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Seven Billion: The Real Population Scare Is Not What You Think
The Earth’s resources that underpin our modern lifestyles are deteriorating. This is not to suggest that hard-earned middle class lifestyles must be curbed or that Africans and Asians should be denied the chance to own laptops and iPods. Far from it. Rather, as the middle class grows, business needs to find ways to shrink natural resource use.
- Categories
- Environment, Health Care
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- nutrition
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W/Video Via ViewChange, Oxfam: This World Food Day, Making it Africa’s Last Famine
In 2009, 200 households in the northern Ethiopian farming village Adi Ha enrolled in an Oxfam America program letting them trade work for insurance against draught. This year over 13,000 families in 45 villages enrolled. As draught threatens East Africa, this 1/2 hour documentary from ViewChange and Oxfam shows how investments can break the cycle.
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- Health Care
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- nutrition
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Finding Value in Waste
As the number one exporter of Brazil nuts, Bolivia cultivates approximately 20,000 tons a year. Only 0.8 percent of the Brazil nuts are exported with their shell; the rest are cracked and their nutshells are discarded as waste. But the founders of PelletBol, developed a method to compress the Brazil nutshells into pellets as a source of biofuel.
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- Health Care
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Bolivia’s First Crop Insurance Scheme Promises to Empower Farmers
Natural disasters can come with six-digit figures of damage and debt attached, even in Latin America’s poorest country. Bolivia ’s rural areas, still dependent on rain cycles, are the most financially vulnerable to drought, frost, hail, floods and other weather adversities. Lose your crops, farmers say, and you’re left with nothing but your debts. Luis Alvaro Toledo, who’s wo...
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- Health Care
- Region
- Latin America
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- nutrition
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Updated: The Ugly Truth About Famines
The drought, which spurred the UN to declare a famine for the first time since 1984, has affected the entire Horn of Africa, including much of Kenya, Somalia, Ethiopia, Eritrea and Djibouti. And yet the only areas where the UN has officially declared a "famine" are two pockets of southern Somalia controlled by the al-Shabab militia.
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- Education, Health Care
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Partnerships, Private Sector, Tech Dominate SID
With an international financial system teetering, the Horn of Africa marred by famine, and aid dollars jeopardized by domestic politics, the Society for International Development’s triennial World Congress held in Washington this weekend was in no short supply of substance or imperatives.
- Categories
- Education, Health Care, Technology
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- nutrition, partnerships
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Less Hungry, More Human: A Marketing Perspective to Fighting Malnutrition
As the World Food Programme launches a glitzy new fundraising campaign called A Billion for A Billion, maybe it could learn from P&G’s 3D White Collection, which was the most successful non-foods new product launch in 2011, with over $151 million in sales. While the latter may not be particularly noble, marketers are clearly doing something right.
- Categories
- Health Care, Social Enterprise
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- nutrition, product design
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Quinoa, Dairy, Coffee: Value Chains and Rural Microcredit in Bolivia
Bolivia has grown famous for its 20-year history in microfinance. As part of my research with microfinance group Sembrar Sartawi, I travelled to a number of predominantly poor small towns across Bolivia to better understand how three value chains - quinoa, dairy and coffee production - each defined the ways in which micro-loans are provided.
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- Health Care
- Tags
- nutrition
