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Beyond ‘Africa Rising’ – The Emergence of the Not-Quite-Middle Class
The past five years or so have seen exuberant studies and predictions that Africa’s rapid growth was creating a new middle class that would transform governance and politics – the optimistic story of “Africa Rising.” But what we really see is not a rising middle class but rather a new group that lives on the cusp of poverty, getting by on $2 to $5 a day, and lacking the kinds of assets, job security, purchasing power and stability we associate with middle-class livelihoods.
- Categories
- Social Enterprise
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Weekly Roundup: Foundation Under Fire, Hartigan Remembered and Blockchain Unchained
NB's editors pay their respects to social entrepreneurship pioneer Pamela Hartigan, ponder the future of the Clinton Foundation, discuss blockchain technology's march toward the development sector mainstream, opine on Michael Bloomberg's new role with the World Health Organization, and wonder why, if everyone's talking about "rigorous research," no one is using it?
- Categories
- Health Care, Technology
- Tags
- blockchain, research
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Borrowing and Saving – Not Two Sides of the Same Coin
From a mathematical point of view, borrowing and saving are mirror images. In both cases many small payments allow for one or more large payouts. Only the sequence differs. But after traveling to India and Kenya as part of a research project, we were struck by vast differences in the way people make borrowing and savings decisions - and these have profound implications for financial service providers.
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- Uncategorized
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When Doctors Can’t Reach Sick People in Madagascar, They Send This Medicine-Carrying Drone
Due to the continued use of drone strikes by the military, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are often associated more with ending lives than saving them. That’s a trend researchers at Stony Brook University want to help reverse.
- Categories
- Health Care, Technology
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
- Tags
- research
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How to Help Low-Income People Save for Retirement: Make it Personal
Can personalized information about their pension payouts help lower-income individuals boost the size of their pensions? To find out, Innovations for Poverty Action placed eight publicly accessible computer modules in Chilean government offices, offering information on individuals' retirement savings from the national database. Here's what they found.
- Categories
- Investing
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GSK and Google parent forge $715 million bioelectronic medicines firm
GlaxoSmithKline and Google parent Alphabet's life sciences unit are creating a new company focused on fighting diseases by targeting electrical signals in the body, jump-starting a novel field of medicine called bioelectronics.
- Categories
- Health Care, Technology
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IBM steps up efforts in fight against Zika
International Business Machines said on Wednesday it would provide its technology and resources to help track the spread of the Zika virus. Oswaldo Cruz Foundation (Fiocruz), a leading research institution affiliated with the Brazilian Ministry of Health, plans to use IBM’s technology to analyze information from official data about human travel patterns to anecdotal observations recorded on social media.
- Categories
- Health Care, Technology
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Africa Tops 500m Mobile Users, Adds $150bn To Continent’s Economy
Africa now has half a billion mobile users, and the mobile ecosystem added $153-billion to the African economy in 2015, according to a new GSMA study, which predicts smartphone numbers will triple in the next five years.
- Categories
- Uncategorized
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
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