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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.
- Region
- Asia Pacific
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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...
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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 ...
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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...
- Region
- Latin America
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Entrepreneur gets big banks to back very small loans
Microlending-for-Profit Effort In India Draws Business From Citigroup, HSBC By ERIC BELLMAN SHIVNOOR, India? Vikram Akula runs a company that doles out loans of $100 or less to desperately poor villagers so they can buy a water buffalo or a bicycle. But he’s hardly a typical do-gooder. Mr. Akula, the 37-year-old founder of SKS Microfinance Pvt. Ltd., is at the forefront of the latest trend in microlending, or making tiny loans that ...
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Applying the ?shampoo sachet? paradigm to affordable housing, rather than evictions and demoliti
Professor C K Prahalad’s much celebrated book entitled The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid was launched on the Independence Day two years ago. The book is about how to eradicate poverty through profits. For more than a decade, Prahalad has urged business leaders and leading capitalists to see the poor as individuals and consumers. The poor represent a huge market waiting to be tapped. If you sell products and services in small portions, at affordable prices, your business c...
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MUMBAI: The bugle was sounded for a fresh battle on Thursday in the booming Indian telecom market. ?Don?t stop Mobile?, a new scheme unveiled by Tata Indicom across 20 circles that allows customers to make free outgoing calls for a period of 2 years to any Tata Indicom Mobile or Tata Indicom fixed phone. It allows a maximum outgoing talktime of 3,600 minutes (60 hours) to another Tata Indicom phone. It was only in October last year that Tata Indicom had coined a new free i...
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Mobile phone boom spurs economic growth in Bangladesh
Bangladesh’s booming mobile phone industry has emerged as a key driver of the cash-strapped nation’s economy, creating nearly 240,000 jobs and adding 650 million dollars to gross domestic product (GDP). The mobile phone industry in Bangladesh employs 237,900 people directly and indirectly. These are well-paid jobs with salaries many times the national average, said the study by the international consultancy firm Ovum. Bangladesh is one of the world&#...
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