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Rural B-School Empowers Indian Women
For less than three cents a day, largely uneducated women are learning how to invest their money and run their own profitable businesses On the first day of a 10-day business course, 15 women are gathered in an 8-by-10-foot classroom in western India, absorbing the nuances of finance. Teaching in the local Marathi language, the female instructor peppers her talk with examples to explain investments, credit, profit and loss, and market accessibility. The advanced finance course also will cover su...
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Low Technologies, High Aims
Beneath the bustling ?infinite corridor? linking buildings at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, just past a boiler room, an assemblage of tinkerers from 16 countries welded, stitched and hammered, working on rough-hewn inventions aimed at saving the world, one village at a time. M.I.T. has nurtured dozens of Nobel Prize winners in cerebral realms like astrophysics, economics and genetics. But lately, the institute has turned its attention toward concrete thinking to improve t...
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The World Bank, founded to fight poverty, is searching for the right role in places that need its he
A typical bank will do its very best to retain customers who are relatively mature and reliable. Whenever it deals with these favoured clients, it will try to offer a personalised service, devise innovative products and keep rival lenders away. The World Bank is certainly not a typical bank, but in this respect it follows the norm. It relishes dealing with its ?best? customers: the middle-income countries (MICs), a group whose GDP per head typically ranges from about $1,000 to $6,0...
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Nokia’s Big Plans for India
On a three-day tour of India in late August, the first since he became president and chief executive of Finnish telecom giant Nokia (NOK) last year, Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo highlighted just how important the fast-growing Indian telecom market has become. He visited Nokia’s manufacturing facility in Chennai and met telecom regulators in New Delhi and corporate customers in Mumbai. Nokia has long dominated the Indian mobile handset market, with a 70% share, and on his trip Kallasvuo announced tha...
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Mali’s Farmers Discover a Weed’s Potential Power
When Suleiman Diarra Banani’s brother said that the poisonous black seeds dropping from the seemingly worthless weed that had grown around his family farm for decades could be used to run a generator, or even a car, Mr. Banani did not believe him. When he suggested that they intersperse the plant, until now used as a natural fence between rows of their regular crops ? edible millet, peanuts, corn and beans ? he thought his older brother, Dadjo, was crazy. KOULIKORO, Mali ? When Suleiman Diar...
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IDB President Moreno Calls for Market-Based Solutions for Providing Basic Services to Low-Income Con
Announces partnerships with the World Business Council for Sustainable Development, SNV-Netherlands Development Organization Ann Arbor, Michigan ? IDB President Luis Alberto Moreno today called market-based solutions the key to providing water, housing and electricity and other basic services to low-income consumers in Latin America and the Caribbean. Speaking at a conference entitled Business with Four Billion: Creating Mutual Value at the Base of the Pyramid Moreno urged...
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In India, a Quest to Ease the Pain of the Dying
It was a neighbor screaming in pain 35 years ago that set Dr. M. R. Rajagopal on the path to his nickname: India?s father of palliative care. He was dying of cancer, with lots of tumors on his face and scalp, Dr. Rajagopal recalled. His family asked if I could help, and I couldn?t ? I was just a medical student. TRIVANDRUM, India ? It was a neighbor screaming in pain 35 years ago that set Dr. M. R. Rajagopal on the path to his nickname: India?s &q...
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Drugs Banned, Many of World?s Poor Suffer in Pain
Like millions of others in the world?s poorest countries, she is destined to die in pain. She cannot get the drug she needs ? one that is cheap, effective, perfectly legal for medical uses under treaties signed by virtually every country, made in large quantities, and has been around since Hippocrates praised its source, the opium poppy. She cannot get morphine. WATERLOO, Sierra Leone ? Although the rainy season was coming on fast, Zainabu Sesay was in no shape to help her husband. Ditches had t...
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