The story began with Zeynep. She is a nine-year-old girl who said she only knows male scientists, so she never thought that a woman can also become one. She never even dared to have such dreams. In fact, she is not the only one who thinks so. Only 18 percent of senior managers are female in Turkey according to the latest Global Gap Report . Realising how such stereotypes and lack of role models affect children, Learning Designs team (a group of women from Turkey) decided to make a tool that will be fun, easy and above all useful and educational for kids. They came up with a kit called TEK -it stands for social equality kit in Turkish- consisting of a board game, posters tailored for children aged between 9 to 14. TEK is designed to encourag...

​First U.N. effort to finance solar energy with cryptocurrency could expand to Eastern Europe where markets are considered mature but funding is scarce ​   Chisinau, Moldova, 4 May 2018 – The UN Development Programme (UNDP) is teaming up with Sun Exchange – a marketplace that finances solar power with cryptocurrency – to help one of Moldova's largest universities go solar. The establishment is expected to meet most of its energy needs from solar power overnight and make considerable savings on its bills, thanks to rooftop installations expected to reach 15,000 square meters in surface area. People who purchase solar cells through the South Africa-based Sun Exchange can lease them out to hospitals, businesses, schools and private reside...

​On Tuesday, July 25, the Maker Hub and the Gelardin New Media Center are hosting a special afternoon of conversation, socailizing, and workshops with the UN Development Programme's Alternative Finance Lab from UNDP Istanbul Regional Hub in Lauinger Library. The afternoon will begin at 2:00pm with a presentation by members of the AltFin Labin the Murray Room (5th Floor, Lauinger Library). The AltFin Lab is an internal startup, run out of UNDP Istanbul Regional Hub for Europe and CIS. It is a mechanism for exploring and tapping into new financial technologies and mechanisms to access investment for achieving Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). They will discuss their activities related to crowdfunding, crowdlending, and crowdinvesting, as ...

Ten months ago we had an eclectic group of people introduce a slew of new financial mechanisms- blockchain based cash transfers and impact bonds for reducing recidivism to forecast based finance for disasters and peer to peer lending for SMEs- emerging into what the ODI calls a new ' age of choice' for the development finance . We tackle this topic not just because there is a $2.5 billion gap in funding the current SDG agenda (even though ODA flows to developing countries continue to increase year on year). We are more tickled by the sheer explosion of money coming from other sources of funding that aren't high on the priority list of either development organizations or governments (admittedly this is fast changing)- the European alternativ...