NextBillion

Excellent point about tech products for emerging markets. This is absolutely true. I just want to point out that people normally think that "emerging markets" are the same as "developing nations", when in reality it means "underserved markets" (aka "bottom of the pyramid"): In developing countries, the middle-class or above has access to the (more or less) same life style as in developed countries, and thus products can be launched without much modification -- Localization is normally enough. In the other hand, undeserved markets do have its own set of challenges, which we technologists are normally unaware because most of us never experienced life in those conditions. Also note that developed nations have underserved markets too: For example, if you are in Bay Area, just drive around East Palo Alto or East San Jose and note the diversity and number of products developed specifically for those communities. Here are a few excellent resources on the subject of underserved markets http://www.amazon.com/Fortune-Bottom-Pyramid-Eradicating-Paperback/dp/… http://www.nextbillion.net/ http://rdvp.org/ http://www.nokia.com/A4126014

Has Kiva gotten better about choosing their lending partner organizations? It was big news a few years ago that Kiva was partnering with in-country lenders charging extortionate interest rates. http://www.kivafriends.org/index.php?topic=3403.190 This pretty recent article though makes it sound like it's still a big problem. http://www.nextbillion.net/m/bp.aspx?b=3726 Kiva is a great idea in concept. They just need to take a firm stance against corrupt lending practices, especially since they present themselves as a charity and so no middleman should really be profiting incommensurately in the process.

Also worth looking at Kiva's response to that article, though the editor of the piece you linked to many of Kiva's responses. http://www.nextbillion.net/blogpost.aspx?blogid=3731

If we talk about Kiva it's always worth to revisit this article http://www.nextbillion.net/blogpost.aspx?blogid=3726 which asks some good questions about their model.

Prior discussion of this same link can be found at this other thread (which I had in my list of links below but it felt useful to surface it). https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15700718 So, something maybe-fascinating to people is that Rivest--who designed this scheme--helped start a company to use it on the web to pay for things like news articles and generally replace ads. It was called Peppercoin, and was sufficiently before its time that not only did it fail (well, in the usual YC-sense: it got acquired by something boring and failed to change the world) but a lot of the people working on this technology today have never heard of it ;P. Here are a million references I have in a note I was collecting back in December on the rise and fall of Peppercoin (which I intended to show to my team at Orchid--where we are trying to apply this technology to a decentralized market for bandwidth and other Internet services: see orchid.com--and then honestly never have as I have been busy; and I considered that, maybe even "best case", this was likely to be a distraction to them as much as it was to me…

I'm not too up to date, I should do some more reading. Without having researched this thoroughly, I can say this though: The first link you posted shows some 'portfolio yields' (pretty much interest+fees, which can kind of be summarized as interest rates anyway) of up to say 80% in South Sudan for 2012. But that's not as crazy as you may think. After all, South Sudan has an 80% inflation rate in 2012, meaning the two are cancelled out. This may not be true for every year, for every partner, for every country, but inflation rates of 20% are pretty average and typical for a lot of developing countries. Accompanying interest rates of 20% may sound ridiculous to us, but it's not considering all prices and income in nominal terms rise by 20% per year, too, making the ability to pay off your loan similar to if income/prices and interest rates were 0 throughout the year. The second link you posted is hyperbolic bullshit (like microfinance producing 'zero impact on a good day' or irrelevant facts that are clear ad hominem attacks, like how the founders have 'newly minted MBAs', which we all know has become the international and universal sign of 'inexperienced privileged rich people without a clue' and just a cheap shot. He doesn't for example mention he himself is writing the article with a 'freshly minted MBA', because he indeed has an MBA himself) David Roodman has written a great book, but any nuance it may have had is completely thrown out the window by the writer of the…

Yes. I've spent a lot of time looking at job boards and here are my favorite ones. # Design Authentic Jobs - https://authenticjobs.com/ Dribbble - https://dribbble.com/jobs # Nonprofit GIIN - https://jobs.thegiin.org/ Idealist - https://www.idealist.org/ Next Billion - https://nextbillion.net/jobs/ # Remote NODESK - https://nodesk.co/remote-jobs/ RemoteOK - https://remoteok.io/ WeWorkRemotely - https://weworkremotely.com/ # Startups/Tech AngelList - https://angel.co/jobs Hacker News - https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=whoishiring WorkinTech.io - https://workintech.io/

Yay for pseudo-journalism! @mfheretic, fact checking your work wouldn't be hard. Kiva's Response: http://www.nextbillion.net/blogpost.aspx?blogid=3731

Am I sensing a trend in more recent YC batches to select teams that want to help people rather than find a market? Watsi, True Link, now this. I mean, both are about building something people want, but they are definitely different points of view of this goal. One is about what people are willing to pay for, other is about what people could benefit from. I most wholeheartedly welcome this trend (if it is in fact a conscious one). Myself, I work very close to this new field of "social ventures/social business/impact investment", the latest labels of a model that combine, at once, social impact and profit. No judgmental ideology, just using market forces to improve people's lives. Specially people with some kind of vulnerability (in general, poor people, but as seen here, not restricted to). Muhamad Yunus (Nobel peace laureate) is the most famous champion of this way of changing the world, but he sure put some very rigid limitations on how to manage the profit, which I think are too demanding and not particularly effective. But it is a good way to think different about creating new business: http://www.muhammadyunus.org/index.php/social-business/social-business For an approach that I think is more effective, here are some good places to learn: http://www.nextbillion.net/ http://businessfightspoverty.org/ http://www.thegiin.org/cgi-bin/iowa/home/index.html http://acumen.org/

I also live in Rwanda and whilst I don't agree with my friend's argument that playing football with a piece of trash is as much fun as playing with a real ball, I do agree with his conclusion that this a solution looking for a problem. There's no doubt that kids will be happy if you give them a shiny new football. They'll also be happy if you give them a secondhand t-shirt or new pair of shoes. That makes for lots of donor 'feel good' and nice photos on your Facebook page, but that doesn't make it good aid. If the priority here is to do something helpful for the developing world, and that's why they're willing to put all the required effort and money into this project, then why not start by asking the developing world what their pressing problems are? Ask a few developing country governments and see how many of them report a lack of good footballs as a pressing problem. When people don't ask questions like that it's usually an indication that the aid is more about the donor than the recipient. This project sounds a lot like TOMS Shoes Buy One Give One which has been frequently criticized for being a donor oriented initiative with little long term benefit [1]. It might sound completely harmless to hand out free shoes to kids, but it ends up undermining local producers and sellers, and perpetuates a 'handout' aid culture. [1] http://goodintents.org/in-kind-donations/toms-shoes http://www.nextbillion.net/blogpost.aspx?blogid=2345

Big fan of the environmental sciences over here. You might look for jobs and opportunities at nonprofits/NGOs as places where applied research and interventions are occurring. Mission-driven organizations, including government ministries, are a good way to feel like the hours you spend at work are directed towards something positive in the world. In some cases like the GP these sound like direct actions in the field - which sounds really enriching. NGOs jobs tend to be structured on topics as much as on functions, so making a shortlist of topical keywords might be helpful in the search to become aware of organizations. You should also look directly at organizations' staff lists, which are typically fairly open and have emails listed. One thing to be aware of is many nonprofits have tightly budgeted projects with specific needs, so getting your foot in the door on a less interesting project might be needed. Generalists can benefit here. I know a few job sites that collect these kind of positions, some techy and some not: https://techjobsforgood.com/ https://nextbillion.net/jobs/ https://greenjobs.greenjobsearch.org/ https://www.devex.com/jobs/search/ Last I will mention the nonprofit organization I work for - World Resources Institute (https://wri.org). We organize our work around seven global challenges: food, forests, water, the ocean, energy, climate, and cities. We do research, build data products and applications, organize partnerships. We help tackle some the…