NextBillion - An Initiative of the William Davidson Institute at the University of Michigan

IFC Promotes Sustainable Banking in the Middle East

Lars Thunell, Executive Vice President and CEO of IFC, a member of the World Bank Group, discussed sustainable banking today with the Middle Eastern banking community. He explained how the integration of social, environmental, and corporate governance objectives into financial institutions’ strategy can help them better manage risks and create new investment opportunities. Thunell spoke at a joint IFC and Financial Times dinner, where banks discussed how they can make sustainabili...

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CSR Wire (link opens in a new window)

The legacy that got left on the shelf

When a consumer-goods company casts around for the best growth prospects, rarely does anything look more promising than emerging economies. These markets are growing so rapidly that within just two years they will account for half of all the world’s consumer spending, estimates Harish Manwani, head of the Asian and African businesses of Unilever, a giant of the world’s consumer-goods industries. But even with more than a century of experience in some of these countries, Unilever tripped ...

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Economist.com (link opens in a new window)

IDB Fund Supports Inclusive Business Development in Peru and Ecuador

(Para la versi?n en espa?ol de este art?culo, v?ase el comunicado de prensa del BID ) The Multilateral Investment Fund (MIF) of the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) today announced approval of financing for two non-reimbursable technical cooperation projects in Peru and Ecuador, totaling US$1.6 million and US$1.5 million, respectively. Both projects will target inclusive bu...

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WBCSD (link opens in a new window)

IDE Receives Second Grant From Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation

IDE News - Press Release International Development Enterprises (IDE) today announced a grant of $27 million over four years from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in support of its micro-irrigation programs for Indian smallholder farmers. Bill Gates, co-chair of the foundation, announced the project as part of a package of agricultural development grants at a press conference with Amos Namanga Ngongi, President of the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa...

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International Development Enterprises News (link opens in a new window)

C.K. Prahalad: ’The Poor Deserve World-Class Products and Services’

C.K. Prahalad, author of The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid; Eradicating Poverty through Profit (Wharton School Publishing, 2004), has long championed the notion that business -- rather than government handouts -- represents the most effective solution to poverty. In a keynote speech at the recent TiE Entrepreneurship Summit in New Delhi, he noted that India must pay more attention to entrepreneurship, which he described as the essence of development. We ne...

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Knowledge@Wharton (link opens in a new window)

Region

South Asia

Many Are Already at Work on Fulfilling Gates’s Vision

Bill Gates?s bold Davos challenge to the world?s capitalists last week should have come with equally bold footnotes. There are billions of people who need the great inventions of the computer age, he asserted. Breakthroughs change lives only where people can afford to buy them. With any luck it will mean that the emerging nations will finally complete the promise of a failed computing experiment played out by a team of French and American computer scientists i...

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The New York TImes (link opens in a new window)

The Tata Nao Car Has Two Forms Of Innovation. Shall We Call It Nanovation?

If you go to the official Tata Nano website and check out the bottom left corner, it says inclusive innovation. Click on that and you get to a discussion on the kinds of innovations that Nano represents. One is called frugal engineering by Renault-Nissans?s chief Carlos Ghosen, referring to the simple and inexpensive way the car was developed. It is a methodology you see all over India?in health care, telecom, drug development and now car manufacturing. I p...

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Business Week (link opens in a new window)

Billions of Entrepreneurs in China and India

By Martha Legace Entrepreneurship in the world’s 2 most populous nations, China and India, has through modern times been somewhat asleep. But now, says HBS professor Tarun Khanna in a new book, both societies have woken up, and the results could reshape business, politics, and society worldwide. In some sense people in these societies are running faster than their rules and laws can keep up. So they are creating the rules as they go along. ...

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Harvard Business School (link opens in a new window)