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Financial Inclusion

Seeking Opportunity in Unlikely Places: Mercy Corps' Elizabeth Berthe

Elizabeth Berthe, Mercy Corps’ newest social innovations team member, has been creating businesses with her dad since she was eight years old. "You know how some people flip houses? We flipped businesses.”

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An interview with Global Envision's founder on our 10th anniversary

When many youth and NGOs protested the World Trade Organization Ministerial Conference in Seattle in 1999, Global Envision’s founder Bill Early saw an opportunity to create a dialogue about how globalization and capitalism could help lift people out of poverty. This idea eventually became Global Envision.

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Financial Inclusion

Unleashing Ugandan farmers’ potential through mobile phones

A powerful new mobile platform combining agriculture information and financial services specifically designed for farmers in Uganda is going live, helping them plow even more value from each acre.

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Financial Inclusion

Quotable: Africa alone has more mobile money users than Facebook does worldwide

There are now more mobile money activity users in Africa than there are users of Facebook.

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Value Chains

A new paradigm for food aid: Building new local food businesses

Crunch time! How a 1-year USDA grant reshaped a Bangladesh cereal market.

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Financial Inclusion

The new bank for rural poor: The post office

Post offices in Nigeria are becoming surrogate bank branches for the unbanked rural poor, under a government project launched last month.

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Youth Skills

Mobile Tech: a peaceful yet powerful weapon in Kenya

Mobile connections in the hands of youth may be the secret weapon for a strong democratic future in Kenya.

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Social Enterprise

Extreme by design: Film tracks the world's biggest little ideas

Innovative, life-changing products offer simple solutions to complex problems in impoverished places. But their conception is often anything but simple.

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Financial Inclusion

A 'demographic window' of opportunity: Why youth need bank access now

The enormous economic potential of developing countries depends on their response to a global demographic shift--a response that'll fail without universal, affordable access to financial services.

A Mexican weaver stands behind his loom. Photo: <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/28703188@N02/4204678905/">Knoxville Museum of Art</a>

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Value Chains

As youth artisans struggle, NGOs beef up business training

A new generation of artisans in the Global South are getting entrepreneurial training with their craft skills.

Encouraging youth to pursue farming may be the answer to both unemployment issues and fading crop yields. Photo: <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/gatesfoundation/5075935331/in/photostream/">Gates Foundation (Flickr)</a>

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Youth Skills

Rural youth seek greener pastures in the city, but farming could get hot

Even on the farm, it pays to be young, but every year, young people are "escaping" their hometown rural communities to seek the "greener pastures" of city life. Meanwhile, global buyers of commodities such as coffee and cocoa beans worry about the aging farming workforce.

Malawian boys are proud of their family's dairy cows. Photo: Jennifer Hyman/Land O'Lakes International Development

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Value Chains

Land O'Lakes finds success with dairy micro co-ops in Malawi

The top US dairy cooperative has brought decades of expertise to Malawi, creating micro co-ops that pool their milk for purchase by one of the country's largest processors.