Financial institutions often impose Western models of risk assessment, which are often ill-fitted for diverse global markets -- especially in Africa, a continent made up of thousands of ethnic and cultural groups and more than 2,000 languages. Fintech entrepreneur Viola Llewellyn is determined to properly tap into the continent's potential for w...

In this short, provocative talk, financier Sangu Delle questions whether microfinance — small loans to small entrepreneurs -- is the best way to drive growth in developing countries. "We seem to be fixated on this romanticized idea that every poor person in Africa is an entrepreneur,” he says. "Yet, my work has taught me that most people want jo...

Rose Goslinga isn’t your typical insurance salesperson. Through the Syngenta Foundation, her team developed insurance solutions to assist small-scale farmers in Africa, to safeguard their crops in case of droughts.

Shaffi Mather is the founder of 1298 for Ambulance, Education Access for All, and co-promoter of Moksha-Yug Access.

Shivani Siroya created a tool that allows anyone with a cell phone to build a financial track record.

Iqbal Quadir is an advocate of business as a humanitarian tool. With GrameenPhone, he brought the first commercial telecom services to poor areas of Bangladesh. His latest project will help rural entrepreneurs build power plants.

Shameran Abed helps households around the world create a path out of extreme poverty.

Ajay Banga is CEO of Mastercard and a member of its board of directors, and will become executive chairman of the board of directors in January 2021.

About this event: Organized by international Master students of CBS International Business School. Once again we did our best to bring outstanding thinkers and doers to our TEDx event: Laxmi Remer: How Microfinance can help the Poor Jesper Erichsen: Future of Mobility Nils Schneider: Holistic Life Goals

Close your eyes and listen to the grunts and jostling, the smack of rubber on cement and triumphant high-fives. You could be listening to a pickup basketball game anywhere. But you’re in Afghanistan and this is much more than just a game. It is the country’s very first wheelchair basketball tournament and the players are all disabled. Som...

About this event: Over the past several years, a flood of fascinating data from the worlds of education, microfinance and more has shown an essential link between investing in women and girls and economic growth, public health, political stability. A new lens reveals women as powerful change agents in developing nations; meanwhile, in the West, generations of edu...

About this event: TEDxChange 2012 is a TEDx event co-organized by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and TED. Convened by Melinda French Gates and hosted by Chris Anderson, TEDxChange will focus on issues surrounding global health and development. TEDxChange type events are TEDx events hosted around the live webcast of TEDxChange, and also feature local spea...

Daring, bold, systems-disrupting change requires big dreams and an even bigger vision. For Session 5 of TED2020, the Audacious Project, a collaborative funding initiative housed at TED, highlighted bold plans for social change from Southern New Hampshire University, SIRUM, BRAC, Harlem Children's Zone, Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT), Proj...

As usual, the TED community has lots of news to share this week. Below, some highlights. Human rights for chimps? This week, TED2015 speaker Steven Wise and his organization, The Nonhuman Rights Project, successfully argued for Hercules and Leo, two chimpanzees who have been used for medical experimentation at Stony Brook University, to be ...

About this event: TEDxAdelaide Team brought to you the first TEDxAdelaideWomen event hosted at UniSA's City West Campus. Adelaide’s own TEDxAdelaideWomen aimed to highlight great achievements of women in SA. We invited a mix of men and women to encourage discussion and sharing. Our inspiring speakers took you on a journey to the Space Between. The progra...

In Session 2 of today's Fellows Talks: a waterborne peep show in San Francisco, a triage app that saves lives, the architecture of death, and more! The session starts with Bill "Blinky" Sellanga performing "Usinibore" solo on acoustic guitar. "It was a song I wrote in 2008 in response to the post-election violence," he says, "when I was f...

Glaciologist Michele Koppes travels to some of the coldest, iciest places on Earth for work. Her one-of-a-kind research in the Himalayas fills in gaps of unrecorded glacial change, and may help vulnerable populations adapt to shifting weather patterns. Despite the severe consequences of climate change, Michele finds hope in the optimism of t...

We live in contentious times. Yet behind the dismaying headlines and social-media-fueled quarrels, people around the world -- millions of them -- are working unrelentingly to solve problems big and small, dreaming up new ways to expand the possible and build a better world. At "We the Future," a day of talks at the TED World Theater prese...

How do we manage the transformations that are radically altering our lives -- all while making a positive impact on our well-being, productivity and the world? In a word: reboot. For a seventh year, BCG has partnered with TED to bring experts in leadership, psychology, technology, sustainability and more to the stage to share ideas on ret...

The greatest ideas of our time will be sparked by a simple question: "What if?" What if we had truly inclusive workplaces? What if we removed the inefficiencies that stand in the way of eliminating world hunger? What if we could deliver quality health care in the home? What if we took back our privacy online? At this year’s TED@UPS -- held on...

Across sub-Saharan Africa, small farmers are the bedrock of national and regional economies—unless the weather proves unpredictable and their crops fail. The solution is insurance, at a vast, continental scale, and at a very low, affordable cost. Rose Goslinga and the Syngenta Foundation for Sustainable Agriculture pioneered an unconventional wa...

Women aren't micro--so why do they only get micro-loans? Reporter Gayle Tzemach Lemmon argues that women running all types of firms-- from home businesses to major factories-- are the overlooked key to economic development.

Solar-powered LED lightbulbs could transform the lives of rural Haitians, but as Daniel Schnitzer found, they don't simply sell themselves. At TEDxPittsburgh, he shows how smart health and energy products for the developing world are useless unless the market works too.

We each want to live a life of purpose, but where to start? In this luminous, wide-ranging talk, Jacqueline Novogratz introduces us to people she's met in her work in "patient capital" -- people who have immersed themselves in a cause, a community, a passion for justice. These human stories carry powerful moments of inspiration.

In a globe-trotting career that has spanned corporations, governments, nonprofits and philanthropy, Rosita Najmi has often found herself translating among them. Instead of focusing on leadership style, she makes the case for becoming fluent in the languages of leadership, explaining how it can help you adapt to audiences across industries and co...

What do you think of people in poverty? Maybe what Jessica Jackley once did: "they" need "our" help, in the form of a few coins in a jar. The co-founder of Kiva.org talks about how her attitude changed -- and how her work with microloans has brought new power to people who live on a few dollars a day.

Shaffi Mather explains why he left his first career to become a social entrepreneur, providing life-saving transportation with his company 1298 for Ambulance. Now, he has a new idea and plans to begin a company to fight the booming business of corruption in public service, eliminating it one bribe at a time.

Real narratives are complicated: Africa isn't a country, and it's not a disaster zone, says reporter and researcher Leslie Dodson. She calls for journalists, researchers and NGOs to stop representing entire continents as one big tragedy.

What can you do to build a better world? Sharing stories from her pioneering career dedicated to tackling poverty, Jacqueline Novogratz offers three principles to spark and sustain a moral revolution. Learn how you can commit (or recommit) to creating big, positive change in your lifetime -- and give back more to the world than you take from it....