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Beyond the Metros: Exploring Western and Southern India’s Jaipur, Pune and Thiruvananthapuram
Villgro’s Unconvention|L team and Okapi Research, which are visiting nine tier III cities in India to map regional social enterprise ecosystems and outline highlights and insights. In today’s post they focus on Western and Southern Indian towns Jaipur, Pune and Trivandrum.
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- Uncategorized
- Tags
- incubators, scale
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Major donors launch new fund to support innovation
For some time now, major bilateral donors have been working independently to fund innovations and support startups, but a group of them announced Tuesday a new fund where they will pool capital to spur creative, pioneering interventions to tackle global development challenges.
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- Uncategorized
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Nepal’s entrepreneurs healing blindness among poor
Many villagers are not aware of how easily cataract can be treated or cured," said Suraj Shrestha, CEO at Anthropose, a Nepal-based enterprise. "The thing that appalls me the most is how people superstitiously believe that cataract is a curse from God. This needs to change," the entrepreneur told Xinhua on Sunday.
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- Environment, Health Care
- Region
- South Asia
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The Trouble With Dirt: Floors can make people sick, so EarthEnable’s founders came up with a market-based solution, but are still testing models
Dirt floors in the developing world make people sick. Replacing those floors with concrete isn’t the answer, as it is prohibitively expensive. EarthEnable’s solution: locally sourced, earthen floors that are 75 percent cheaper than the concrete alternative.
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- Education, Health Care
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‘The Next Frontier of Financial Services’ (Part 2): Why some m-insurance models have more upside than others, according to BFA’s Jeremy Leach
"The (m-insurance models) that look best are the loyalty and ‘freemium’ models at this stage, primarily because consumers need the market-making capabilities of experiencing their product first, before they are willing to pay for it," says Jeremy Leach of BFA, in the second of a two-part series on microinsurance. He explores the risks and benefits of m-insurance in this Q&A.
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- Technology
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‘The Next Frontier of Financial Services’ (Part 1): Jeremy Leach, director at Bankable Frontier Associates, discusses microinsurance’s potential and challenges
Insurers have traditionally steered clear of the base of the pyramid, for a variety of reasons. But that’s changing, says Jeremy Leach of Bankable Frontier Associates, who sees insurance as the "next frontier of financial services." We discuss the state of the sector, and the challenges and opportunities it faces in serving the BoP, in part one of this Q&A.
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- Technology
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NexThought Monday – The Affordable Housing Puzzle: Three pilot projects in India aim to assemble the pieces –customers, financing and scale
Can the low-cost or affordable housing segment business in fact be profitable, and more importantly, scalable? asks housing developer and researcher Dhaval Monani. He points to new pilot projects that show promise in delivering safe, very low-cost homes that come with a profit for developers.
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Sustainable Access to Safe Drinking Water and Sanitation: Lessons learned from market-based approaches in India
After working with a number of key players in the water and sanitation business, the author, Urvashi Prasad, has compiled a list of factors that could enable for-profit players to fulfill the dual objectives of making profits and doing social good by bringing essential services to people who need them the most.
- Categories
- Agriculture, Health Care
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