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Practical Progress Via the ’Opportunity Collaboration’
In October, the Opportunity Collaboration convened a group of 300 social investors and entrepreneurs to generate a strong cross-pollination of ideas and action for poverty reduction. In a recent interview, Founder and CEO Jonathan C. Lewis provided an update on the OC’s impact and shared some unvarnished views on the state of microfinance.
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- Impact Assessment
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Targeting the Ultra Poor: The Sustainable Agriculture Puzzle in India?s Most-Destitute State
Continuing our series showcasing the challenges faced by the "ultra poor," and new approaches that differ from traditional poverty alleviation interventions - this post examines the Network for Enterprise Enhancement and Development Support, a nonprofit that works in one of India’s poorest and most natural resource-rich states, Jharkhand.
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- Agriculture
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Break No Promises
With $500 million and marching orders from the Gates Foundation, banks, microfinance institutions, mobile phone operators, regulators, retailers, and telecom companies, will now venture into a world filled with informal financial mechanisms, often deeply embedded in culture and history. Will these informal mechanisms be brought along or trampled?
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- Uncategorized
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Forum Looks at BoP in Brazil
Tomorrow in S?o Paulo, Brazil, NextBillion along with several other stakeholders, will participate an event on "Modelos De Negocios Que Reduzem a Pobreza" or for the non-Portuguese speaker, Business Models that Reduce Poverty. I briefly spoke with Rob Parkison, Coordinator for ANDE’s Brazil Regional Hub and organizer of the event.
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- Uncategorized
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Sustainable Employment: A Necessary Intervention for the Poor
The global rate for extreme poverty is projected to be 15% in 2015, down significantly from 42% in 1990. Still, the International Day for the Eradication of Poverty, is a call to explore all possible approaches to stabilize the volatile lives of the poor.
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- Environment
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Voices From the Skoll World Forum Opening Plenary
The opening plenary at the Skoll World Forum had numerous themes and Twitter-perfect quotes, but to me one of the most important threads that ran through the evening was the importance of giving individuals a voice to help themselves out of conflict, abject poverty, and the effects of natural disaster.
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- Social Enterprise
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Big Corporations Try to Tap a Market They Have Ignored
The world’s biggest corporations are scrambling to tap a market they have largely ignored for decades - the world’s four billion poor people. From South Africa to Brazil, companies like Danone and Unilever sell individual packets of yogurt and soap in rural villages and urban open-air markets. In the telecommunications sector, the biggest growth area is among the poor, who are snapping up cellphones. Some 60 percent of the world’s population exists on less than ...
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- Investing
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Cornell students help corporations and Kenya’s poor build business partnerships
Kibera in Nairobi, Kenya, is one of East Africa’s largest slums and the setting for the recent film The Constant Gardener, which presents images of grinding poverty, tempered by people’s spirit of endurance. A story of another kind is also unfolding in Kibera and in Nyota township in rural Kenya -- one in which a multinational corporation assumes the unlikely role of business partner to poo...