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Scaling Biodigesters: How Appropriate Financing Can Help This Undervalued Technology Deliver Social and Environmental Impact
Biodigesters break down organic material to produce biogas for cooking and heating, along with fertilizer. But though these applications are extremely useful for farming households, uptake remains limited: In Africa alone, the technology could be adopted by almost 33 million households, but market penetration is less than 1% of that. Tanya Kothari of the Catalysing Agriculture by Scaling Energy Ecosystems program shares a recent study from the Shell Foundation exploring the impact biodigesters can make, while identifying the kinds of financing that could support growth in the market.
- Categories
- Agriculture, Energy
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Press Release: Convergence Provides Funding to Protect Critical Habitat and Advance Sustainable Agriculture in Indonesia
Convergence awards a feasibility study grant to the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) to develop a blended finance solution in Indonesia that increases access to credit and training for smallholder coffee farmers to engage in sustainable agriculture
- Categories
- Agriculture
- Region
- South Asia
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Kenyan Foodtech Startup Kune Raises $1 Million Pre-Seed for Its Ready-to-Eat Meals Service
Kenyan foodtech startup Kune has announced that it has closed a $1 million pre-seed round to launch its on-demand food service in August.
- Categories
- Technology
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
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South African Partnership Gets $3 Million and Launches Telehealth Product
A new platform is launching out of South Africa and it wants to provide accessible quality care for Africans with its telehealth service.
- Categories
- Health Care, Technology
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
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Agritech Supplant Raises $10 Million to Accelerate South African Agriculture Growth
SupPlant, a leading precision agriculture hardware-software solution, has announced its recent funding round, raising $10-million partially dedicated to accelerating its penetration into the South African Market.
- Categories
- Agriculture, Investing, Technology
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
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Analysis: Can Agricultural Insurance Help Guarantee Post-Pandemic Food Security?
In a world in which radical climatic events are increasingly affecting farm production, agricultural insurance is coming to be seen as a key solution for producers to bolster economic and food security.
- Categories
- Agriculture, Coronavirus, Finance
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
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Below the Tip of the Iceberg: Why Systems Change is the Key to Scaling Innovations and Solving Development Challenges
In recent years there has been an increased focus on systems change in the development sector, in response to growing awareness of how underlying systemic causes are perpetuating many global challenges. María Boa-Alvarado at CIMMYT, Lennart Woltering at One CGIAR and Marcos Sanjuán at CRS-El Salvador discuss the benefits of this approach, as applied to the issue of land degradation in Central America. They explore how their organizations are using a systems thinking tool, the iceberg model, to better understand the root causes of this problem – and to provide lasting solutions.
- Categories
- Agriculture, Environment, Technology
- Tags
- innovation, scale, systems change
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Learning From India: How Low- and Middle-Income Countries Can Scale up Access to Oxygen During a COVID-19 Surge
The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the crucial importance of medical oxygen. And as India has shown, it has also revealed health systems’ limitations in supplying it – and the global supply chain’s inability to respond to the massive need that can arise during a crisis. PATH has worked for the past five years to sustainably improve access to oxygen in low- and middle-income countries. Analysts at the organization explore the current oxygen crisis in India, and share lessons that can help other countries avoid similar shortfalls if they experience their own COVID-19 surges.
- Categories
- Coronavirus, Health Care, Transportation
- Tags
- COVID-19, scale, supply chains