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AmEx Pushes Tech to Bank the Unbanked
America's unbanked and underbanked spent $78 billion on fees and interest in 2011; $30 billion in overdraft fees. Meanwhile, 93% of branch closures over the last five years have been in low-income neighbourhoods.
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This Social Enterprise Runs A Global Crowd-funding Platform; Eyes $3-5 Million In Series B Funding
Welcome to Milaap Social Ventures, a social enterprise operating from Bangalore and Singapore, which has developed an online crowd-funding platform to help the unbanked and the underprivileged masses in India. Simply put, Milaap (it means 'connecting together' in Hindi) offers an RBI-approved micro-lending platform that allows the organisation to receive 'loans' from all over the world.
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Digital survey could change global impact investing priorities
Impact investing is all about meeting needs. It places capital in businesses that provide human essentials such as water, power, food, education and healthcare. At the same time, it helps meet the needs of the planet and its non-human inhabitants by fostering business approaches that protect ecosystems and conserve natural resources.
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- Impact Assessment
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Women in Kenya stay united to reap benefits from micro-loans
Women in Kenya are reaping huge from micro-lending institutions because of their ability to form groups and stay united. The women, majority who are in groups commonly known as chamas, are the biggest beneficiaries of micro-loans in the East African nation.
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US Foundation Endowments – A Missing Piece to Maximizing Impact
A handful of foundations leverage their shares in public equity investments to directly engage the companies they hold in their portfolios.
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- Impact Assessment
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Matching capital with ‘space’ in unlocking Nigeria’s microinsurance potential
Nigeria prepares to unlock its microinsurance potential given the country’s huge population of 170 million people and a demographic structure leaning towards the mass poor.
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- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
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Digitizing Savings Circles for the Base of the Pyramid: Bringing a centuries-old concept into the digital age
Traditional savings circles have existed in different forms for centuries, and are popular in immigrant communities in the U.S. and emerging markets around the world. Accion Venture Lab discusses how the Internet and social media are allowing companies to formalize and digitize them to make them more accessible to a greater number of people.
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World Bank postpones Uganda loan over anti-gay law
The World Bank on Thursday postponed a $90 million loan to Uganda's health system over a law that toughened punishment for gays, an unusual move for an institution that typically avoids wading into politics.
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- Health Care