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Our staff scans hundreds of news sources every day to create a custom newsfeed. When the mainstream media covers the development through enterprise space, you can expect to find it here
By Steve Hamm
There's plenty to love about organizations that focus on solving the world's poverty and health problems—but their impact is often hard to measure. That can make it hard for philanthropies and investors to tell whether their money is well spent and leaves some of them reluctant to channel funds to the social sector.
From The Economist Print Edition
A clapboard house in Cape Cod is very different from a one-room mud-brick hut in the Indian state of Orissa, but making them into green homes involves a similar approach: using as little energy as possible to meet the occupants' needs. But in the developing world the impact of new technology can be far more transformative.
By Dan Gross
What the world needs right now is more subprime lending—a lot more of it. Yes, I know that in the public imagination, subprime lending is the scourge responsible for crippling the U.S. financial system. The massive extension of credit to people who lacked extensive credit histories and documented wages seems, in hindsight, supremely stupid. But far from the madding, depressed crowds of Wall Street, billions of people are starving for credit.
The country’s largest consumer products company by turnover, Hindustan Unilever Ltd, or HUL, plans to launch Pureit, its water purifier brand, in rural markets by year-end, targeted at relatively well-off village households that are able to afford its recurring cost.
Pop!Tech (www.poptech.org), the renowned annual ideas summit and social innovation network, today unveiled the 2008 Pop!Tech Social Innovation Fellows: a corps of high-potential change agents incubating breakthrough – or “big bet” – approaches to the world’s most pressing social, economic and environmental challenges.
CavinKare, a Chennai-based unlisted FMCG company known for its Chik brand, has embarked on a strategy which will test its mettle as a low-cost bottled shampoo-maker in the southern markets.
By Lily Huang
In Tajikistan, Georgetown graduate student Dan Zuckerman is the face of Kiva, a San Francisco-based microlending organization operating in a region that currently hums with nearly 3,000 Kiva-sponsored entrepreneurs. Zuckerman has to get to know them and act as their bridge to their remote lenders by sharing their stories, both with the people providing loans and with the local microcredit institution, MLF MicroInvest, which is Kiva's partner. In all of Tajikistan, he works alone. How does Zuckerman, 25, manage to cover all this ground without support staff and with a supervisor 11,000 kilometers away? Between field visits, he logs on to the Kiva Fellows wiki page, which allows him to tap into ideas about best practices from the experiences of Jara Small in Tanzania, Javed Rezayee in Afghanistan, Cynthia McMurry in Bolivia and the rest of the 100 Kiva Fellows dispersed among 45 countries. The wiki not only makes Zuckerman and his colleagues more effective, it also, as Kiva president Premal Shah puts it, gives them the ability to "co-create Kiva."
Monterrey, Mexico, Sept. 3 /PRNewswire
IGNIA Fund I, LP announced today that it has committed US$3.0 million to Primedic SAPI de CV as co-lead in a US$6.0 million first round of financing for the Company. Primedic, formerly known as Transparencia Medica, is a leading provider of healthcare services in Monterrey, currently operating three clinics and one radiological imaging facility. This funding will enable Primedic to rapidly expand operations to other cities in Mexico and to attain national coverage.
Primedic provides access to unlimited primary health care and selected medical technology services and specialists through an innovative membership program which is affordable to urban individuals and families who earn less than US$3,500 per person per year, the base of the socio-economic pyramid (BoP). "With this investment, IGNIA seeks to provide a cost-effective and quality solution to help bridge the wide gap faced by the majority of Mexicans as they deal with the inefficiencies of public health services, and the high cost of private healthcare," said Alvaro Rodriguez Arregui, co-founder and Managing Partner of IGNIA. "By bringing the right partners to the right company, we will enable Primedic to help transform the lives of millions of Mexicans."
