Stories We're Watching
For consumers who want to “wire” money to some far corner of the world, not much has changed since the days of the Old West. If you try to send a small amount of money from America to the Philippines, say, or Mexico, you will probably have to queue at a neighbourhood money-transfer agent and pay a fee that could easily reach 10% of the value of the remittance.
Turn left off the main reception to PayPal’s offices in San Jose, open a nondescript door and you step into a garish living room dominated by a flat-screen television. This is a laboratory for what PayPal calls “couch commerce”: people sit in front of the television buying things with their mobile phones or tablet computers.
The infoDev team has taken a closer look at his and the other five finalists’ backgrounds, and we found some helpful insights about new sources of innovation, their promise, and their needs.
We need to nearly double the amount of food we grow by mid-century if 9 billion people are going to have enough to eat. Yet most of the world’s prime farmland is already planted. The rest of the available land tends to lie under forests, or suffer from problems that keep it fallow. But feeding the world will mean redefining what is "arable" land.
Five more African countries have met the Maputo Declaration goal of investing ten per cent of their national budgets in agriculture.
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