Digital Job Creation for Youth
We need new ideas and models in digital work that can be scaled to meet global outsourcing demands.
Poverty
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A Bigger Pie
Mission Pie, a for-profit bakery and café, supports local farmers while training at-risk kids.
Banking on Change
Express Credit Union reopens in Seattle to serve the unbanked, underbanked, and want-to-be-banked.
Beyond the Poverty Line
A new approach to measuring poverty is needed, one that accounts for multiple factors such as housing, and regional economic differences.
Microfinance’s Next Frontier
LeapFrog Investments aims to insure the poor on a grand scale.
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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.