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Live from the BOP workshops in Mexico and Brazil
Some 250 people packed a hotel conference center here in Mexico City to hear Professors Stu Hart and CK Prahalad and a host of Mexican government officials, corporate executives, and social entrepreneurs talk about the business and social opportunities represented by the base of the pyramid....
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New report highlights private sector role in Millennium Development Goals
WBCSD member companies have a combined annual turnover of more than 5 trillion USD, and their products and services touch the lives of about 2.5 billion people every day. Imagine the possibilities if even a portion of this business energy is harnessed to transform the lives of the world’s...
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African Microfinance Fails to Profit
An April 2005 report on the financial performance of Africanmicrofinance institutions (MFIs) finds that more than half of those surveyedfail to turn a profit. Conventionalwisdom (and much of the writing on this site) tends to say otherwise ? that microfinanceis profitable. Maybe...
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Kurt Hoffman Interview: Summing up the Shell Foundation Experience
This post is Part 5 of a 5 part series.A.H.: How does the Shell Company view your activities? How do they see them in a strategic sense?K.H.: What matters most inside a big company is performance. In the early stages, we got help, but no real interest. It was hard to get the business...
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Does insurance serve or exploit the BOP?
Howmuch credit should banks extend to the BOP? Are insurance policies appropriatefinancial instruments for low-income communities? For the last few weeks, theeditorial page of South Africa?sBusiness Day has taken up the debate. On the one hand, the paper reports on...
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Interview with Kurt Hoffman, Part IV
This post is part 4 of a 5 part series.A.H: Why start these funds? What were your motivations?K.H.: The Foundation was designed to focus on social issues that relate to Shell?s business; namely, energy and the environment, and energy and poverty. Both Chris West (Deputy Director) and I...
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Brokering Private Investment to Alleviate Poverty
I?m typically skeptical of developmentagencies? efforts to stimulate business solutions to poverty. When it comes to the Growing SustainableBusiness (GSB) initiative of the UN Development Program, however, perhaps myskepticism is mislaid. According totheir web site,The Growing...
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Housing for the Poor – Part II
A month ago, I posted some information about housing technologies for the BOP. This week, a colleague of mine emailed me to tell me about some of her research in the area. One thing her team has discovered is that the choice of technology may not be as important as the choice of business...
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