-
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...
- Categories
- Uncategorized
-
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...
- Categories
- Uncategorized
-
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...
- Categories
- Uncategorized
-
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...
- Categories
- Uncategorized
-
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...
- Categories
- Uncategorized
-
Interview with Kurt Hoffman, Part III
This post is part 3 in a 5 part series.A.H.: What?s next, and is there a way to pay for technical assistance as part of the investment process, so that an SME fund could be fully self-financing and sustainable?K.H.: Once we had shown the model worked, and that it could generate a...
- Categories
- Uncategorized
-
From New York to Nairobi, the Parallel Problems of Poor People
In his broad analysis of business and the BOP, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, C.K Prahalad points out that being poor is expensive. With a lack of products and services tailored to fit their needs and incomes, they languish in exploitative informal markets that often prevent them...
- Categories
- Uncategorized
-
New Calendar on Nextbillion.net
We’re pleased to announce that a new Calendar feature was launched today on Nextbillion.net. The Calendar will highlight upcoming BOP-related events, such as WRI’s two regional conferences on private sector-led development, to be held in Brazil and Mexico later this month.As much as...
- Categories
- Uncategorized
