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Kiva Co-founder on the Future of Microfinance
Jessica Jackley has had her hands full since stepping away from Kiva, the peer-to-peer microlender she co-founded in 2005. Between investing in startups through the Collaborative Fund; launching ProFounder, a crowdfunding site for entrepreneurs and small businesses; and consulting with companies to improve their social impact, the popular TED talker has also managed to give birth to three children. And she has a new book, Clay Water Brick: Finding Inspiration From Entrepreneurs Who Do the Most with the Least.
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- Uncategorized
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- crowdfunding, microfinance
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Zidisha Helps Connect Lenders With Entrepreneurs in Developing Countries
Zidisha is a non-profit startup that acts as an online microlending community connecting lenders with entrepreneurs no matter the distance or disparity. As of right now, Zidisha allows individuals worldwide to lend to tech-savvy entrepreneurs in the slums of Africa and Asia where even a few dollars can go a long way. Over 20,000 people are using Zidisha today. Recently, I spoke with Zidisha founder and CEO Julia Kurnia to learn more about the company.
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- Uncategorized
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- lending, microfinance
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How Companies Should Respond As Social Business Goes Global
Social business has been known as a systemically defined business practice for tackling poverty and is blossoming in every corner of the globe including China, the world’s second largest economy.
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- Uncategorized
- Region
- South Asia
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Measuring Client Health Outcomes Using Simple Indicators: Data collection is the easy part; the next test is helping organizations analyze, interpret
The Microcredit Summit Campaign is hoping financial services providers and others will use the “health outcome performance indicators” (HOPI) to assess the health and well-being of clients and their families, and believes wide usage of the HOPI could create short- and long-term value for practitioners, social investors and donors, raters and other actors.
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- Health Care, Impact Assessment
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A Light in the Darkness
Some mountainous parts of Mexico are so remote that the electricity grid fails to reach them, let alone the banking system. A five-year-old social enterprise, Iluméxico, hopes to change that. It provides more than 20,000 people with loans to buy low-cost solar panels and batteries, enabling them to switch lights on, watch television and charge mobile phones, sometimes for the first time.
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- Energy
- Region
- Latin America
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The Most Popular Posts for May : Details, details, details
Looking at the blog posts receiving the most page views in May, it’s clear that our readers also like to sweat the details, as three exceptionally detailed (yet extraordinarily readable) posts topped our readers’ favorites.
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- Energy
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- microfinance, solar
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Press Release: FINCA Surpasses $1 Million in Loans to Microenterprise and Small Businesses in Nigeria in First Six Months
FINCA's newest subsidiary, FINCA Microfinance Bank Ltd. in Nigeria, surpassed USD 1 million in small loans to microenterprise and small business owners within its first six months of operation, it was announced today by President & CEO Rupert Scofield during his remarks at the Spring meeting of the Financial Inclusion Equity Council (FIEC), hosted this year by FINCA at its headquarters building in Washington, DC.
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- Uncategorized
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
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- lending, microfinance
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Is There Finally Some Movement on the Pressing Challenge of Microinsurance?
More market players are stepping into the microinsurance arena - if this trend continues, the role of philanthropy in this space may become less and less critical.
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- Uncategorized
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