health

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Sustainable Energy

Interview: Bringing light and stoves to rural East Timor

Lack of energy access does more then keep households in the dark: it also limits economic development and exacerbates health problems. An interview with Will Barron about innovative ways to make solar electricity and efficient cookstoves available in the marketplace in Timor-Leste.

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New alternative to GDP measures social outcomes, not income

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Social Enterprise

Quotable: Microinsurance penetration set to double by 2020

By 2020, over 1 billion people in poor countries will be covered under microinsurance.

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Mobile Technology

Food or phone? Study finds some poor Kenyans choose the second

In Kenya, using one’s mobile phone is now often considered to be more of a priority than eating or paying utility bills.

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Social Enterprise

Interview: D-Rev's Krista Donaldson on designing health products for the world's poor

Across the globe, public hospitals struggle to pay for resources needed to treat even the most basic inflictions. But a San Francisco based non-profit is working to change that.

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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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Social Enterprise

Interview: Healthy food carts for kids get a boost from a healthy global partnership in Indonesia

This article was republished by The Christian Science Monitor.

Rural Vietnamese hope to benefit from community latrines. <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/wanhoff/2684767918/sizes/z/in/photostream/"> Flickr </a>

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Value Chains

Unilever will train rural Vietnamese to build demand for toilets

Unilever is rejecting the latrine handout model in favor of a sanitation market sourced and supported wholly by local entrepreneurs.

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Value Chains

No toilet? Just finding a good spot costs the economy $500 million

From the World Bank’s Water and Sanitation Program report, reported by CNN:

Left: Patricia Wolff, founder and executive director of Meds and Food for Kids. (Photo: MFK.) Right: Paul Farmer, founder and executive director of Partners in Health. (Photo: <a href="http://flic.kr/p/csKJu9">Nyaya Health, Flickr</a>.)

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Social Enterprise

Devil take the hindmost? Haiti peanut battle puts NGOs head to head

When antipoverty nonprofits compete, it's not always clear who will lose more: the one whose business is threatened, or the people both nonprofits set out to serve.

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A closer look at India's new health microinsurance scheme

As mentioned in last week's post, India set out four years ago to achieve universal health coverage for poor families using a massive system of state-subsidized private microinsurance.

India is subsidizing more than 100 million small-value insurance policies in an effort to help people treat health problems without falling into poverty. Photo: <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/nadya/4789818776/in/photostream/">Nadya Peek(flickr)</a>

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Financial Inclusion

India: Knocking the poor back on their feet with microinsurance

Hospitalization can save a life--at the cost, sometimes, of throwing it permanently off track. Two very different countries, India and the United States, recently chose a similar solution: subsidized insurance.

An improved sanitation system allows private sanitation companies to access new customers in narrow urban slums, where some of the 94 million Indonesians live without access to such services. Photo: Mercy Corps

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Value Chains

Disruptive sanitation: Can 3-wheeled carts and better septic tanks clean up Jakarta?

This article was republished by The Christian Science Monitor.

Incorporating native plants could revitalize the agriculture, nutrition and economy of Malawi. Photo: <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/cimmyt/7290577556/in/photostream/”>CIMMYT (Flickr)</a>

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Value Chains

The problem with Malawi's state-subsidized maize surplus: Nutrition

Malawi is fixated on maize, but Kristof and Stacia Nordin aim to change that. They say native crops would bring variety and abundance to the monotonous Malawian diet.