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The Future of the Graduation Approach: Taking a Proven Anti-Poverty Measure to Scale
How can the "graduation" approach to fighting extreme poverty achieve a scale commensurate with extreme poverty itself? Increasingly, the answer is to embed graduation within government-run social protection programs that already operate at massive scale. MetLife Foundation's Krishna Thacker explores why the approach works, and how innovative organizations are taking it to the next level.
- Categories
- Education
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Research as a catalyst to grow technology clusters in Africa
Africa’s poor standing mirrors an unfortunate reality that has seen research and development given less importance, both in building scalable products or an active technology community.
- Categories
- Technology
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
- Tags
- innovation, research
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Lessons Learned Using Mobile Tools to Compile Financial Diary Data
Financial diary methodology is a powerful tool for studying financial inclusion, especially if digital tools are used. Using a mobile data collection and analysis app (which also worked offline) and a cloud-hosted database, Catholic Relief Services drew household data from rural areas in real time and amassed thousands of data points generated by tracking people’s financial lives each week.
- Categories
- Finance, Technology
- Tags
- data, financial inclusion, fintech, research
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Beyond ‘Pilotitis’: Three Critical Success Factors for National Digital Health Strategies
The ecosystem of digital health solutions and programs remains disjointed and many countries are moving toward the complex task of implementing national strategies to coordinate this fragmentation. A new report highlights eight countries that are effectively developing and implementing national digital health strategies, and finds three common success factors.
- Categories
- Health Care, Technology
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Africa as a Hotbed for Innovation: Technology Providing New Ways to Look at Age-Old Problems
Intellecap’s latest research explores how emerging technologies can trigger a set of big shifts in Africa over the next decade, and how innovators and enterprises there can leverage these shifts to help address the continent’s mega-challenges in a variety of sectors, including agriculture, financial services, health care, education, energy and water.
- Categories
- Social Enterprise, Technology
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A radical view for the age of superbugs: Don’t fight infections. Learn to live with them
Scientists have focused for decades on the how the immune system battles pathogens. Janelle Ayres believes other elements of our physiology are at least as important — so she’s hunting for the beneficial bacteria that seem to help some patients maintain a healthy appetite and repair damaged tissue even during bouts of serious disease.
- Categories
- Health Care
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Why Do Social Enterprises Fail? New Research Reveals Three Reasons (And Some Surprises)
In a recent study by the Failure Institute – the research arm of F*ckUp Nights, a global movement that aims to break the stigma around business failure – social entrepreneurs in Mexico gave three primary reasons why their businesses failed: a lack of resources and infrastructure; insufficient public policy support; and a dysfunctional board of directors. F*ckUp Nights' director discusses these and other findings.
- Categories
- Social Enterprise
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Why Low-Income Families Don’t Send Their Children to College. Hint: It’s Not Always About Money.
Household income is not the only limiting factor as to why children of low to upper-low income families do not attend or save for university. Significant behavioral reasons are also involved, and ESCALA, which helps families save for higher education, worked with BFA’s customer insights team to identify and develop a plan to help overcome a few of them.
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