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Bringing a Gender Lens to Technical Assistance: New Research Reveals the Benefits and Costs of Gender-Smart TA to SMEs and Investors
There’s growing momentum behind gender lens strategies in impact investing. But according to Yaquta Kanchwala Fatehi at the William Davidson Institute and Lisa Willems and Ladé Araba at the AlphaMundi Foundation, investors tend to apply a gender lens to their investing and pipeline development activities – but not to technical assistance and other types of post-investment support. They share findings from a recent study from the Gender-Smart Enterprise Assistance Research Coalition (G-SEARCh) consortium, which explores the business case for gender-smart technical assistance for small and medium enterprises (SMEs).
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- Entrepreneurship, Impact Assessment, Investing
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Making Technical Assistance Work in Africa: Three Keys to Success for Financial Services Providers
It’s not easy delivering data-driven financial services to financially excluded customers in Africa. That’s why technical assistance can be essential to these financial service providers' success. Dumisani Dube at Insight2Impact (i2i) explores the technical assistance programs that i2i provided to seven financial service providers across the continent, and shares what worked – and what didn't.
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- Finance
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Tech Companies Struggle to Get World on Internet
When Sumarni, a 39-year-old woman in a rural village in Indonesia, first cradled a smartphone in her hand about two years ago, her reaction was “bingung,” the word for “confused” in Indonesian. As she looked at the Android phone’s sleek, black surface, she asked herself: “Where are the buttons?”
- Categories
- Technology
- Region
- South Asia
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Disease-fighting Data: In Sierra Leone, tracking Ebola’s economic impact
Bad information has been problematic during the Ebola outbreak. As a result, IPA has been collecting data on the economic impacts of the crisis and is working on piloting and evaluating an electronic contact-tracing system that could substantially improve efficiency and reduce Ebola transmission rates.
- Categories
- Health Care, Impact Assessment
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Positive (and Negative) Charges – Which Business Models Are Surging: Going Off Grid Series (pt 2)
What’s the best business model for distributed energy solutions? Jack Bird with Santa Clara State University says the answer is entirely dependent on the technology, the target market and the resources of the enterprise. No one model is the silver bullet for providing the 1.3 billion people suffering from energy poverty with clean, reliable and affordable energy. There are, however, a few takeaways from the exhaustive Energy Map.
- Categories
- Education, Energy, Health Care
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SMART-er Ways to Plant Profitable Crops
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When you’re a subsistence farmer in drought-stricken regions of East Africa, gambling on what crop to plant is a life-and-death wager for your family. Ellen Metzger, with Village Enterprise, details the organization’s new SMART system - an Android phone enabled program designed to help farmers in Uganda and Kenya make planting decisions based on what’s likely to be most profitable.- Categories
- Agriculture, Technology
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Radio Station Reaches Remote Areas Through Cell Phones
Unilever in India launches a marketing initiative that provides entertainment and ads in areas unreachable by other media.
- Categories
- Health Care, Technology
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Competitive Co-Advantage: In an iDE initiative ‘farm business advisors’ help deliver products and profits to Cambodian farmers
Lors Thmey, which means "new growth" in Khmer, teaches local entrepreneurs to become farm business advisors (FBAs). That means that in addition to selling products to farmers, they’re trained to be consultants, too. As a result, farmers produce better crops and make more money, and the FBAs expand their businesses and boost their incomes, too.
- Categories
- Agriculture, Entrepreneurship
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