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

How to Market to Asia’s Masses

Don’t Overlook the Fact That Even Low-Income Consumers Have Needs They Want Help Meeting. For decades, the majority of multinational corporations marketing in Asia have focused on the affluent minority, those who tend to live in urban areas and have shopping habits and product needs that are quite similar to those in the West. But by focusing only on the upper-income urbanites, marketers are missing a vast opportunity at the bottom of the economic pyramid. About 4 billion people i...

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Advertising Age (link opens in a new window)

Tamweelcom Launches Educational Grant Programme, ’Marketing gateway?

Microfinance is in no way charity, rather it is a proven effective tool to assist low-income families move beyond hand-to-mouth survival and plan for the future. With this in mind, one of the Kingdom’s major micro-lenders, Tamweelcom, held an event on Saturday to launch an educational grant programme and a newly developed marketing gateway. Tamweelcom has looked beyond lending like traditional microfinance institutions. We are providing a value chain s...

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Jordan Information Center (link opens in a new window)

The Fortune in Commercialization of African Biosciences

Commercialization of African science is the fundamental solution to healthcare development in Africa and a sustainable solution to the global health challenge. This transformational insight issued out of the KDNC Fourth Business Workshop (KB4W) which took place in Washington, D.C. in August 2006. Previous workshops (KDNC Second Business Workshop [K2BW], and KDNC Third Business Workshop [K3BW]) firmly established that market failure was the primary reason of underdevelopment in Africa, and failur...

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African Path (link opens in a new window)

NGO Brings Lighting Services to Poor Households in India

A new nongovernmental organization is forming a critical link between poor communities, renewable energy providers, and local banks in southern India. Over the past three years, the Small-Scale Sustainable Infrastructure Development Fund, Inc. (S3IDF) has implemented 35 low-investment renewable lighting projects for urban and rural communities, benefiting about 5,500 people. ?Increasing evolution of technology and materials is driving small-scale solutions to be much more cost effective in poor ...

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World Watch (link opens in a new window)

India Nurturing Homegrown Ideas

A little seed money has helped to unleash the potential of this rural nation’s many back-yard inventors. IMPHAL, India. Uddhab Bharali wanted to be a mechanical engineer. But before he could get a college degree, his father developed asthma and could no longer work. The youth decided to start manufacturing plastic bags to support his family. But the machine he needed cost $12,500, five times what he had in savings. So he built his own. Twenty years later, he has invente...

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Chicago Tribune (link opens in a new window)

PM: Find Ways to Tackle Poverty

Enough talk, let?s find real solutions to poverty in the world. Prime Minister Datuk Seri Abdullah Ahmad Badawi said immediate action must be taken to resolve the problem of the poor. Let us, therefore, in the next two days, concentrate on finding solutions to this problem, he told some 400 participants at the opening of the Eighth Langkawi International Dialogue (LID) 2007 here last night. LANGKAWI: Enough talk, let?s find real solutions to poverty in the world.

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NST Online (link opens in a new window)

Region

Asia Pacific

Envirofit: Retrofitting the Two-Stroke Engine

Two-stroke engines emit as much pollution as approximately 50 conventional automobiles. A retrofit kit initially designed to reduce the emissions of snowmobiles is now being applied to the ubiquitous two-stroke motorcycle taxis in Philippine cities. Envirofit, an independent nonprofit company started at Colorado State University in 2003, works to develop and disseminate direct injection retrofit kits to improve the efficiency of two-stroke engines, one of the world?s largest sources o...

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World Changing (link opens in a new window)

Environmental Technologies and the Bottom of the Pyramid

Roughly four billion people, mostly in developing countries, subsist at the bottom of the economic and social pyramid. They are vulnerable not only to the risks associated with poverty, unemployment and social exclusion, but also to a host of environmental threats including poor air quality, contaminated water and climate change. Linking their entrepreneurial talent with the need to overcome the environmental conditions in which they live could accelerate the deployment of environmental technolo...

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Environmental News Network (link opens in a new window)