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

Excerpt:? PAHF aims to provide long-term solutions by helping establish local African production facilities for essential medical products, to increase their availability and affordability. It selects vital medical technologies, such as AD syringes and ITNs, which are identified by the WHO as effective at preventing or treating one of Africa’s major diseases. It targets cost-effective medical supplies which can be manufactured from raw materials available in Africa. PAHF wor...

Source

Vanguard (link opens in a new window)

Region

Sub-Saharan Africa

Moody?s upgrades Indonesia on improved finances

Global rating agency Moody?s Investors Service raised Indonesia?s rating to B1 from B2 on Friday, commending an improvement in public finance and a record of sound fiscal management in the past few years. Government debt as a percent of gross domestic product had fallen to 50 percent in end-2005, Moody?s said, adding that it expected further declines. ?Although somewhat more than half the debt is in foreign currency, the great majo...

Source

Financial Times (link opens in a new window)

NAIROBI, Kenya (AP) -- African Internet users pay on average 90 times what Americans pay, crippling efforts by the world’s poorest continent to become competitive, a senior Kenyan official said. Internet users in America pay $20 for one gigabyte of data per month, but people in Africa pay about $1,800 for the same amount of data, Minister for Information and Communication Mutahi Kagwe said in a speech read on his behalf by Permanent Secretary Bitange Ndemo. That’...

Source

CNN (link opens in a new window)

By Abimbola Akosile The Growth of Women in Nigeria (GOWIN), a pan Nigeria women group has commended Nigerian Bottling Company (NBC) Plc for lending support to efforts to alleviate poverty in the country. The commendation came during the presentation by NBC, of various items worth several thousands of naira, as seed capital to GOWIN in Ajegunle, Ajeromi-Ifelodun Council Area in Lagos. Above items...

Source

This Day (Lagos) (link opens in a new window)

Workshop aims to help Vietnam’s poor take advantage of markets

An organization called M4P is exploring how poor Vietnamese can escape poverty by taking advantage of the free market. At a recent workshop in Hanoi, experts said that using market forc es to fight poverty is promising, but far from easy.

Source

Voice of America (link opens in a new window)

Region

Asia Pacific

Professor Muhammad Yunus, the man behind the small loans or microcredit system, has just been in the Netherlands to receive the Freedom from Want Award 2006. While he regards the award as recognition for his work, this economist from Bangladesh says it’s much more important that more people become aware that the provision of small loans - microcredit - is a way for the world’s impoverished to escape from the vicious poverty trap. It’s a method which too few people - in Africa and Lat...

Source

Radio Netherlands (link opens in a new window)

Africa has one of the most highly developed mobile workforces in the world, even in the poorer and least developed countries on the continent, says Eric Anderbjork, Nokia enterprise solutions head for Middle East and Africa. Anderbjork says a limited and unreliable fixed-line infrastructure has led to the rapid adoption of wireless technology by African countries, led by South Africa, which is one of the biggest users of mobile data in the world. Click ...

Source

MobAfrica (link opens in a new window)

Nestl?: Corporate Citizenship and the Value Chain

Nestl? is traveling its own road with a proposed new corporate social responsibility model. By Ken Stier Nestl?’s recently unveiled Latin America corporate social responsibility report is the food giant’s bear-hug attempt to understand its operational impacts across a vast sourcing, production and distribution chain. It is also a stab at defining a new corporate responsibility model, one that sits more comfortably with the firm’s defiantly unap...

Source

GreenBiz News (link opens in a new window)

Region

Latin America