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What Microloans Miss
Making loans and fighting poverty are normally two of the least glamorous pursuits around, but put the two together and you have an economic innovation that has become not just popular but downright chic. The innovation???microfinance???involves making small loans to poor entrepreneurs, usually in developing countries. It has been around since the nineteen-seventies, but in the past few years it has seized the imaginations of economists, activists, and bankers alike. The U.N. declared 2005 th...
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CNN Heroes: Peanut Farmers Get a Big Hand from Simple Device
In 2002, Brandis was helping a friend repair a water treatment system in a Mali, Africa, village. There, he encountered a woman whose hands were bleeding from shelling peanuts to support her family -- and this was not uncommon. In Africa alone, women spend 4 billion hours a year shelling peanuts by hand, according to the Peanut Collaborative Research Support Program. A sun-dried peanut is like a little rock. It’s that hard, says Brandis. Cracking t...
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The Consumers of the Future
The so called ?next billion? consumers come from Brazil, China, India, Eastern Europe and even parts of Africa and Asia and represent the largest untapped consumer market in the world. The Boston Consulting Group estimates that these new consumers already spend over a trillion dollars a year although they have barely entered traditional consumer markets yet. The individuals who make up this new consumer market are neither especially affluent nor particularly poor, however most are young and e...
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Tata Plans World’s Largest Wimax Network
The Indian telco plans a system of 3,000 base stations to deliver limited or full broadband service to 110 cities. Tata Communications is planning the world’s largest commercial Wimax rollout, with full coverage in 15 cities across India. The Indian telco has contracted US vendor Telsima to build the network, which it expects to capture 200,000 retail customers in 2009. The network of 3000 base stations will provide limited coverage for enterprises in 110 citi...
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Brands and Creative Capitalism
At the recent annual World Economic Forum, Davos, the redoubtable Bill Gates spoke of ?creative capitalism??an approach where governments, businesses, and nonprofits work together to stretch the reach of market forces so that more people can make a profit, or gain recognition, doing work that eases the world’s inequities. There is an increasing recognition and acceptance of this new and more complex definition of business. And at a different level, it could be the harbinger of a new way o...
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Entrepreneurs in Brazil: Betting the Fazenda
SETTLE down at one of S?o Paulo’s sushi bars and before long you will overhear a discussion about a start-up business making energy from obscure weeds, or some other bright idea for relieving members of the country’s growing middle class of their disposable income. A field study of this kind displays a strong sample bias, but the point is clear: Brazil does not lack go-getters. Yet according to a more thorough survey backed by the International Finance Corporation (IFC), a sister orga...
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An Empty Revolution: The Unfulfilled Promises of Hugo Ch?vez
Summary:? Even critics of Hugo Ch?vez tend to concede that he has made helping the poor his top priority. But in fact, Ch?vez’s government has not done any more to fight poverty than past Venezuelan governments, and his much-heralded social programs have had little effect. A close look at the evidence reveals just how much Ch?vez’s revolution has hurt Venezuela’s economy -- and that the poor are hurting most of all. FRANCISCO RODR?GUEZ, Assistant Profess...
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The Only Nonprofit That Matters
(Fortune Magazine) -- Peter Mukasa needs $250 to buy some hooch. Care to help a guy who’s down on his luck if he promises to pay it back? Oops, too late. Mukasa, the owner of a closet-sized liquor store in the Ugandan village of Makindye, posted his funding request on Kiva.org one afternoon in mid-November. Within hours, ten lenders ponied up $25 each to help the man stock his shelves. Case open, case closed. That’s how quickly things happen at the hottest nonprofit on the...
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