Exploring Failure
Failure and its upside—a report from the 2010 PopTech conference.
Poverty
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Youth Entrepreneurship in Africa
How do we promote bottom-up entrepreneurship in emerging economies?
Learning, Earning, and Saving
The need for holistic approaches to poverty alleviation for young people in Africa.
Podcast
NewSchools Venture Summit
U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and Chairman of the House Committee on Education George Miller, address the NewSchools Summit 2010.
Podcast
Disaster Relief; How Can Business Help?
Joe Becker, the Senior Vice President of Disaster Services at the American Red Cross, who explains how partnerships with businesses can bring resiliency back to a community after disaster —.
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Design Thinking for Social Innovation
By working closely with the clients and consumers, design thinking allows high-impact solutions to social problems to bubble up from below rather than being imposed from the top.
The Problem With Fair Trade Coffee
Fair Trade-certified coffee is growing in sales, but strict certification requirements are resulting in uneven economic advantages for coffee growers and lower quality coffee for consumers.
Microfinance Misses Its Mark
Despite the hoopla over microfinance, it doesn't cure poverty. But stable jobs do. If societies are serious about helping the poorest of the poor, they should stop investing in microfinance and start supporting large, labor-intensive industries.
In Microfinance, Clients Must Come First
Few microfinance institutions articulate what, exactly, their ultimate goals are and how to achieve them. If the goal of microfinance is to alleviate poverty, the authors say, then MFIs should focus on helping their clients build successful enterprises, rather than on making more and bigger loans.
Romanticizing the Poor
Market solutions to poverty, which include services and products targeting consumers at the “bottom of the pyramid,” portray poor people as creative entrepreneurs and discerning consumers. Yet this rosy view of poverty-stricken people is not only wrong, but also harmful.