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Managing Trade-Offs Between Impact and Profit – Finding the Formula for BoP Business
Eugenia Rosca's study of small enterprises in BOP markets reveals that many of them have similar characteristics and are founded to respond to highly pressing local issues. The businesses usually identify a social need and develop a market to address it; then, in time, around one-third of them reported an increased orientation toward economic goals. To be successful, they should acquire skills, resources and capabilities for both social and economic activities.
- Categories
- Environment, Social Enterprise
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From Extremely Poor to Entrepreneur: A Starter Asset Combined with Mentorship Forges Pathway Out of Poverty
Today Arfa Bibi runs a successful vegetable farming business in India. Only a few years ago, however, Bibi and her husband struggled to feed their family and she even resorted to begging. Her transformation into entrepreneur came thanks to Kolkata-based nonprofit Bandhan-Konnagar's graduation model program Targeting the Hardcore-Poor, whose success was cited in a six-country MIT study of 21,000 of the world's poorest people.
- Categories
- Agriculture
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First-of-its-kind report highlights enormous potential for developing mutual and cooperative insurance for the poor in India
With about 600,000 cooperatives in the country with a collective membership of over 250 million people, the potential for developing mutual and cooperative insurance for the poor in India is enormous.
- Categories
- Uncategorized
- Region
- South Asia
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Addressing Eye Care in Emerging Markets with Blended Finance
WHO estimates that 39 million people suffer from blindness, more than half of them due to cataracts, and more than 90 percent of blind people live in the developing world. Cataracts are often curable but the traditional surgery is expensive. Convergence is supporting GlobalVision's plan to build on the affordable eye model that Aravind pioneered in India and establish a network of 60 eye care hospitals in emerging markets over the next 10 years, borrowing techniques from the microfinance sector.
- Categories
- Health Care, Investing, Social Enterprise, Technology
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Report: Reaching deep in low-income markets
This report was developed jointly by Monitor Deloitte, the MacArthur Foundation, the Omidyar Network, and the Rockefeller Foundation to help provide transparency and guidance to advance the broader field of funding for businesses serving the deep BOP.
- Categories
- Uncategorized
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The Future of the Graduation Approach: Taking a Proven Anti-Poverty Measure to Scale
How can the "graduation" approach to fighting extreme poverty achieve a scale commensurate with extreme poverty itself? Increasingly, the answer is to embed graduation within government-run social protection programs that already operate at massive scale. MetLife Foundation's Krishna Thacker explores why the approach works, and how innovative organizations are taking it to the next level.
- Categories
- Education
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Field of View: How a Chilli Cash Crop Helps Subsistence Farmers Shape Their Future
During a three-year process designed to assess the impact of growing a chilli cash crop on small farmers living in southern Africa, it was discovered that when a family earned just $500 more of net income per year, the money materially impacted at least two categories of their basic human needs. But the most profound impact, writes Tanner Methvin, was that of self-determination.
- Categories
- Agriculture
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Smartphones: Under pressure from Chinese companies, Panasonic to exit low-end phones segment
Japan's Panasonic Corp, about a century-old powerhouse in consumer electronics, wouldn't sell feature-and entry-level smartphones in India any longer because of the intense competition from Chinese brands. In a strategy overhaul, Panasonic would also bring the distribution responsibility in-house, and pare down the market-share targets to about 5% in two years from initial projections running into two digits.
- Categories
- Technology
- Region
- Asia Pacific
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