NextBillion - An Initiative of the William Davidson Institute at the University of Michigan

If you’re in New York City this Wednesday you have the opportunity to learn more about Endeavor, an exceptional organization that supports entrepreneurs in emerging markets take their businesses to the next level. This information session is at their offices at 4pm on May 19. RSVP required.

This past week on NextBillion…

Andrew Eder covered a Congressional hearing on private enterprise in Haiti, including two Haitian entrepreneurs, Mathias Pierre and Olivier Barrau.

Maria Zheng delved into a big topic on which NextBillion frequently only scratches the surface – the base of the pyramid in China. Maria surveys several topics including access to services for urban migrants, family savings, and development driven by tourism. More on China soon, hopefully.

Diana Holloman sat down for an interview with Dr. Iman Bibars, the founder and director of Ashoka Arab World to follow up on the Presidential Summit on Entrepreneurship and discuss the challenges of social entrepreneurship in the Arab world, as well as details on Ashoka’s Housing for All initiative.

Manuel Bueno posted an exploration of how climate change’s impacts at the base of the pyramid will interact with microfinanceinstitutions – part 1 of 2. These are two huge topics that are just beginning to intersect in part based on interest in energy, but carbon finance could open new doors to expand microfinance services.

Heather Esper covered two big new developments in health in Africa– the Africa Health Fund and the Advanced Market Commitments. With half of health expenditure going to private providers in Africa, the Africa Health Fund is putting money into these small and medium enterprises. The AMC in turn involves global pharma companies like GlaxoSmithKline and Pfizer.

Francisco Noguera continued our special coverage of organizations in Latin America from a few weeks ago with a post on the impact investment fund IGNIA (which just made a $4M investment in mobile services firm Finestrella) and an interview with Kelly Michael of Vox Capital and Artemisia in Brazil.

Jobs

Don’t miss it – in the Career Center we’ve posted new positions with the Grassroots Business Fund in Washington, DC, the OTF Group in Kigali, and a Summer Associate role with Jacaranda Health.

Finally, over at BeyondProfit, Adrienne Villani put together a succinct summary of Sankalp 2010, the social enterprise expo that took place in Mumbai a few weeks ago, helpfully formatted in a Top Ten list for why you should regret not going.