reliable grid energy, families are not just inconvenienced – they’re also contributing to climate change as their rotting foods emit greenhouse gasses. In this post, part of our “Offline Innovation” series, Truong puts the spotlight on his Fenik Yuma cooler, which solves this dilemma through low-tech evaporative cooling.
- Categories
- Energy, Technology
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Low Tech, High Impact: An Affordable, Hand-Powered Innovation Aims to Boost Food Production in Africa
For many global development players, high-tech innovations are the go-to solution for challenges in emerging markets. But according to Taylor Quinn of JUST, Inc., low-tech approaches can be even smarter. He discusses the promising potential of locally made and hand-powered machines in emerging economy value chains, and explores how JUST is using one such device to improve food security, increase access to quality nutrition and promote entrepreneurship in Liberia.
- Categories
- Entrepreneurship, Technology
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This Agricultural Guide On A Phone Helps Increase Developing-World Farmers’ Yields
“A lot of smallholder farmers are very poor and they wait until it’s too late because they don’t want to spend the money,” says Leesa Shrader, who leads work on DigiFarm for Mercy Corps, one of several groups developing the platform. “The cow dies and they’ve lost an $800 asset, which can be devastating to the families. With DigiFarm, they can pull the training when they want it.”
- Categories
- Agriculture, Technology
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
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We know how food production needs to change if crisis is to be avoided—so why isn’t this happening?
With the global population to reach 9 billion in decades, global food systems must change in order to feed the planet. Is agroecology the solution?
- Categories
- Agriculture, Environment
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Kenyan agri-tech startup Taimba wins $10k at SXSW
Kenyan startup Taimba, which connects farmers to retailers, was one of three winners of the 2018 Food+City Challenge Prize at the recent SXSW event, taking home US$10,000 in prize money.
- Categories
- Agriculture, Technology
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
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Rethinking Food Security By Re-inventing the Cold Storage Chain
In developing countries, 40 percent of food losses occur after harvest and early on in the supply chain, leading to more than 250 million tons of food waste annually — mostly because of inadequate refrigeration and unreliable and expensive energy supply. Paula Rodriguez at InspiraFarms discusses the problem – and the company's innovative solution.
- Categories
- Agriculture, Entrepreneurship, Technology
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