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

Wanted: Web Content for Rural India

Two days back, a close friend called to say that she plans to work on a documentary on how technology is changing the lives of rural Indians. She arm-twisted me into meeting her for lunch, before she vanishes into the remote villages of India for a few months. Two days back, a close friend called to say that she plans to work on a documentary on how technology is changing the lives of rural Indians. She arm-twisted me into meeting her for lunch, before she vanishes into the remote villages...

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ZD net Asia (link opens in a new window)

There are no VCs yet Dedicated to Clean Tech, Renewable Energy

Suneel Parasnis, country director for Hyderabad-based New Ventures India, talks about how his team identifies businesses best suited for funding. Country director for Hyderabad-based New Ventures India, Suneel Parasnis, helps start-ups in clean technology and renewable energy?areas relatively untouched by venture capital? raise funds. The typical funding requirement is between $100,000 and $5 million (Rs41.6 lakh and Rs20.8 crore). The challenge: most available investors seek deals s...

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LiveMint.com Wall Street Journal (link opens in a new window)

World’s Poorest, Living on $1, Get Hypothetical Help in Survey

How many people in the world live on less than $1 a day? When U.S. workers in an online survey answered that question, 23 percent correctly said 1 billion people or more. The survey, sponsored by the nonprofit group Millennium Promise, gathered information from 6,823 employees at U.S. companies and released the results today. Millennium Promise was founded by the economist Jeffrey D. Sachs to help ease extreme poverty in African villages. Sixty percent of the sur...

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Bloomberg (link opens in a new window)

Hope and despair in micro-finance

These last few months have been marked by deals in the microfinance industry never witnessed before. With $12.5m into Spandana (of which $10m came from JM Financial), $11.5m in SKS Microfinance (majority from Silicon Valley-based Sequoia Capital) and a whopping $27m in Share (of which $25 m came from Dubai based Legatum Capital), suddenly all MFI CEOs seem to be talking about raising capital and doing it quick lest they miss the bus. But in a nascent industry MFIs large enough (with ...

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Business Standard, India (link opens in a new window)

Region

Asia Pacific

Managing Globalization: To Reduce Poverty, Money isn’t Everything

How much can governments do to fight poverty? In South America, a couple of answers are emerging in the growing economies of Venezuela and Brazil. Both governments have publicly pledged billions of dollars to raise living standards - but have they succeeded? Overall income is moving upward in both countries, if for different reasons. Venezuela is riding the black tide of high-priced oil, while Brazil’s relatively firm economic policies have built confidence in its business prospec...

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International Herald Tribune (link opens in a new window)

Eradicating Poverty Through Small Business Ventures

GUYANA Small Business Association (GSBA), in collaboration with Guyana Micro-Projects Programme (GMPP), is conducting a series of one-week training courses funded by the European Union (EU). They are being conducted at the GSBA Secretariat, Lot 160 Waterloo Street, North Cummingsburg, Georgetown, at no cost and interested persons can make contact at the address. A press release said the sessions between 5 p.m. and 9p.m. are intended to empower the disadvantaged through smal...

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Guyana Chronicle (link opens in a new window)

Upward Mobile-ity for India’s Poor

During the late 1990s, an often repeated story about India’s mobile revolution featured fishermen in the southern Indian state of Kerala who used their mobile phones to call wholesale agents before reaching the shore to check market prices. Considering that mobile calls used to cost 20 cents a minute in those days and were obviously limited to the affluent, the story appeared apocryphal to some. There is now research that has mapped the benefits to those fishermen. The study, by R...

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Wall Street Journal (link opens in a new window)

Africa’s Village of Dreams

Sauri must be the luckiest village in Africa. The maize is taller, the water cleaner, and the schoolchildren better fed than almost anywhere else south of the ?Sahara. Just two years ago, Sauri was an ordinary Kenyan village where poverty, hunger, and illness were facts of everyday life. Now it is an experiment, a prototype Millennium Village. The idea is simple: Every year for five years, invest roughly $100 for each of the village’s 5,000 inhabitants, and see what ?...

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The Wilson Quarterly (link opens in a new window)