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Monday, June 30, 2008 — No Region Specified

Cracking the BoP code

Source: Hindu Business Line
Pointing towards the slide of an elephant carrying electronic voting machines in Assam, C. K. Prahalad quipped, Don't focus on the face of poverty. Tap the technology. Conventional management wisdom had yet again been questioned by the strategist at a conference focusing on the ?Bottom of the pyramid' market segment at the Maastricht School of Management in The Netherlands, one of the premier business sc hools in Europe. Knowledge-intensive multinationals and wo...
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Monday, June 30, 2008 — Latin America

Doing good by doing very nicely indeed

Source: Economist
For years Muhammad Yunus reigned as the public face of microfinance. It seemed only right when, in 2006, the Bangladeshi economist cum social entrepreneur and his Grameen Bank shared the Nobel peace prize for a micro-lending revolution that has helped millions to earn their own way out of poverty. Yet for the past year or so, microfinance has had another public face, one that troubles people like Mr Yunus. CompartamosBanco argues that the best way for microfinance to help the poor is for it t...
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Monday, June 30, 2008 — No Region Specified

Interconnected We Prosper

Source: International Herald Tribune
The World Bank recently revisited its dollar a day global poverty yardstick and came to a startling conclusion: It was wrong when it said some 250 million people in China had escaped from severe poverty between 1990 and 2004. Instead, by its latest count, some 407 million Chinese citizens rose out of poverty during those 14 years - roughly one-third of the entire population of the most populous country on the planet! This upward shift is being repeated around...
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Monday, June 30, 2008 — No Region Specified

Further international recognition for microfinance programme

Source: Daily Star
MICROCREDIT is undoubtedly the number one image builder for Bangladesh. It has earned the most coveted Nobel (peace) prize for the initiator Dr Muhmmad Yunus and his Grameem Bank. It has earned many other international applauds for the operators, including the recent Banking at the Bottom of the Pyramid prize jointly awarded by the Financial Times of London and the International Investment Institute (IFC) to ASA. Mayor of London Boris Johnson formally announced the prize on June 3...
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Friday, June 27, 2008 — No Region Specified

A sunrise industry coming up in West Delhi?s Uttam Nagar

Source: Live Mint: Wall Street Journal
New Delhi: Shyama Kumari has a new-found sense of confidence. The 20-year-old college goer taught part-time at a local school for two years and saved Rs8,000, which she has put in a bank account. Her banker? The local drug store. Kumari isn?t the only one who banks in a shop and shops in a bank. Around 1,400 people in her neighbourhood, Uttam Nagar?a lower middle class colony in West Delhi?have, through shops that include grocers and chemists, opened accounts that now have between Rs...
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Friday, June 27, 2008 — No Region Specified

Gates Steps Down from Microsoft to Guide Foundation

Source: News VOA
Friday June 27, Bill Gates will step down from his full-time job at Microsoft, the company he co-founded with his childhood friend, Paul Allen. Gates said he will focus his efforts on improving the health and living conditions of the world's neediest people through the world's biggest charitable foundation, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. VOA's Mike O'Sullivan has more from Los Angeles. Bill Gates may be the world's most successful college dropout.? More ...
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Friday, June 27, 2008 — No Region Specified

Sun looks to emerging markets with new division

Source: Channel Web
Sun has launched an new division to drive sales in emerging markets such as South and Eastern Europe, Latin America, India and Greater China. The vendor has also embarked on a series of management changes to realign the business with its latest plan for growth. The new Emerging Markets division will be headed up by Denis Heraud, Sun's senior vice president of A...
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Friday, June 27, 2008 — No Region Specified

Sun looks to emerging markets with new division

Source: Channel Web
Sun has launched an new division to drive sales in emerging markets such as South and Eastern Europe, Latin America, India and Greater China. The vendor has also embarked on a series of management changes to realign the business with its latest plan for growth. The new Emerging Markets division will be headed up by Denis Heraud, Sun's senior vice president of A...
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Friday, June 27, 2008 — No Region Specified

Dell's Quest for Growth: to Offset Domestic Slowdown Company Chases Latin America

Source: Statesman
The shortest distance between a U.S. shopper and the product he or she craves: credit, preferably of the card variety. For many Latin American consumers hoping to get their hands on a personal computer, the barrier is the same - or more precisely, it's the lack of credit. Really, nobody but a couple companies will finance consumers, said Peter Weigandt, head of Dell Inc.'s business in Latin America. Dell and other computer makers are develo...
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Thursday, June 26, 2008 — No Region Specified

Down to business

Source:

It's already launched in Kenya, Afghanistan and Tanzania. And now a mobile money-transfer service from Vodafone is to reach 40 million customers in India. Meanwhile, Microsoft Innovation Centres in Rwanda, Nigeria, Uganda and Morocco are set to provide aspiring business people with the technology to launch new products. And in India, personalised commercial information is being texted to the mobile phones of thousands of farmers in their own language. These three groundbreakin...
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Thursday, June 26, 2008 — No Region Specified

Micro-Franchises Provide Business Solutions for Poverty

Source: BYU NewsNet
It's no secret in the business world - if you want to start your own business with little risk, you buy a franchise. For decades, successful American businesses have been franchised, allowing would-be entrepreneurs a safe place to begin their business. Thanks to a team of BYU researchers and developers, the success of franchises is being used to bring people out of poverty through a new initiative called micro-franchise. For years, economic development practitioner...
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Thursday, June 26, 2008 — No Region Specified

Emerging markets will be key to growth

Source: Financial Times
Emerging economies will become a bigger slice of Procter & Gamble's business in the next decade as it looks to ameliorate the effects of the US slowdown by tapping into the fast-growing markets of Brazil, Russia, India and China. Bob McDonald, chief operating officer of P&G, said that the consumer goods company had built strong positions in Russia and China but was finding India, a stronghold of UK-based rival Unilever, a tougher nut to crack. India is imp...
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Wednesday, June 25, 2008 — No Region Specified

Exploring New Models to Serve the Majority

Source: MicroEnterprise Americas
In Latin America, the majority of the population, approximately 360 million people, remains outside of the integrated economy, living on extremely low incomes and lacking access to basic goods and services such as energy, healthcare, and housing. This majority group shares other challenges such as high dependence on informal livelihoods and the poverty penalty, in effect a fine-a tax for being poor-in forms such as higher costs to obtain potable water and hours wasted ...
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Wednesday, June 25, 2008 — No Region Specified

Pay For It

Source: Forbes
Many of the world's poor don't get good water because they don't live near a piped water connection. Or if they have a connection, it is often bad and irregular, with backflow putting dangerous and dirty substances into the drinking water. The underlying problem is that many governments artificially hold down the price of water, or they won't let water companies cut off nonpaying customers. The result is that water companies don't want to serve these poor customers in the ...
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Tuesday, June 24, 2008 — No Region Specified

Free medical tool tackles disease

Source: BBC News
Our mission is to build a health records system in support of direct patient care, on the ground for the very poorest of the poor, Dr Paul Biondich, a paediatrician at the Regenstrief Institute in the US and one of the co-founders of OpenMRS told the BBC World Service's Digital Planet. OpenMRS was formed in 2004 and is a free application that has already been rolled out in many African countries, including, Kenya, South Africa and Rwanda. The system has been des...
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Tuesday, June 24, 2008 — No Region Specified

Investors boost the 'missing middle'

Source:

William Foote had gained a place at Harvard Business School and was ready to go when he had what he calls an existential crisis. He had already spent some time working at Lehman Brothers (NYSE:LEH) as an analyst in the Latin American corporate finance group. Then followed two years in Mexico on a journalism fellowship, reporting on socio-economic development. But neither his work on multimillion-dollar deals, such as securitisations of Mexican toll-road reve...
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Monday, June 23, 2008 — No Region Specified

Businesses Making an Impact

Source: SmallBiz
While in medical school, John Sargent and fellow med student Ernest Darkoh, who had both spent a great deal of time overseas, found themselves pondering the question: Why is it that you can get a Coca Cola in remote areas of the world, but you can't get aspirin? That's when Sargent realized that the health-care community could learn a thing or two from for-profit businesses. And upon graduation, rather than practicing medicine, he and Darkoh sought out a heavy ...
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Monday, June 23, 2008 — No Region Specified

Poor markets make good cents ? phones, finance and innovation at the base of the pyramid

Source: Receiver Magazine
David Lehr is Senior Advisor, Social Innovations for Mercy Corps and has over fifteen years of experience in international business development focused on software, telecommunications and other technologies. He was a Fellow at Stanford University, holds a Masters from the University of California, San Diego, and a BA from the State University of New York at Albany. Lehr has lived and worked in several countries in Asia and currently consults for a number of non-profits, including Acumen Fund,...
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Friday, June 20, 2008 — No Region Specified

Poor Markets Make Good Cents ? Phones, Finance and Innovation at the Base of the Pyramid

Source: Vodafone Receiver
By David Lehr and Daniel Greenstadt David Lehr is Senior Advisor, Social Innovations for Mercy Corps and has over fifteen years of experience in international business development focused on software, telecommunications and other technologies. He was a Fellow at Stanford University, holds a Masters from the University of California, San Diego, and a BA from the State University of New York at Albany. Lehr has lived and worked in several countries in Asia and cu...
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Thursday, June 19, 2008 — No Region Specified

Cash in hand: why Africans are banking on the mobile phone

Source: The Guardian
For consumers in developed markets, using a mobile phone for banking services is a smart add-on to a bank's branch network. But to people in the developing world, the arrival of mobile banking - or m-banking - is potentially revolutionary. If money is an economy's lifeblood, improving its circulation plays a critical role. Many Africans living in rural areas, for instance, rely on money sent home by members of their family who work in towns and cities. But getting that cash...
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Thursday, June 19, 2008 — Latin America

Latin America's Poor Provide Rich Pickings

Source: The Guardian
Peruvian housewife Genoveva Airaconda spends her days visiting neighbours around her shanty town on the outskirts of Lima. It might not sound like a profitable pastime, but her visits provide a steady income for her family as well as adding to the bottom line of Swiss-based multinational Nestl?. Airaconda is one of hundreds of door-to-door salespeople that the food giant has recently employed to sell their nutritional products in the Peruvian capital. By usi...
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Wednesday, June 18, 2008 — No Region Specified

Microfinance To Provide Cheap Handsets To Poor

Source: Business Standard
Leading microfinance lender SKS Microfinance will join hands with Nokia and Airtel for providing cheap handsets to the poor.?This is our pilot project. We are in the process of it and the MoU is soon to be signed, Vikram Akula, CEO of SKS Microfinance said here today. The company will launch the project in Andhra Pradesh first. As much as 15 per cent of the customers of SKS are already having handsets. We expect 75 per cent of our customers to go for these cheap ...
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Wednesday, June 18, 2008 — No Region Specified

Bridging the Global Digital Divide, One Laptop at a Time

Source: Knowledge at Wharton
On May 20, the non-profit One Laptop per Child (OLPC) program unveiled the second version of its XO laptop, which is designed to bring affordable, modern technology to children in developing countries. In April, Intel announced its next-generation Classmate PC, which targets the same market. Meanwhile, Microsoft has been tweaking its Windows XP operating system for these educational devices, which also run on the open source Linux operating system. Experts at Wharton say that the focus on thi...
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Tuesday, June 17, 2008 — No Region Specified

50 Best Websites 2008

Source: Time
There's a lot of international development news that doesn't make it onto CNN. So bookmark AfriGadget , a site dedicated to simple, sustainable inventions in Africa. Recent entries have covered efforts to create biodiesel fuel out of local pine nuts in Sierra Leone, and programs to build bicycles out of bamboo in Ghana and Kenya. AfriGadget isn't updated every day (and sometimes not even once a week), but it offers such distincti...
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Tuesday, June 17, 2008 — No Region Specified

d.light design Launches Revolutionary LED & CFL Lighting Products

Source: Business Wire
d.light design today announced the launch of its first line of revolutionary lighting products, custom-designed for urban and rural households in developing countries that do not have regular access to electricity and are currently relying primarily on dim, polluting and hazardous kerosene lanterns for lighting. ? We believe that 1.6 billion people without regular access to electricity deserve high-quality, safe and dependable light that they can afford, ? ...
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Monday, June 16, 2008 — No Region Specified

Banks fail to reach rural borrowers

Source: Daily Star
The percentage of bank lending going to rural areas has fallen by 50 percent during the past decade, despite concerted attempts by the government to increase access to credit in the countryside. According to recently released data from Bangladesh Bank, bank advances to rural areas were 16.93 percent of the country's total advances in 1998, but fell to 8.39 percent at the end of December 2007. While micro-credit institutions have been able to provide small loans in rural...
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Friday, June 13, 2008 — No Region Specified

RP shows how to help, not exploit, the poor

Source: Business Mirror
SARI-SARI stores, sachets, electronic loads and unlimited texting. These are just some of the models that the Philippines will be sharing with the rest of Asia on how entrepreneurs can better serve and reach the $3.5-billion ?base of the pyramid? (BoP) market in the region. The Ateneo School of Government,...
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Friday, June 13, 2008 — No Region Specified

Science for the poor

Source: ABS-CBN News Online
How does one help the poor or those who belong to the base of the pyramid (BOP) during these tough times? The Ateneo of School Government (ASoG), in partnership with the International Development Research Center, provided a scientific answer: Innovation for BOP or iBOP. The iBOP works on this principle: the poor should be enabled to be not just recipients, but as consumers of services. Inventors and technopreneurs should create products that answer to the needs and fit ...
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Thursday, June 12, 2008 — No Region Specified

CBN should bar universal banks from microfinance banking?Crown Eagle MFB boss

Source: Vanguard
President/Chief Executive, Crown Eagle Microfinance Bank, Mr. Ben Taiwo Ojomo has called on the Cental Bank of Nigeria (CBN) to bar universal banks from microfinance banking sector. Speaking in an interview with Vanguard at a pre launching of the bank, Ojomo averred that it is misplaced priorities for universal banks to establish microfinance banks as they are supposed to focus on competing globally with other banks. Speaking on the challenges confronting the microfinan...
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Thursday, June 12, 2008 — Sub-Saharan Africa

Microfinance bank pledges commitment to SMEs

Source: Guardian Newspapers
T HE Crowned Eagle Microfinance Bank Limited has made a commitment to add more value to the small and medium enterprises (SMEs). Speaking at the pre-launching news conference of the bank recently at Ikorodu, the President/Chief Executive Officer of the bank, Mr. Ben Tai Ojomo explained that their commitment to SMEs was to add value to their business with enhanced credit facilities. His words: We would position ourselves as a bank for small and medium size businesses and hel...
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Wednesday, June 11, 2008 — No Region Specified

Conceptualization of Market Expansion Strategies in Developing Economies

Source: KIIT School of Management, India
Of late, the issue of market expansion has attracted the attention of academia as well as industry. Market expansion as a strategic growth option is particularly relevant in developing countries like India because of very low product penetration and consumption levels. The McKinsey Quarterly in its global survey of business executives reports that 84 percent of executives consider growing number of consumers in emerging markets as an important trend but a lesser number of executi...
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Wednesday, June 11, 2008 — No Region Specified

Measuring Market-Based Approaches

Source: Alliance Magazine
By Raman Nanda Market-based approaches, which can sustainably provide needed goods and services once donor dollars have dried up, must be a part of the solution to the problems of poverty. However, building new models that provide such goods and services at affordable prices ? in the face of high transaction costs, poor distribution systems, dispersed customers, limited financing options and, often, corruption ? requires imaginative business solutions and partnerships...
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Wednesday, June 11, 2008 — No Region Specified

Global Survey Finds Most Companies Lack Sustainability Strategy

Source: PR Newswire
Results of a global survey of corporations on sustainability released today show that one-half of businesses polled lack a sustainability strategy. Those with a strategy are more likely to be focused on improving perceptions and responding to increasing regulations, rather than meeting social needs or generating revenue opportunities. CEOs made up the majority of survey respondents, and although less than half have a strategy today, 55 percent said sustainability will grow in impor...
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Wednesday, June 11, 2008 — No Region Specified

Banking Access Can Help Break Cycle of Poverty

Source: Calibre
Johannesburg, Jun 11, 2008 (Business Day/All Africa Global Media via COMTEX News Network) -- QUEUING at the bank often seems as inevitable, and about as much fun, as death and taxes. Yet for many in SA, bank services remain far out of reach. The findings of the 2005-06 Income and Expenditure Survey (IES) on access to financial services show up the divisions in the economy that leave so many poor and unemployed, and the way markets continue to replicate the inequalities created ove...
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Tuesday, June 10, 2008 — Latin America

Latin America: Social innovation ? Giving the majority a stake

Source: Ethical Corporation
Latin American companies are getting to grips with ?bottom of the pyramid? business. Illiterate residents across rural Bolivia have never heard of the academic CK Prahalad. And until recently many had never used modern banking services. They still don?t know who Prahalad is, but now they are withdrawing money from a voice-recognition ATM developed by Prodem, a microfinance institution. In addition to understanding verbal instructions, the specially adapted bank ...
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Tuesday, June 10, 2008 — South Asia

Business Basics at the Base of the Pyramid

Source: Harvard Business Review
A decade after founding SKS Microfinance, CEO Akula explains how to make money at the bottom tier of the economic pyramid while raising the living standards of the people who occupy it. His company, which provides many small-business loans and other financial services to poor women in India, has a customer base that has been nearly tripling each year and now numbers more than 2 million. Akula attributes his firm's success in part to heeding three principles: Adopt a profit-oriented approach ...
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Tuesday, June 10, 2008 — No Region Specified

Scojo Foundation Changes Name to VisionSpring, Launches $5 Million Prospectus to Build Sustainable S

Source: Press Release
Scojo Foundation today announced that it is changing its name to VisionSpring to better reflect its mission and brand for the long term and is launching a five year, $5 million dollar prospectus to secure funding to build a sustainable enterprise capable of reducing poverty and creating economic opportunities throughout Latin America, South Asia and Africa.? ?VisionSpring?s prospectus builds on our commitment as part of the Clinton Global Initiative to triple the scale of our impact ...
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Tuesday, June 10, 2008 — No Region Specified

Kenyan mobile IPO may mark market?s zenith

Source: Financial Times
The stage has been set for east Africa?s biggest ? and most hyped ? initial public offering, with record-breaking profits, a share sale almost five-times subscribed and the cheerleading of Kenyan politicians. Safaricom, a Kenyan mobile phone operator part-owned by Vodafone, begins trading on the Nairobi stock exchange on Monday following the government?s sale of a 25 per cent stake in the group. In spite of the euphoria surrounding the company, which dominates Kenya?s two-p...
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Monday, June 09, 2008 — No Region Specified

Microloan Sharks

Source: Stanford Social Innovation Review
Banco Compartamos, the largest microfinance institution in Mexico, is the acknowledged poster child for commercial microfinance institutions (MFIs). From its inception in 1990 until 2000, Compartamos operated as a not-for-profit nongovernmental organization (NGO), receiving $4.3 million from international development agencies and private Mexican donors. In 2000, the organization was reaching 60,000 borrowers? mainly poor women in rural areas. To tap commercial funds for even faster growth, the N...
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Monday, June 09, 2008 — No Region Specified

Review: Out of Poverty

Source: Stanford Social Innovation Review
By Paul Hudnut OUT OF POVERTY: What Works When Traditional Approaches Fail Paul Polak 240 pages (Berrett-Koehler, 2008) Until now, the social enterprise bookshelf contained mostly two types of books?studies of what works, and studies of what?s broken. David Bornstein?s How to Change the World, which chronicles the inspiring work of Ashoka Fellows, best represents the first type. The writings of Jeffrey Sachs, Hernando De Soto, and William Eas...
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Monday, June 09, 2008 — No Region Specified

One Laptop Meets Big Business

Source: BusinessWeek
The fate of OLPC is uncertain, and it's too early to judge the effectiveness of the computers. Still, it's possible to draw lessons about the difficulties of such grand-scale social innovation. The group's struggles show how hard it is for a nonprofit made up largely of academics to operate like a business and compete with powerful companies. They also show what happens when differing philosophies of education and beliefs in how software should be created go head-to-head. Values the ...
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Monday, June 09, 2008 — No Region Specified

Misguided Calls for Business Thinking

Source: Financial Times
?Philanthrocapitalism? is all the rage these days ? the use of business thinking to strengthen philanthropy and the not-for-profit world, which is the world I have been working in since 1982. If I had a dollar for every time I?ve been told to ?behave more like a business? I would be a successful philanthrocapitalist myself. The problem is that these calls are misguided and possibly even dangerous. They threaten to erode the distinctive values and independence of the not-for-profit sec...
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Monday, June 09, 2008 — No Region Specified

Investments in People

Source: Financial Times
The next few years could see a shift in emphasis in the non-profit world ? at least, if the work of organisations supporting entrepreneurs is an indication of the direction the sector is taking. ?Philanthropy is one of those wonderfully antique words that we will stop using in 10 to 15 years,? says Bill Drayton, who founded Ashoka and pioneered the idea of identifying and investing in entrepreneurs. ?The business/social boundaries are simply collapsing.? As models such as venture phil...
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Monday, June 09, 2008 — No Region Specified

Microfinance Unlocks Potential of the Poor

Source: Financial Times
Drawn by their corporate responsibility agendas and the promise of profitability, commercial banks have been entering the microfinance market, with Credit Agricole and JPMorgan among recent entrants. But when it comes to serving the 4bn people living on less than $2 a day, traditional microfinance models are not the only means of expanding access to financial services. In Ghana, for example, Barclaysoffers deposit accounts to traditional Susu collectors, who form part of a...
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Monday, June 09, 2008 — No Region Specified

The Big Trouble In Small Loans

Source: Time Magazine
Rafael Llosa's company has been lending money to some of the poorest people in Peru for 30 years. It used to be a fairly lonely endeavor. Giving tiny loans to impoverished women to make ceramics or to farmers to buy milk cows was hardly seen as a great business. Except that it was. In 1998 the organization Llosa runs, now called Mibanco, converted from a nonprofit into a bank, demonstrating what other microfinance institutions around the world knew too: that the poor ar...
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Monday, June 09, 2008 — No Region Specified

Commencement Address by Muhammad Yunus

Source: MIT News
Below is the prepared text of the Commencement address by Muhammad Yunus, winner of the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize, for MIT's 142nd Commencement held June 6, 2008. Good Morning: It as a very special privilege for me to speak at the commencement ceremony of this prestigious institution. What a wonderful feeling to be here today. To be with all of you, some of the brightest minds in t...
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Friday, June 06, 2008 — No Region Specified

Citibank offers $10m credit facility to ASA

Source: The Daily Star
Citibank, NA Bangladesh and ASA yesterday signed a credit facility agreement for microfinance portfolio expansion in rural Bangladesh, says a press release. As per the agreement, Citibank will provide US$ 10 million in equivalent local currency to ASA, one of the world's leading Micro Finance Institutions (MFIs). Md Shafiqual Haque Choudhury, founder and president of ASA, and Mamun Rashid, managing director and Citi country officer, Bangladesh, signed the agreement on...
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Thursday, June 05, 2008 — No Region Specified

MIT Legatum Center Announces Inaugural class of Legatum Fellows

Source: MIT Press Office
The Legatum Center for Development and Entrepreneurship at MIT announced May 20 that it has selected its first class of Legatum Fellows for the 2008-2009 academic year. The Legatum Fellowships bring extraordinary men and women to MIT to pursue enterprise solutions to some of the most difficult challenges facing low-income countries, noted Iqbal Z. Quadir, director of the center. By empowering entrepreneurs, the business plans created by Legatum Fellows will serve to ...
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Thursday, June 05, 2008 — No Region Specified

Understanding Social Enterprise: Theory And Practice

Source: Article Dashboard
This introductory article attempts to answer questions for: 1. Those in the private sector wondering if social enterprises are a threat or an opportunity for them (and how they might alter their own practice to remain competitive). 2. Those in the voluntary sector trying to work out their medium/long-term future (whether they should engage or resist the notion of social enterprise). 3. Those in the public sector being asked to develop, support or commission...
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Wednesday, June 04, 2008 — No Region Specified

Indian Bank is Emerging Markets Sustainable Bank'

Source: Business Standard
An Indian bank has won the 'Emerging Markets Sustainable Bank of the Year Award 2008' for Asia in the honours constituted by The Financial Times and the International Finance Corporation, a member of the World Bank Group.??? ? YES bank won the award given in recognition to excellence in creating environmental, social and financial value in its operations in India.??? ? As a Public Trust Institution, the (YES) bank takes responsibility for augmenting sust...
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Wednesday, June 04, 2008 — No Region Specified

Financial Times Awards E+Co Sustainable Investor of the Year

Source: E+Co
Bloomfield, NJ - E+Co, a non-profit investment company that tackles climate change and poverty by investing in clean energy businesses in Africa, Asia and Latin America, has been officially awarded as the Financial Times' prestigious Sustainable Investor of the Year. The Sustainable Investor of the Year award highlights groundbreaking achievement in the area of sustainable investment, recognizing programs with outstanding triple bottom-line impact. You hear talk about bout...
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Wednesday, June 04, 2008 — No Region Specified

Trust the Development Experts ? All 7 Billion

Source: Brookings
Why should we care about the debacle of a World Bank report? Because this report represents the final collapse of the development expert paradigm that has governed the west's approach to poor countries since the second world war. All this time, we have hoped a small group of elite thinkers can figure out how to raise the growth rate of a whole economy. If there was something for development experts to say about attaining high growth, this talented group would have ...
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Wednesday, June 04, 2008 — No Region Specified

Retreat to Bottom Line not an Option

Source: The Financial Times
By John Willman Sustainable banking is a term that has acquired new meaning in the past year, as the world?s leading financial institutions have struggled to deal with the US sub-prime lending crisis. Banks that prided themselves on the sustainability of their lending practices have found themselves writing off debt that they had thought was ? almost literally ? safe as houses. Many of the largest have been humbled by the need to turn to emerging mar...
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Tuesday, June 03, 2008 — No Region Specified

2nd Annual Social Venture Network Innovation Awards Applications Now Being Accepted,

Source: KOTA Territory News
SAN FRANCISCO, June 2 /PRNewswire/ -- Social Venture Network (SVN), the country's leading network of socially responsible entrepreneurs, announced today that it is now accepting applications for the 2nd Annual SVN Innovation Awards. The Innovation Awards program supports the next generation of socially responsible business and nonprofit leaders by providing them access to the people and resources to help develop their ideas into successful enterprises. SVN is...
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Monday, June 02, 2008 — No Region Specified

A Stock Exchange for Do-Gooders

Source: Newsweek
By Mac Margolis Celso Grecco used to think his priorities made perfect sense. My plan was to work hard, get rich and retire, says the 46-year-old S?o Paulo marketing ace. Then maybe I'd take up some worthy social project. For a brass-tacks businessman like Grecco, the rules of engagement were clear. Money came first. Saving the world could wait. He made his name by the time he was in his 30s, coaching corporate stars like the tiremaker ...
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