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Entrepreneurship is a Skill, Not a Talent: The Power of the Group-Based Graduation Model
Village Enterprise implements a cost-effective, group-based, one-year graduation program for rural Africans who live on less than $1.90 per day. The organization believes that entrepreneurship is not just for the naturally business-minded, it's a skill like leadership or teamwork that can be fostered and learned. Its aim, therefore, is to unlock the potential of those who are entrepreneurs by nature and instill the skills of entrepreneurship in those who are not.
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- Social Enterprise
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From Extremely Poor to Entrepreneur: A Starter Asset Combined with Mentorship Forges Pathway Out of Poverty
Today Arfa Bibi runs a successful vegetable farming business in India. Only a few years ago, however, Bibi and her husband struggled to feed their family and she even resorted to begging. Her transformation into entrepreneur came thanks to Kolkata-based nonprofit Bandhan-Konnagar's graduation model program Targeting the Hardcore-Poor, whose success was cited in a six-country MIT study of 21,000 of the world's poorest people.
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- Agriculture
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The Future of the Graduation Approach: Taking a Proven Anti-Poverty Measure to Scale
How can the "graduation" approach to fighting extreme poverty achieve a scale commensurate with extreme poverty itself? Increasingly, the answer is to embed graduation within government-run social protection programs that already operate at massive scale. MetLife Foundation's Krishna Thacker explores why the approach works, and how innovative organizations are taking it to the next level.
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- Education
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Rural Knowledge Meets Tech Innovation: What Ultra-Poor Entrepreneurs Can Teach the World
What happens when Barefoot College, a global NGO which trains entrepreneurs in poverty-stricken rural areas, melds its expertise and values with tech innovators like Apple? It sparks the emergence of a new kind of entrepreneur who has much to teach the world, says Scot Bolsinger – along with new opportunities for rural communities to share and connect in ways never before possible.
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- Education, Technology
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Surviving a Pandemic: How ‘Economic Training’ Helps Families Live Beyond HIV/AIDS
Millions of households are struggling to support children affected by HIV/AIDS. A new approach seeks to ease their burden by integrating economic strengthening activities into programs that already serve orphans and vulnerable children and their extended families. It involves training practitioners with new skill sets, so they in turn can help others develop financial independence and resilience.
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- Health Care
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Digital Tools for Impact and Scale to Reduce Extreme Poverty
Ana Pantelic writes that Fundación Capital is using tablet-based applications and e-learning platforms to change the way that families living in extreme poverty – and the program mentors who work with them – access information and build local capacity. By integrating digital solutions into its work, the organization has improved and standardized the quality of training, and as a result, scaled national responses to eliminating poverty.
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- Education, Technology
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Peer Mentorships Helping Colombia Write Its Next Chapter
Peer learning provides mutually beneficial relationships that advance the knowledge and well-being of all participants. In the second post in our series on the Graduation model of alleviating poverty, Fundación Capital explores the power of local peer mentors in supporting the income-generation projects of individuals affected by the violence in Colombia.
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- Education
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Second-Generation Graduation: New Ways to Scale a Proven Anti-Poverty Model
This post, the first in a series by Fundación Capital exploring the Graduation strategy as a way to pull people out of extreme poverty, looks at how the concept is evolving. With more governments investing in Graduation, and more technological tools being applied, Tatiana Rincon suggests that "we stand at the edge of change that could lead to a world without poverty."
- Categories
- Education