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Nexthought Monday – Fertilizer as Both Friend AND Foe: How to use them more responsibly, effectively and for farmers – profitably
More than 100 million tons of fertilizers are applied worldwide each year, supplying our planet with plentiful harvests. But that’s only part of the story. At Semilla Nueva, we have a lot of interest in how fertilizers can be used responsibly and sustainably to feed our growing planet and boost farmers’ incomes in the process.
- Categories
- Agriculture, Social Enterprise
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Three Steps to Jumpstart Agriculture Mobile Payments: Step 3 – Overcoming farmers’ illiteracy, financial illiteracy and lack of trust
In the third and final post in his series on embedding mobile payments by large buyers to farmers into agricultural value chains, Lee Babcock considers the need to overcome farmers’ illiteracy, financial illiteracy and, perhaps most importantly, lack of trust.
- Categories
- Agriculture
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Three Steps to Jumpstart Mobile Finance: Step 1 – Researching smallholders’ financial behavior to help them transition to mobile payments
It’s becoming increasingly clear that cash payment schemes are obsolete in the 21st century, says Lee Babcock. And in agriculture, there’s a growing recognition that enabling digital payments to smallholders is a huge opportunity, both for farmers and the mobile finance sector. In this three-part series, Babcock lays out three steps for embedding mobile money into agriculture development at the BoP.
- Categories
- Agriculture
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Chocolate at Risk?: Why sustainable finance is crucial to ensuring a steady cocoa supply for the world’s chocolate industry
Smallholder cocoa farmers in Côte d’Ivoire produce 40 percent of the world cocoa supply. Yet the vast majority still live in poverty due to declining productivity, and in the absence of long-term financing opportunities, many have been changing to other crops. Rainforest Alliance’s Helen Roy describes how socially-minded investors are mobilizing capital to help these farmers revive their land.
- Categories
- Agriculture, Environment
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In Coffee, Avoiding ‘Great’ Being the Enemy of ‘Good’: The fair-trade model isn’t perfect, but it provides an essential foundation for improving livelihoods
The Fair Trade, Employment, and Poverty Reduction project recently released a widely discussed study that asserts fair-trade practices do not help the poorest agricultural workers. While enthused to see new research into the effectiveness of the fair-trade system, Sustainable Harvest’s Jorge Cuevas takes issue with its conclusions, particularly when it comes to coffee.
- Categories
- Agriculture, Education
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Healthy Foods and New Jobs, Part 2: Infrastructure matters
On the way to introducing a food cart vendor business in Benin, West Africa, MamaCarts has encountered all sorts of problems with sanitation, incorporation and the government. But there’s a positive spin on these infrastructure gaps: Alternative solutions do exist and people circumnavigate these difficulties on a daily basis.
- Categories
- Agriculture, Education, Health Care, Social Enterprise
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Social Lending for Smallholders: Opportunities to support social lenders in closing the smallholder agricultural finance gap
The global demand for food is increasing, but the smallholder farmers who could help meet that demand lack the funds to invest in productivity and connect to markets. And many of the businesses that aggregate smallholders lack access to credit. Social lenders are one solution, says Laura Goldman, in discussing the Initiative for Smallholder Finance’s new guide to investing in or funding the sector.
- Categories
- Agriculture
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Healthy Foods and New Jobs, Part 1: MamaCarts learns valuable lessons while launching food cart delivery service from scratch
MamaCarts began by pitching an idea at a business plan competition and culminated with receiving a 2013 Rockefeller Foundation Centennial Innovation Challenge Award. That’s all there is to starting a food cart delivery service in Benin, West Africa, right? Wrong.
- Categories
- Agriculture, Education, Health Care, Social Enterprise
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