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Poverty-stricken Rwanda puts its faith and future into the wide wired world
Excerpt: Office workers talking over Skype. Fibre-optic cable snaking hundreds of miles underground and to the top of a 4,500-metre volcano. Paperless cabinet meetings with every minister using a laptop. This may sound like an advanced western country rather than a tiny, poor African state. Yet this is Rwanda, now in the midst of an extraordinary development plan to leap into the 21st century. More mobile in every pocket than chicken in every pot, the Vision 20...
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Africa and the G8: A business perspective on progress one year later
Excerpt: Governments and development agencies are starting to take the private sector seriously as a vehicle for development, argues Graham Mackay, chief executive of SABMiller. A year on from the Gleneagles Summit - and governments, NGOs, multilateral organisations, civil society and the private sector are taking stock of what has been achieved in the past year. As an African-originated multinational business committed to helping achieve the millennium development goals w...
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Cheapest Credit Card in South Africa
Excerpt: VIRGIN founder Richard Branson has launched an assault on the second high-fee industry in SA within a week ? ploughing R120m into launching the cheapest credit card in SA yesterday and setting his sights on a full-blown financial services business. This follows Virgin?s launch at the weekend of SA?s fourth cellular company. Virgin?s aggressive move into the banking and cellular sectors promises to bring compet...
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’Let business lift Africa out of poverty’
Excerpt: Big business has something of a poor reputation when it comes to Africa. Critics accuse multinational oil and mining companies in particular of exploiting local people, damaging the environment and helping to prop-up some of Africa’s more odious regimes. It’s an unfair charge and one that’s all too familiar, argues the former boss of an oil giant who now heads one of the world’s biggest mining firms. There is in ...
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Tiny Loans Seen as Big Way to Invest in Developing Nations’ Poor
It was at the end of a long, dusty road in Guatemala that Mike Galgon, a Seattle tech entrepreneur, became a believer. He met a woman who used a $50 loan to buy a simple metal-bending machine, allowing her to increase her daily production of buckets from two to 10. By selling the extra buckets, she was able to buy medicine for an ailing daughter, send several other children to school and purchase a second machine to expand her business. At two buckets, you can’t ...
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Report urges reform of business in Brazil
Excerpt: Bewildering bureaucracy, endless paperwork and one of the world?s most onerous tax systems mean that thousands of Brazilian businesses can only survive by operating illegally, according to a report published on Wednesday. The report by the International Finance Corporation finds wide differences among the 13 Brazilian states surveyed but concludes that Brazil needs to radically simplify procedures in order to compete more effectively with other emerging markets.?There is stil...
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India’s tiffinwalas fuel economy
Excerpt: Every morning, 65-year-old Dhondu Chaudhary picks up a lunchbox from Arpana Rao’s home in the suburbs of Mumbai. Mrs Rao relies on Mr Chaudhary to get her husband’s daily lunch delivered to Mumbai’s financial district where he works. That is about an hour away from her home - and looking after her new baby means she barely has time for herself, let alone find the time to deliver a tiffin, or lunchbox, to her husband’s office. That is whe...
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African Farmers try KickStarting Their Farms
Summary: KickStart is a company hoping to help lift African farmers out of poverty by selling them simple water pumps for their crops. Scott Simon talks with Martin Fisher, co-founder of the non-profit company....
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