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Islamic Banking, tools of the trade
This is my second posting about Islamic banking. I hope to share some information about practices that few people hear about, but are pertinent to doing business in the Muslim world--especially regarding microcredit. For a loan to conform to Islamic law, it must be riba-free;...
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Harvard’s Global Poverty Conference – Abstracts Posted
Last week, Harvard Business School brought together committed scholars and corporate, non-profit and government leaders to discuss the role of business in poverty alleviation. The 3-day conference, Global Poverty: Business Solutions and Approaches, featured case studies on and empirical...
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2005 Milken “Capital Access Index”
The Milken Institute has just published its 2005 Capital Access Index entitled"Best Markets for Entrepreneurial Finance.” This index ranks 121countries by how easily new and existing firms can access capital. As PSD blogger Pablo Halykard points out,17 of the lowest-ranking 20...
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Using mobile technology to fight poverty
The latest issue of Developments, the international development magazine published by DFID, features two good stories about how mobile technology is reducing poverty throughout the developing world. The first points to a new study by the London Business School that researched the effects of...
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Heard of Islamic micro-banking? Us neither.
Having worked for Nextbillion and scoured news sources every day for two months, I’ve been surprised at how seldom any Middle-Eastern, BOP-activity makes the news, compared to, say, Bangladesh or Uganda. (Perhaps I am looking in the wrong places? If you know good SME/BOP-related news sites...
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HBS conference on Global Poverty
"The question is not whether business has a role to play in alleviating poverty. We know that. The question is how.” With that statement, Harvard Business School Professor Kash Rangan opened a gathering of academics, business leaders from around the world, and development officials to...
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“Wikipedia and Global Development”
I just heard Jim Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, speak about “Wikipedia and Global Development” at the Institute for International Economics - co-sponsored by the Center for Global Development. For the uninitiated, Wikipedia is an online, free, open-source encyclopedia that can be...
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Reality check for the $100 laptop
Among the never-ending stream of news stories hyping the One Laptop Per Child project, there finally seems to be a few that strike a healthy note of caution. Both Slate and CNN ran articles this week that ask some very legitimate questions:- “If you’re willing to assume that MIT can...
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