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Purifying Water Using a Ceramic Pot in Uganda
When the well is contaminated: The Purifaaya pot, made by Spouts of Water, is 99.9% effective and its water is potable, say Ugandan authorities
- Categories
- Entrepreneurship, WASH
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
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Up to 2.5 Billion People Need Glasses: Can This Hardware Innovation Deliver?
Roughly 25 percent of the global population needs glasses, but lacks access. The problem isn't cost: Affordable glasses are readily available in emerging markets. What's lacking are trained eye care specialists. The social startup PlenOptika is tackling that issue with a device called the QuickSee: a binocular-sized autorefractor that non-specialists can use to scan a patient’s eyes and produce an eyeglass prescription within seconds. Paul Scott, director of engineering for ASME, discusses the innovation, and the challenges and rewards of running a social hardware startup.
- Categories
- Entrepreneurship, Health Care, Technology
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The Funder Problem: Good Intentions Aren’t Enough
Despite their good intentions, funders are often the biggest barriers to social enterprises or nonprofits achieving impact. Open Road Alliance, a philanthropic initiative that gives emergency grants to impact-focused organizations, gathered and analyzed five years of data about roadblocks faced by over 100 grantees. Nearly half of the problems the group found were caused by funders. Laurie Michaels describes the three categories of funder-related barriers that account for the most frequent challenges – and offers some surprisingly easy fixes.
- Categories
- Entrepreneurship
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Younger Entrepreneurs Choose Social Impact As Their Top Business Priority
One in five entrepreneurs considers social responsibility, being active in the community, or environmental responsibility as their top priority as a business owner, rather than prioritising areas such as maximising shareholder value or economic prosperity.
- Categories
- Entrepreneurship
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Social enterprise accelerator for health innovators kicks-off in Nairobi
The MMH Accelerator combines Ashoka’s expertise in social entrepreneurship with the pharmaceutical’s business acumen and knowledge of the healthcare industry.
- Categories
- Health Care
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
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How Western Definitions Perpetuate Ethnocentric Bias – Even Among the Social Impact Crowd
You'd think that ethnocentrism – judging another culture by the standards or values of one's own – would be relatively rare in the global, cosmopolitan social impact sector. In fact, says KadAfrica founder Rebecca Kaduru, it's alive and well, as social entrepreneurs must often adapt to ethnocentric definitions to secure the funding necessary to grow their enterprises. She explores why this dynamic has to change.
- Categories
- Agriculture, Education, Entrepreneurship
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Tata Trust’s FISE develops low-cost portable MRI scanner to take health services to rural India
In a statement to the press, FISE said that the 1.5 Tesla whole body MRI scanner can make MRI scans four times faster, compared to other scanners that are currently available in the market while consuming less power and being light weight hence easy to carry.
- Categories
- Entrepreneurship, Health Care, Technology
- Region
- South Asia
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Hardware Innovation is … Hard: How These Entrepreneurs Overcame the Challenges
Compared with the creators of app-based products, hardware-focused innovators face a much more difficult and expensive journey, says Villgro CTO Arun Venkatesan. The resources and time required to perfect hardware iterations are larger, the lack of a mature ecosystem is a problem, and the buyer is often distinctly different from the user or beneficiary. Venkatesan profiles four hardware innovators in agriculture and health care, discussing how they worked through these obstacles.
- Categories
- Agriculture, Health Care, Investing, Technology
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