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

Turning Small Farms Into Big Business

Amitabha, winner of the 2005 Skoll Award for Social Entrepreneurship, now sells inexpensive irrigation systems to small farmers in India who have benifited significantly from the new product. Excerpt: Amitabha Sadangi’s vision is to create the means for sustainable rural livelihood, empowering the poor to achieve food security, improved health and education, increased income and a stable and productive natural resource base. He has worked in rural development for more than 20 years, and has ...

Source

The Skoll Foundation (link opens in a new window)

ICICI’s K.V. Kamath Shapes a Business Plan in Rural India’s Uncertain Financial Terrain

In an interview with Michael Useem, Wharton professor of management and director of the school’s Center for Leadership & Change Management, Kamath discusses ICICI’s foray into rural banking and other challenges. Excerpt: The key challenge is to look to new horizons. Our growth so far has been based on our ability to identify opportunity horizons very early and build businesses to scale those horizons. In our case, we had to get the capital right, get the people right, get the technol...

Source

Knowledge @ Wharton (link opens in a new window)

A revolution in a laptop

In an article published on Sunday, Aljazeera discusses Negroponte and his project to produce a $100 laptop for the developing world. Excerpt: After an inauspicious birth 25 years ago when Ronnie Reagan and Maggie Thatcher were in their prime, the IBM 5150, retailing at $1,565, ushered in the age of the modern PC. A quarter of a century on the legacy of the PC is ubiquitous. Chances are one is at work in every facet of your daily life ? chances are, you are using one r...

Source

Aljazeera (link opens in a new window)

Region

Sub-Saharan Africa

Kenyan bank to use IT to link East Africa

Nairobi - Kenyan, Tanzanian and southern Sudanese nationals would shortly begin to bank in any of the three countries when the Kenya Commercial Bank (KCB) completes the rollout phase of its latest computer technology, a KCB executive has said. According to Dr Tony Githuku, the bank’s technology and operations divisional director, the bank was in the process of acquiring new advanced banking software to link its subsidiaries in the three East Africa countries before the end of the ...

Source

Business in Africa (link opens in a new window)

A Firm Foundation

Excerpt: We can?t all be Warren Buffett: The 75-year-old billionaire recently announced that he would donate $37 billion to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which works to alleviate disease and poverty in developing countries. But that doesn?t mean that we turn a blind eye to the world?s problems: Sometimes, the most seemingly mundane of objects can spark great opportunities for change. For Laila Iskandar, founder and managing director of the Community and Institutional Developm...

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Business Today (link opens in a new window)

Businesses Cash in on Water

Excerpt: Everyone knows there is a lot of money to be made in oil. But a fresh group of big businesses is discovering there may be even greater profit in a more prosaic liquid: water. ?You?ve got exploding urban populations, increased pollution and a need to address those things in a meaningful way,?? said Ian Barbour, general manager of Dow Chemical?s Water Solutions unit. ?Of course, we?re investing significantly in the water business.? Most analysts expect the water mar...

Source

The New York Times (link opens in a new window)

Microloans May Work, but There Is Dispute in India Over Who Will Make Them

Tyler Cowen, co-author of Marginal Revolution , reports for the New York Times from Hyderabad: My visit suggested that microfinance is working, but it is often more corporate, more commercial and under more attack than I had expected. He goes on to describe the tension between state-sponsored microfinance programs and private ones, with interesting anecdotes sprinkled in. MICROFINANCE is b...

Source

The New York Times (link opens in a new window)

Region

South Asia

What works at the top doesn?t work at the base

By Charo Quesada Hobbled by an inadequate and often incomplete basic education, low-income people in Latin America and the Caribbean are forced to take low-skill jobs that offer few opportunities for training or advancement. Obviously, they are also a distinct disadvantage when it comes to starting and running a business. As Alejandro Espinosa of Grupo Nueva of Chile put it at the IDB conference Building Opportunities for the Majority, ?successful businesses can?t happen in fail...

Source

IDB America (link opens in a new window)