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Award Winning Social Enterprise Uses Bikes to Power Utilities
Every year, Echoing Green selects a handful of social entrepreneurs to participate in a two-year fellowship. Echoing Green fellows receive start-up capital and technical assistance to build their fledgling social enterprises. Perhaps the most interesting Echoing Green fellow this year is 23-year-old Jodie Wu, founder of Global Cycle Solutions. Based in Arusha, Tanzania, Global Cycle Solutions is innovative from both an engineering and entrepreneurial perspective. The company creates dev...
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
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African Huts Far From the Grid Glow With Renewable Power
As small-scale renewable energy becomes cheaper, more reliable and more efficient, it is providing the first drops of modern power to people who live far from slow-growing electricity grids and fuel pipelines in developing countries. Although dwarfed by the big renewable energy projects that many industrialized countries are embracing to rein in greenhouse gas emissions, these tiny systems are playing an epic, transformative role. The ...
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
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Interest Rates on Microloans in Rwanda to Drop
Rwandans will soon pay lower interest rates following the launch of the Transparent Pricing Initiative project in the country. The initiative, which is already operational in Uganda, Kenya and Tanzania, is part of the broader MFTransparency programme aimed at impelling African microfinance institutions to price loans fairly and educate citizens on interest rates. "Rather than attempt to control interest rates, we facilitate transparent pricing in microfinance products so that all ...
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
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Poor Communities to Benefit from Poverty Alleviation Project
GWERU - The European Commission and Heifer Netherlands have funded a US$2.3 million poverty alleviation project through the Heifer Project International that is set to benefit 33 000 people in the Midlands province. The project will see cattle farmers in the province receiving heifers as a pass on gift project. In an interview with The Zimbabwean On Thursday at the launch of the project, the Heifer International Zimbabwe Country Director Bongani Ngwenya said his organisation wa...
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
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Unemployed African Youth to Benefit from UN-backed Finance Programme
Some 200,000 low-income youth in sub-Saharan Africa will benefit from a United Nations-backed initiative announced today to increase access for them to financial services in a region where youth unemployment rates are two to three times that of adults. YouthStart, co-sponsored by UN Capital Development Fund (UNCDF) and the MasterCard Foundation, which has made a four-year, $12 million contribution, is a competition-based programme that will identify and support up to 12 financial instit...
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
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Jane Goodall Saves Chimpanzees Using Microcredit
Jane Goodall came to Gombe National Park to study chimpanzees 50 years ago. She became one of the world’s best known primate researchers. In the early 1990s, she became shocked by the ecological destruction around the park and left the jungle to become an activist. Nowadays she’s saving the primates using microcredit. The 76-year-old chimpanzee expert travels the world to talk about her conservation work. She tells stories about how local people are involved in conserving the...
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
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Sudan’s First SMS-Powered Voting Monitor Tracks Violence
While Sudanese vote about the fate of South Sudan’s independence, one Sudan-born Texan supports the voting process from afar with a historic mobile-powered monitoring tool. Fareed Zein came to the United States from Sudan in 1981 to pursue a college education in computer science. One of the lucky ones, his family could afford his departure and his education, and he left before civil war rattled his homeland. Zein now spends his time--outside of his day job in oil and gas in Ho...
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
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Currency War: The Stakes for Africa
By Sanou Mbaye As a result of chronically deficient demand in the aftermath of the 2008-09 financial and economic crises, global imbalances are on the rise again, as is the risk of protectionism. The US thinks China is undervaluing its currency to support its industry. The situation could lead to an "international currency war". What does this herald for African...
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
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