Welcome to my blog!

Esther Duflo’s Poptechtalk from 2009

(Source: pooreconomics.com)

When setting up a micro credit bank the last thing you want to think about is technology. You want to focus on your clients and help their business’ grow. 

Ben Lyon founded FrontlineSMS:Credit to allow microfinance institutions to send and receive secure loan payments, track loans and develop a micro-insurance model using the ubiquitous mobile phone.

Sounds like a great invention creating infrastructure and tools for micro finance institutions to grow and operate better. 

Find out more here

The outsourcing industry doesn’t have a great name, people fear that it’s destroying jobs in Europe and America. The jobs are not destroyed because of cheap labour in India but because western companies failed to become more efficient and effective. And the outsourcing industry probably did more for the emancipation of women in India than all demonstrations for equal rights combined. Because millions of young women have a well paying job and can support themselves easily. 

Leila Janah promotes outsourcing as an way to eradicate poverty in East Africa and other places. They just got an investment from Google and more and more technology companies are outsourcing work that computers can’t do to bright workers in places like Kenya: 

• High-quality image captioning
• Content writing and editing
• Product cataloguing
• Database enhancement and verification
• Web-based research
• We also offer custom enterprise solutions:
• High-volume book, document and receipt digitization
• Audio and video transcription
• OCR correction

Her philosophy: “Handouts are not going to end global poverty, but work - real work - just might”

Find out more on Samasource

(Source: poptech.org)

We need more people thinking about business models and development. Instead of always wanting to invent the next technology breakthrough, we have to focus on the business models and systems to use these breakthroughs in real life. So much is possible from a technical point of view, but usually the business model to bring it to scale is not there. Let’s not waist our time finding new solutions, but take the current ones, experiment to improve, and get it to scale!

The concept of M.Paani is fascinating because it doesn’t speak about technology hardware etc. but only about a scalable business model. And yes this has to be tested and checked etc. but these kind of innovations are the ones we need! 

(Source: mpaani.com)

Building buildings that heal, it does make a lot of sense! It’s quite shocking that a lot of buildings intended to make you better actually could make you sicker.

A new wave of architects sees the connection between the design of the hospital and the health of the patients. Also hospitals start to see this connection and see the effects. If their hospital is designed better, patients get recover quiker, thus clearing the bed sooner for another patient. This makes a lot of economical sense as well.

(Source: poptech.org)

Pieter Hoff is an extraordinary man. He set out to find a way to grow trees in the desert and he actually found a way. By looking at nature for clues he discovered how to make trees survive the extreme conditions. Especially concerning water, there’s rain in the desert (really!) only ones a year. So a plant has to survive 51 weeks without any water and most young trees can’t deal with that (yet). 

Anyway the box Pieter invented is capable of helping trees to grow in the desert. This has huge implications because the deserts are expanding at a rate almost to fast to fight it. (article in the Guardian) So we need to do something to stop it. The question is: can Pieter scale this operation big enough to make an impact?

He should use the power of the internet to connect communities and villages fighting desertification to people with money and interest to pay for the boxes. 

On the website of his company there are some really cool animations which explain the whole concept further