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Cell Phone Banking Offers Financial Hope to Millions
Imagine your life if you had no access to banks, ATMs, credit cards, or savings and checking accounts -- just cash that you needed to hide or carry around. It would be hard to save, plan, get ahead, take chances, or feel secure. For billions of poor people in the developing world, that’s how life has always been -- and it’s a big reason why many have remained poor. And because they’re poor, banks steer clear of them. Enter the cell phone. In recent...
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Worth a Hill of Soyabeans: How the Internet Can Make Agricultural Markets More Efficient
WHEN the internet took off in the mid-1990s, it was often claimed that it would improve price transparency, cut out middlemen and make markets more efficient. There is plenty of anecdotal evidence for this, just as there is for similar claims about mobile phones. Empirical data on the impact of these new technologies increasingly support the thesis. Macroeconomic studies suggest that the internet and mobile phones boost growth. The effect is bigger in developing countries than developed...
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A Spoonful of Ingenuity: New Ideas for Raising Money for Medical Care
IN THE old days, the job of eradicating disease fell to governments and inter-governmental bodies. Then charities, often led by celebrities or entrepreneurs, joined in. Finally, in the Western world at least, governments accepted the need to pool their efforts with those of private donors, big and small. The effort still seems unequal to the task. Every year, nearly 11m children die before the age of five because of a mixture of poor nutrition and preventable disease. Many of the United Natio...
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Rural Banks’ Service in the Philippines
Rural banks do the nation a great service that people in the cities seldom give a thought to. They serve a market segment big banks don’t want to be bothered with. The money of the farmers, rural businesses and agricultural and fishery entrepreneurs that make up that market segment is too small-and therefore too expensive-for the large commercial banks to attend to. Indivi...
- Region
- Asia Pacific
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GSK, Nestle, Coca-Cola & Dabur Top Up Effort to Tap Rural Consumers
NEW DELHI: Consumer product makers such as GlaxoSmithKline, Nestle, Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, Hindustan Unilever, Marico, Godrej and Dabur ar are rushing to the bottom-of-the-pyramid market with custom-made products six years after management guru CK Prahalad said consumers with incomes less than $2 a day can be a profitable segment for marketers. Estimated at close...
- Region
- South Asia
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Women on the West Bank Fight Poverty with Enterprise
Nearly a year after the war in Gaza, women in the West Bank are overcoming poverty by running their own co-operatives. With help and funding from several aid agencies, women have been able to set up their own small businesses providing training and marketing assistance...
- Region
- North Africa & Near East
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Trinidad and Tobago: SMEs Have Borrowed $225 million
Even as Gerard Talbot-Paul, acting chairman, National Entrepreneurship Development Company (NEDCO), called for a smoother system to be put in place to foster the growth of small and medium enterprises (SMEs), he said they have borrowed $225 million in the last seven years. He said ...
- Region
- Latin America
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