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After the Grant Ends: Why Rural Water Utilities Fail — And What We Learned from Building One
For decades, rural water projects in low- and middle-income countries have followed a familiar pattern: Infrastructure is built, communities are trained, a ribbon is cut — and within a few years, the system stops working. After leading the early operations of Max TapWater, a social enterprise providing piped water in rural Bangladesh, Saif Islam identified a fundamental reason for these failures: Investment continues to prioritize capital infrastructure over the operational and maintenance budget needed to sustain it. He explores this challenge, and shares other lessons he has learned about how rural water facilities can sustain operations beyond the grant period.
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Analysis: Beyond the Signal: Why Africa’s Next Telecom Era Will Be Built Beneath the Surface
The subsea cable buildout underway represents the most significant transformation in the continent’s digital infrastructure since mobile telephony arrived in the 1990s. But capacity without distribution remains an abstraction; redundancy without policy coordination remains a vulnerability.
- Categories
- Technology, Telecommunications
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
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Visible From Space: New Research on Zipline’s Impact in Africa Beyond Healthcare
The findings document a 22% reduction in child fatalities from severe acute malnutrition, a 68% direct return on investment for smallholder pig farmers, and $850 to $1,200 in additional annual household income near Zipline distribution hubs.
- Categories
- Health Care, Technology
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
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Grant Dependency is Undermining Global Development: Here’s a Fundamentally New Architecture for Funding NGOs
Across the Global South, NGOs often function as the default conduits for addressing key development challenges in remote and marginalized populations. But as long-time development sector advisor Rajat Ray argues, these systemic problems cannot be solved by organizations that are perpetually teetering on the edge of financial suffocation, propped up by short-term, project-based grants. He explains how the survival tactics NGOs adopt to navigate this funding dilemma end up warping their operations and perpetuating some of the sector's biggest shortcomings. In response, he proposes an entirely new funding model — the “Diminishing Grant Framework” — that treats self-reliance not as an aspiration, but as a mandatory financial milestone.
- Categories
- Investing
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The Keys to Successful Blue Bonds: How Peru’s Strong Local Lending Systems Are Expanding Water and Sanitation Access
For millions of Peruvian families, one barrier stands between them and safe water and sanitation at home: access to affordable financing. Yet as Rocio Cavazos at Water.org explains, the financial institutions serving these communities face their own barrier: limited access to lower-cost capital. She discusses Water.org's efforts to support Peru’s two successful blue bond issuances, exploring how these bonds can allow lenders to offer more affordable loans for water and sanitation solutions — and sharing lessons from Peru's experience that can be applied by blue bonds in other markets.
- Categories
- Environment, Finance, Investing, WASH
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How to Support Rural Social Enterprises: Three Key Learnings from a Field Visit in Malaysia
While global media coverage of the social enterprise sector often focuses on countries like India and Kenya, Malaysia remains relatively underrepresented in these conversations. Yet as Sreevas Sahasranamam at the University of Glasgow explains, the country has developed rich models of social innovation deeply rooted in indigenous knowledge systems, ecological stewardship and local resilience. He shares three key learnings from five community-led ventures, each of which demonstrates how practitioners and policymakers can best support rural social enterprises — not only in Malaysia, but globally.
- Categories
- Social Enterprise
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Press Release: IFAD and Government of India Launch Eight-Year Roadmap to Expand Investments and Scale Incomes in Rural Areas
The new Country Strategic Opportunities Programme sets two strategic objectives: enhancing the social, economic and climatic resilience of rural communities; and strengthening the knowledge systems that enable proven models to be scaled domestically and shared across the Global South.
- Categories
- Agriculture
- Region
- Asia Pacific
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Analysis: Powering Peace: Can Renewable Energy Help End Africa’s Conflicts?
Conflict is now at its highest level since World War II, driven by the breakdown of the international rules-based system, climate degradation, inequality, and demographic pressure—forces that are particularly acute across sub-Saharan Africa.
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
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