Monday, August 11, 2014 - 09:00
As an investment fellow in East Africa, my investment appraisals are all too often conducted in coffee shops, over Skype, or in a conference room at Grameen Foundation's Nairobi or Kampala offices.
Last weekend, I had the opportunity to visit a potential investee that Grameen has been speaking with for over a year, an agribusiness company focused on creating income generating opportunities for smallholder farmers while increasing the biodiversity of the local land.
Founded by Teddy Ruge, a Ugandan serial entrepreneur who also founded the Hive Co-Lab, a co-working space for tech startups in...
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Wednesday, August 6, 2014 - 11:41
Wells Fargo Shares Employees' Expertise with Nonprofits GloballyGrameen Foundation's Bankers without Borders Initiative Provides Volunteer Opportunities in up to 30 Countries
WASHINGTON, Aug. 5, 2014 -- Wells Fargo & Company (NYSE: WFC) announced today that it has joined forces with Grameen Foundation's Bankers without Borders® to expand its Global Fellows program —an international volunteer program that lends employees' professional expertise to nonprofits in up to 30 countries.
"Wells Fargo team members have a long history of giving their time and talent to selflessly serve their...
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Wednesday, August 6, 2014 - 09:00
This week, after hearing about Grameen Foundation’s successes in its Mobile Midwife program in both Ghana and Nigeria, we sought to read more on the importance of improving maternal health and the collaborate efforts being undertaken to spur lifesaving innovations in the field. In a report by the World Health Organization, trends in maternal mortality between 1990 and 2010 revealed that maternal mortality has decreased by 47%! This progress owes itself to the work of local enterprises, governments, and NGOs, which have targeted effective interventions within the community, hospital, or clinic...
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Tuesday, July 1, 2014 - 09:12
The Grameen Foundation Fall Internship Application is now open!
A Grameen Foundation internship provides students and recent graduates an opportunity to learn more about our work while strengthening our ability to carry out our mission to help the poor create a world without poverty. There are a wide range of internship opportunities available within Grameen Foundation. Some of the most common internships are summarized below:
Program Intern: Program teams, such as the Social Performance Management Center and Bankers without Borders, need additional resources to advance their efforts. In...
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Monday, June 2, 2014 - 09:00
Please join us for an uncoming webinar!
BwB Turns Five: Imact, Key Insights, and Lessons Learned
Thursday, June 12, 2014
12:00 PM - 1:00 PM EDT
RSVP HERE. Space is limited.
In 2008, Grameen Foundation launched Bankers without Borders® (BwB) to create an efficient, operational framework to mobilize, engage and leverage the talent and skills of the private sector to help support both its own mission and the missions of other poverty-focused social enterprises. Starting with just 100 volunteers at the time of our launch, today more than 17,000 business professionals, academics, and students from...
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Friday, May 30, 2014 - 09:00
I’ve been silent for a while. But it’s not because I fell into a tech hole while helping build a mobile sourcing tool for one of our partners, a cooperative that receives product orders from large supermarkets and disperses them among farmer associations and their farmers. Well, I did fall into a tech hole, but I was able to claw my way back out and into territory I was more familiar with: planning trainings, program management, logistics management, and field visits, all of which kept me very busy.
Over the last two months, I’ve traveled to visit our partner twice in Pasto, a town in the...
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Friday, May 2, 2014 - 10:48
Earlier this month, I accompanied Shaun Goodwin, a former US Women's Ski Team coach and now a professional photographer for Hope Alive Media, on a visit to a branch office of Musoni Kenya, one of Grameen Foundation's portfolio investees and a partner microfinance institution (MFI) for much of our work here in Kenya. Although not a banker himself, Shaun was in Kenya for 10 days as a volunteer through Bankers without Borders, during which time he accompanied a number of GF Kenya staff to take professional photos of our partners' field operations.
Jane Mathege, Branch Manager of Musoni's Thika...
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Tuesday, April 15, 2014 - 08:38
I first met Kyle Schutter over a beer after an event at Nairobi's iHub, where I was attending the launch of a mobile phone based data service. We started chatting during the networking hour after the company's brief information session. Kyle told me he was an entrepreneur, I told him that I invested in entrepreneurs, and we got to talking.
Kyle explained that his company, Takamoto Biogas, installs a biogas system on smallholder farmers' land for a small fee. The biogas installation comes complete with a digester, stove, piping and a meter that measure biogas delivered to the farmer. The...
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Saturday, April 12, 2014 - 20:03
National Volunteer Week is from April 6th-April 12th this year, so this week, we’ve been reading a lot about volunteering and the benefits of volunteering both locally and around the world. But first, we learned a little bit on the story behind National Volunteer Week and its purpose; created as a small program with big hopes by the Points of Light in 1974, National Volunteer Week is now celebrating its 40th anniversary of existence. As 40 years passed, tens of thousands of volunteer projects and programs conducted by schools, businesses, and organizations around the world have been scheduled...
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Friday, April 11, 2014 - 13:27
This week, I packed up my laptop and worked remotely from my family’s house in Curacao. I set up my work station on our well-worn deck, under the slight shade of a palm branch (only slight shade since I felt I should probably take advantage of all the vitamin D here, since I’ll be back in London soon) and spent about two days reviewing applications for the 2014 Grameen Foundation Fellowships.
My "office" in Curacao.
While reading through the candidates’ expressing their passion of joining the fight against poverty and the ways in which they see their skills advancing Grameen Foundation’s...
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