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The World Bank Is Still Loving Its Blockchain-Powered Bonds
The World Bank’s blockchain-based bond wasn’t just a one-hit wonder.
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Clean vs. ‘Clean Enough’: How the Clean Cooking Industry Can Overcome its Struggles to Scale
Access to clean cookstoves and fuels has only increased by 0.5% per year, well below all global development goals. To turn this trajectory around, Jessica Alderman at Envirofit International argues that the industry needs to resolve a high-stakes debate: Should it focus only on the cleanest solutions that have the greatest health and environmental impacts? Or should it fund and promote technologies that have lesser impacts - but that are more affordable and likelier to reach the people who need them most?
- Categories
- Energy, Health Care, Technology
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UNDP and Samsung Unveil Global Goals Partnership
Samsung Galaxy phones will carry the Global Goals app that defines each of the 17 goals showing users how they can take small actions towards achieving the SDGs.
- Categories
- Technology
- Tags
- global development, SDGs
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Think Big: Behind a Push to Unlock Billions in New “Catalytic” Capital for Global Development
The Global Impact Investing Network’s (GIIN) 2018 Impact Investor Survey shows a diverse and growing market. But the survey also finds a “particularly” wide gap in “appropriate capital across the risk/return spectrum.” Of the $288 billion in impact investment assets today, only 5 percent are allocated below market.
- Categories
- Investing
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Viewpoint: Africa Doesn’t Need More Development Aid, It Needs More Capitalism
In Asia, the fight against poverty and hunger has been so effective because so many Asian countries have implemented capitalist reforms. In China alone— thanks to the partial introduction of private property rights and free-market economics—the proportion of people living in extreme poverty has fallen from 88% in 1981 to below 1% today.
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
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With So Many Financial Instruments Out There – When and How to do Results-Based Financing
The field of results-based financing has taken root, and several new mechanisms have sprouted – from humanitarian impact bonds to outcomes funds. But while development impact bonds and their many variations are getting attention, too many organizations are working backwards to fit them into a particular program or context, write Kate Sturla and Ellen Anderson at IDinsight. They suggest three questions foundations, investors and intermediaries should ask to first diagnose their objectives, then select the right instruments to meet them.
- Categories
- Investing
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Solar Water Pumps Have Been Around Since the 1970s: Here’s Why They Haven’t Scaled
Solar water pumps, which have been around for years, are becoming far more affordable thanks to declining solar panel prices and new business models – particularly for the roughly 500 million smallholder farmers worldwide. So why isn’t the industry taking off? Makena Ireri and Jenny Corry Smith of CLASP, a group of 14 donor organizations working to scale markets and reduce the prices of off-grid technologies, present several reasons. They explore solutions for making solar irrigation systems a priority in the off-grid conversation.
- Categories
- Energy
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Viewpoint: The World Needs A Vast Portfolio Of Solutions To Match Our Portfolio Of Problems
The reality is helping people and the environment to overcome their challenges is complex.
- Categories
- Investing