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A Brazilian company is pushing an entire industry to become more inclusive
The early years of a startup are usually challenging, but Cristina Junqueira had it harder than most. It was 2013 and she was the only female co-founder at Brazilian fintech Nubank, and she was...
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Nubank’s app has been downloaded more than Revolut, Monzo, and N26 combined
As digital banking startups catch on around the world, Nubank has taken a commanding lead when it comes to app downloads. The Brazilian company’s rapid growth shows the promise of mobile banks in...
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The biggest myths about the next billion internet users
A Kenyan farmer stands proudly, looking at his crops while talking on his mobile. A group of Bangladeshi women cluster around a phone to get some health information. Children in an Indian slum look...
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Fossil fuel de-addiction may wipe out a big chunk of India’s government revenues
One of the biggest losers in the fight against climate change could be the Indian government. Taxes and other revenue from fossil fuels contributed $86 billion (Rs6.23 lakh crore) to the budgets of...
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At the Madrid climate talks, carbon offsets—and the future of the planet—are...
Delegates from around the world will gather Monday in Madrid for the start of a week of climate change summitry. This follows a major UN report showing that the goal of holding climate change at 1.5°C...
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Brazil’s president is blaming Leonardo DiCaprio for the Amazon forest fires
The unprecedented fires that burned through the Amazon in August had several culprits: farmers clearing land for cattle ranching, anti-indigenous activists attempting to drive away tribes who live in...
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Indians receive around 26 spam calls a month—mostly from telcos
This post has been corrected. There’s no respite for Indian mobile phone users from spam calls and pesky messages. There was a 15% increase in spam calls in India during 2019, according to data from...
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The world plans to fix climate change with carbon credits. But do they work?
This week in Madrid, delegates from around the world are meeting to nail down the finer points of how to achieve their Paris Agreement commitments. The gloomy backdrop to the UN’s COP25 climate change...
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The decade’s fastest-rising imports in the 12 biggest countries
A decade ago, China did not import much frozen cow meat. The nation brought in about $30 million worth of frozen bovine products (mostly beef) at the end of the 2000s. About half of it came from...
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Nubank is leading the fintech gold rush in Latin America
You are reading a Quartz member-exclusive story, available to all readers for a limited time. To unlock access to all of Quartz, visit our membership page. Early last year, Nubank CEO David Vélez was...
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How US food imports changed in the 2010s: A Quiz!
Overall the 2010s were a period of relatively slow growth for US imports. But the value of live animal, food and drink imports bucked the trend. Those categories grew by almost 60% from 2008 to 2018,...
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Is fintech overhyped or understated?
In the first three quarters of 2019, fintech startups received $24.6 billion in funding. The sector’s unicorns—58 companies including the likes of China’s Ant Financial,…
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How to survive the coming retirement crisis
Few things get people to riot faster than pension cuts. Recent protests in France and Chile were largely about retirement benefits. Even if they don’t take to the streets, around the world people are...
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Indians spent over 3.5 hours on their smartphones every day in 2019
India’s love affair with smartphones is no secret. These devices are the last thing 80% of users in the country see before they sleep. Switching their phones off makes them feel bored, sad, and...
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Why Amazon has failed to live up to its global ambitions
Amazon summed up its hopes for its international sales years ago, in a line buried in its annual reports to the US Securities and Exchange…
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Despite general gloom and doom, Indians are confident about finding the right...
Indians are a confident lot when it comes to finding job opportunities. And the key to that confidence is a good network. For 88% of Indians, networking and knowing the right people is the key to...
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Coronavirus is hammering Latin American economies
Latin American economies are set to suffer heavily from the new coronavirus pandemic and plummeting oil prices, with the region’s collective GDP to shrink 1.5% in 2020, Credit Suisse said in a note to...
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Japan is starting to accept the coronavirus has crushed its Olympic dreams
Update: Japan will soon inform the International Olympic Committee that it would accept a postponement of the 2020 Tokyo games, according to Kyodo News.After weeks of insisting that the 2020 Tokyo...
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How different countries handle their leadership’s line of succession
British prime minister Boris Johnson is in intensive care after his Covid-19 symptoms worsened on Monday (April 6). He has received oxygen treatment at a hospital in London, but has not been put on a...
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India’s offline and online players are pooling their resources to survive the...
India’s consumer goods giants and legacy retailers are forging unique alliances with online aggregators to tide over the logistical hurdles created by the Covid-19 pandemic.Mumbai-based Marico, for...
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Covid-19 has hurt India the most among the world’s top 10 economies
In April 2020, India’s manufacturing and services sectors recorded the sharpest contraction among the world’s top 10 economies.The purchasing managers’ index (PMI) for services, a popular reading...
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Why Silicon Valley is no longer the global model
As coronavirus pushes the world toward a global recession and governments contend with a pandemic that is battering economies and livelihoods with no end in sight, one Silicon Valley voice thinks it’s...
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Covid-19 could change how Americans eat meat for decades
The novel coronavirus that causes Covid-19 has brought United States meat production to its knees.In 2019, the US produced more than 103 billion pounds of beef, pork, and chicken, about a fifth of...
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Rising migration restrictions are driving African refugees into the hands of...
In 2016, Brazilian Federal Police uncovered a smuggling network operating between Brazil and South Africa that delivered fake visas to Africans seeking to travel through Latin America to the United...
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Lack of transparency over Modi’s Covid-19 relief fund hurts Indian democracy
Since India overtook Brazil in September to become the country with the second-largest number of coronavirus cases in the world (after the US), the response of the government of Narendra Modi has come...
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How the US and other major powers handle their leadership’s line of succession
US president Donald Trump has tested positive for coronavirus. He and his wife Melania were already in quarantine after one of their advisers also tested positive, and although the president will have...
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Work from home is burning out Indians—but they still don’t want to go back to...
While working from home in a country like India can have big advantages, the trend, which picked up due to the Covid-19 outbreak, is “negatively impacting wellbeing.”Around one-third of Indians have...
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India restricts WhatsApp from monopolising digital payments—and other...
India has managed to navigate the risk of a potential monopoly by restricting WhatsApp’s newly launched digital payments feature. And this may become a hurdle for the Facebook-owned company across the...
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China’s coronavirus vaccine diplomacy has already begun
China began the year with its international reputation tarnished after anger that it quelled early reports of a new respiratory virus. It hopes to end it on a better note—by dispatching vaccines to...
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Who is using China’s Covid-19 vaccines?
The inoculation of a 90-year-old British woman on Tuesday marked the start of the UK’s first mass Covid-19 vaccine campaign, and will likely be followed by widespread vaccination globally in the coming...
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Brazil is holding the climate hostage for $10 billion annually
As the Paris climate agreement hits its five-year anniversary on Dec. 12, a number of governments including the EU, the UK, Colombia, Canada, and Jamaica have recently rolled out new, more ambitious...
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Southeast Asia is embracing China’s Sinovac vaccine despite its confusing...
In a livestream from the Indonesian presidential secretariat’s YouTube channel, the country’s leader Joko Widodo rolled up his sleeves to receive his shot of the Sinovac coronavirus vaccine, kicking...
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How African body markings were used to construct the idea of race in colonial...
In the 1700s, the gold rush in southeast Brazil created a high demand for mining labor. The Minas Gerais region became one of the main destinations for African slaves. For the first half of the...
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What Indian students thought of Nirmala Sitharaman’s 2021 Budget
For India’s youth, finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman’s budget speech on Feb. 1 was mostly salad dressing and hardly any meat.All eyes were on the Narendra Modi government’s budget for the financial...
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When it comes to deforestation, nothing beats a hamburger
Researchers have known for decades that commodity agriculture is driving deforestation. But a new study by the non-profit World Resources Institute (WRI) puts a much finer point on how this is...
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Rising US treasury bond yields could threaten India’s economic recovery
India’s foreign exchange reserves are at a record high, but there are reasons the country should continue to worry about its currency and economy.Economists believe international investors could start...
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Why have two long-dead Austrian economists become cult figures in Brazil?
In Brazil, two long-gone and much-denounced Austrian economists are experiencing a curious swell of fame. This newfound popularity makes for an unusually clear case study—of how ideas from the fringe...
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India’s deadly second wave of Covid-19 might not peak before June
If trends in other countries are anything to go by, India’s Covid-19 nightmare might continue for more than a month.The second wave of coronavirus is likely to peak only in June, according to research...
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Narendra Modi and other world leaders who made a mess out of managing Covid-19
Covid-19 is notoriously hard to control, and political leaders are only part of the calculus when it comes to pandemic management. But some current and former world leaders have made little effort to...
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What we now know about the efficacy of China’s Covid-19 vaccines
China’s leading Covid-19 vaccines secured their first emergency authorizations outside the country late last year, and were soon in use across the world. Adding together doses administered in China and...
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Is there really a “Nepal variant” of Covid-19?
When Portugal was recently removed from England’s green list for travel, the UK transport secretary, Grant Shapps, blamed it on a new coronavirus variant. “There’s a sort of Nepal mutation of the...
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India’s Covid-19 vaccine is at the center of a corruption scandal in Brazil
India’s homegrown Covid-19 vaccine is at the epicentre of a controversy again.Brazil’s health minister Marcelo Queiroga announced yesterday (June 29) the country would suspend a $324 million contract...
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Both “made in India” vaccines are in the middle of international political...
India’s much-celebrated “homegrown” vaccines aren’t getting the international validation they crave and it’s making the Indian government livid.Yesterday (June 30), India refused to recognise the EU’s...
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Which European countries have recognised Indian Covid-19 vaccines so far?
Indians who have been worried about their future plans to travel to Europe can finally breathe a sigh of relief.Yesterday (July 1), nine European countries reportedly recognised the Covishield vaccine,...
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Which world leaders will—and won’t—be at COP26?
This weekend, attendees from across the world are arriving in Glasgow for COP26, the world’s largest climate conference. Organizers of the global summit, which begins on Oct. 31 and will run until Nov....
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Holding the Tokyo Olympics was absolutely the right call—for Comcast
The 2020 Tokyo Olympics, held in 2021 because of the pandemic, were a successful but muted affair. With the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics set to kick off in February, less than eight months after the...
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Will the WHO’s Covaxin approval answer questions about the vaccine’s trials?
The World Health Organization (WHO) has issued an emergency use listing for Covaxin, India’s homegrown covid-19 vaccine. But will the global health body’s decision answer crucial questions about this...
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The Russia-Ukraine war is set to make Brazil’s fertilizer shortage worse
Farmers in Brazil were already facing a fertilizer shortage. Now that Russia has invaded Ukraine the pressure to find suppliers is even higher to avoid a shortage in 2022.Brazil is the largest importer...
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A ban in Brazil got Telegram to reverse its position on content moderation
Telegram is the last major social network that refuses to moderate misinformation. The app, which has over 500 million users, is run by a libertarian founder and a small team of programmers who are...
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Byju’s tried-and-tested sports sponsorship goals get bigger with FIFA
The world’s biggest ed-tech company is teaming up with its biggest single-sport event.On March 24, Bengaluru-based Byju’s was declared the official sponsor of the FIFA World Cup 2022 to be held in...
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