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How to Build an Impact Industry: Four Strategies from the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves
Almost 3 billion people worldwide cook with materials that are inefficient, unsustainable and polluting. Since 2010, the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves has sought to make clean stoves and fuels commonplace across the developing world, by building an industry that could deliver this vision. Colm Fay and Ted London at the William Davidson Institute share insights from the Alliance's efforts to catalyze this new industry, breaking down four key stages of acceleration and their lessons for other impact-based accelerators.
- Categories
- Energy, Social Enterprise
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Building Markets, Building Cohesion: Lessons from Last-Mile Deliveries
In 2016, Myanmar was a nation emerging from decades of conflict and isolation. Kopernik, the UNDP and Mercy Corps responded with a pilot program that utilized technology distribution as an avenue to strengthen social cohesion in the country's remote rural communities. Tomohiro Hamakawa and Vanesha Manuturi of Kopernik share development lessons learned from the program — lessons with the potential to benefit other emerging market communities making a comeback from histories of conflict.
- Categories
- Energy, Technology
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Solar Startups Are Plugging Africa’s Energy Gap
Based on current trends, the World Bank predicts that even by 2040 over half a billion people in Sub-Saharan Africa will still lack electricity. Although energy use across sub-Saharan Africa has risen by 45% since 2000, supply has not kept pace with demand.
- Categories
- Energy, Technology
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
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Viewpoint: Impact of digitisation: The new rural reality
Rural India contributes a substantial part of the total net value added in many sectors, with an overall 46% contribution to Indian national income.
- Categories
- Finance, Technology
- Region
- South Asia
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Press release: BBOXX pilots internet service to expand from off-grid electricity to additional utilities
In Rwanda, BBOXX has created internet connections via Wi-Fi Hotspots in a joint venture with Axiom Networks. So far, 10 fixed hotspots, powered by BBOXX solar systems, have been installed for the pilot.
- Source
- Press release
- Categories
- Technology
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
- Tags
- data, rural development
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Playing Drake While Ploughing Dirt: Tech Giants Are Bringing The Internet To Rural India, But Is Data The Price?
HuffPost India met with villagers living near Dholpur, a small town in Rajasthan, where Tata Trusts and Google India have been running a project called 'Internet Saathi' to train rural Indians to use a smartphone to access the Internet.
- Categories
- Technology
- Region
- South Asia
- Tags
- data, rural development
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Reviving India’s Artisans: How a Hybrid Model Helped One Social Enterprise Connect Craft Makers with Consumers
Exploitation in the global garment industry is well-known. But despite the perils of the sector, social enterprise Industree Foundation sees in it an opportunity. The organization provides skills training, safe working conditions and necessary equipment to rural women in Indian villages, bringing sustainable livelihoods to remote areas and time-honored artisan craftsmanship to the wider world. As part of NextBillion's "Course Correction" series, two Industree employees share how the organization overcame challenges of scale and sustainability with a hybrid model of social business.
- Categories
- Social Enterprise
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Meet The Social Entrepreneur Behind Africa’s “Uber For The Farm”
How do you sell agriculture as a meaningful career for young people? Hello Tractor, founded in 2014, is helping illuminate one path: By cutting down on the labor and the drudgery long associated with farming, they’re making it more attractive and more lucrative for the next generation.
- Categories
- Agriculture
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa