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Enabling the Business of Recycling: How Innovative Public-Private Partnerships Help to Build Sustainable Cities
Conversations around environmental sustainability often reduce the issue to a false dichotomy: better policies vs. better business practices. But in fact, leveraging both the government and business sectors can provide unique benefits, say Jorge Noguera at Mastercard and Caleb Shreve at Global Fairness Initiative. They explore the impact of an innovative public-private partnership linking city governments in Peru with a network of waste-pickers to deliver recycling services to households and businesses.
- Categories
- Environment, Social Enterprise
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The Vanishing American Dream: The Long Road to Financial Stability
The American economy is growing. Unemployment is down, incomes are inching up and the days of the Great Recession are but a distant memory... except for one thing: A shocking 57 percent of the country—approximately 138 million Americans—are struggling to make ends meet. Jennifer Tescher of the Center for Financial Services Innovation and Tilman Ehrbeck of Omidyar Network say the time to address this crisis is now. They share some promising innovations – and a new research tool – that could help.
- Categories
- Finance
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Ready for a Fight: Behind a Company’s Long Record of Activist Green Giving
With marketing trends driving more brands to embrace political causes, Patagonia’s past couple of years could be mistaken for a masterful PR campaign. But the company’s history shows its activism is no stunt.
- Categories
- Environment
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The Donor-Funded Dilemma: What’s Stopping Emerging Countries from Developing Private Markets for Contraceptives?
In sub-Saharan Africa, the private sector provides family planning solutions to almost 40 percent of women. But that isn’t the case in Malawi, a country that’s long been dominated by donor-funded commodities. Erika Beidelman and Andrea Bare at the William Davidson Institute explore Malawi's family planning landscape, highlighting five factors that may be limiting the private sector’s involvement – issues that may apply to other countries with histories of donor-funded healthcare.
- Categories
- Health Care
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Nigeria’s Central Bank could hamstring local fintech startups with costly new regulation
In a draft policy document, CBN recognized products by fintech companies are “gaining acceptance” but argued their emergence would heighten existing risks in the financial system.
- Categories
- Finance
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
- Tags
- fintech, public policy, regulations, startups
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Africa’s secret weapon for economic growth and global development
Evidence shows that family planning is essential to lower maternal and infant mortality. Although both have decreased in the past decades, still today over 300,000 women and girls die in childbirth or from pregnancy-related complications, including unsafe abortions.
- Categories
- Health Care
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
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Zimbabwe to review mobile money tax after backlash
Using official 2017 statistics on total mobile money transaction value, the tax hike increases government takings from the service by almost ten times.
- Categories
- Finance
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
- Tags
- fintech, public policy
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The Missing Link in the Blockchain: The Need for Trust in a ‘Trustless’ System
Blockchain has become the ultimate tech buzzword, and development organizations are seeking to apply it in projects of every stripe. But as Rose Davis discovered in researching the technology’s social impact applications for Stanford, reliable digital identification is an essential precursor to many blockchain initiatives. Does a distributed ledger that has supposedly transcended the need for centralized oversight actually require some form of verification from trustworthy authorities? And if so, who should provide it? Davis explores these questions in this thought-provoking post.
- Categories
- Technology
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