-
Drug Delivery
How do you get basic care to the remotest villages in Africa? One clever idea is to borrow tactics from retail chains like McDonald’s and Subway --operate an easy-to-replicate, owner-operated franchise system focusing on health care. Minnesota lawyer and businessman Scott Hillstrom started HealthStor...
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
-
Finding Profit in Servicing the Poor
If someone were to do a poll of the Top 10 breakthrough ideas in management in the decade gone by, the concept of the bottom of the pyramid (BOP) would without doubt be somewhere at the top of the list. The idea?that there is a huge untapped opportunity for companies in creating value for and serving the 4 billion people comprising the world’s poor?has captured the imagination of companies across the world. Overnight, multinationals like Unilever and SC Johnson launched initiatives in this d...
-
Western Union And GSMA To Create New Global Mobile Money Transfer Service
The GSM Association (GSMA), a global trade association representing over 700 GSM mobile phone operators, and The Western Union Company (NYSE:WU), a global leader in money-transfer services, today announced an agreement to facilitate the development of cross-border mobile money transfer services. Western Union and the GSMA are developing a commercial and technical framework that mobile operators can use to deploy services that enable consumers to send and receive low-denomination, high...
-
CGAP Newsflash: Implementing Social Performance
Many microfinance institutions aim to help poor people, but can they prove they are helping? While most MFIs report on their financial performance, few report on their social performance as they feel that social performance is too vague and difficult to report on. Now the Social Performance Task Force has developed a common reporting framework that will help. The framework is a set of indicators that institutions with a social mandate can use to report on their social performance.
-
CDC to Boost Microfinance Fund With $30m
By David Wighton in New York. CDC Group , the UK government-owned emerging markets investor, will today announce it is putting $30m into a new microfinance hedge fund, underlining the increasing commercial interest in microfinance. The hedge fund, called Minlam Microfinance Offshore Fund, has raised just under $40m, including money from John Muse, founder of Hick...
-
BiD Challenge India 2007: Awarding Entrepreneurship for Development
Jointly organized by the Business in Development (BiD) Network Foundation and Intellecap , the BiD Challenge India 2007 business plan competition awarded six amazing entrepreneurs who are making a difference and rewriting the rules for running profitable enterprises for development.
- Region
- South Asia
-
Banking Revolution’s Father Lends his Ideas on How to End all Poverty
Inside a private conference room at Microsoft, top executives leaned around the table, eyes and ears fixed on a small, soft-spoken visitor from Bangladesh. He might not be recognized on the street, but to people dreaming up the next great idea to change the world, Muhammad Yunus is a rock star. One year after he won the Nobel Peace Prize, Yunus came to the Seattle area Tuesday to share his vision for uniting technology and business with a social mission. He calle...