NextBillion - A WDI Publication

How Wireless Technology Will Change Global Health

There is a slick new television commercial advertising Apple’s iPad. It includes a cool medical application that can be used for medical imaging. The advertisement shows a trend in medicine: in the last two years there has been an explosion of growth in wireless medicine, which includes digestible smart pills, networked implantable devices, and smart phone applications. The United States is an innovator in this technology, which has the capability to connect patients and healthcare provid...

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Fast Company (link opens in a new window)

A Maverick Academic with a Hands-On Approach

Reuben Abraham was never really meant to be a business school professor. The maverick academic, whose lofty intellectual nature is grounded by a hands-on business approach, could have easily become India’s first Richard Branson. Instead he opted for a different route, one that has given him the chance to shape the country’s future in a more radical and entrenched manner. Born in the communist-ruled Kerala, Abraham’s love for business is borne out of a deep scepticism of the ...

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Financial Times (link opens in a new window)

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South Asia

Silent and Deadly

AFTER vaccines and bed nets, could the humble cooking stove be the next big idea to save millions of lives in poor countries? Hillary Clinton, America’s secretary of state, hopes so. She was marking the launch on September 21st of a new alliance that aims to raise $250m to supply clean stoves to 100m poor households by 2020. It is headed by the United Nations Foundation, a charity. Among its backers are governments (chiefly America, which has put up an initial $50m), charities (the Shell ...

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The Economist (link opens in a new window)

Making the Grade – Microfinance for Education

Funding poor students could be the next big thing in microfinance. "LENDING to get a student through college is a far better way to fight poverty than making small-business loans," says Ganhuyag Ch. Hutagt, until recently boss of XacBank, a Mongolian microfinance lender. Graduates are more likely to take jobs that lift them into a far higher income bracket-which is why, five years ago, XacBank started offering higher-education loans, typically between $700 and $900, to ...

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The Economist (link opens in a new window)

84% of Villagers Unaware of Internet, Says Report

NEW DELHI: A seven-state survey that tracked rural internet awareness shows that about 84% were ignorant of the medium’s existence. Of those who make use of the net, 85% access emails, 67% watch video and listen to music and 48% conduct educational research. Interestingly about 13% utilize the internet to know about latest farming techniques and 8% to find about fertilizers. ...

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Times of India (link opens in a new window)

Energy in the Developing World: Power to the People

AROUND 1.5 billion people, or more than a fifth of the world’s population, have no access to electricity, and a billion more have only an unreliable and intermittent supply. Of the people without electricity, 85% live in rural areas or on the fringes of cities. Extending energy grids into these areas is expensive: the United Nations estimates that an average of $35 billion-40 billion a year needs to be invested until 2030 so everyone on the planet can cook, heat and light their premises, ...

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The Economist (link opens in a new window)

After SKS success, More Issues Are on the Horizon

It was merely a coincidence that the year after C K Prahalad’s bestseller, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid: Eradicating Poverty through Profits (2004), that Vikram Akula returned to SKS Microfinance, leaving a consultancy job at McKinsey & Company in Chicago that he took a year earlier. Akula, a Fulbright Scholar researching poverty and a student of arts, had founded SKS Microfinance as a non-profit venture in late 1997 with funding close to $52,000 raised from 357 peop...

Source

Business Standard (link opens in a new window)

Region

South Asia

A New Alliance for Global Change

We are witnessing a sea change in the way society’s problems are solved, work is performed, and businesses grow. Collaborations between corporations and social entrepreneurs can create and expand markets on a scale not seen since the Industrial Revolution. These markets will reach everyone, but especially the 4 billion people who are not yet part of the world’s formal economy. They will offer new and remarkable products and services in sectors as diverse as education, transportation, ...

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Harvard Business Review (link opens in a new window)