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Lenders to the Poor Adopt Guidelines
By Elizabeth Malkin For months, the fellowship of institutions providing microfinancing has been angrily divided over the actions of one of its own. Compartamos, a fast-growing Mexican bank, went public in April 2007 and sold $468 million in shares on the Mexican stock market and gave the cash to its investors. Critics said the bank, based here, was putting profit ahead of clients, contrary to the altruistic ideals of microlending, which specializes in giving tiny loans ...
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Tracking Social Entrepreneurs Gets Easier
By Steve Hamm There’s plenty to love about organizations that focus on solving the world’s poverty and health problems?but their impact is often hard to measure. That can make it hard for philanthropies and investors to tell whether their money is well spent and leaves some of them reluctant to channel funds to the social sector. A few foundations hope to change that by shedding more light on the track record of organizations that aim to do good. A group led by Acum...
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Another Green Revolution
From The Economist Print Edition A?clapboard house in Cape Cod is very different from a one-room mud-brick hut in the Indian state of Orissa, but making them into green homes involves a similar approach: using as little energy as possible to meet the occupants’ needs. But in the developing world the impact of new technology can be far more transformative. Consider the cooking of food, which is usually done by burning wood or dung. Typically 80% of the fuel&#...
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The World Needs More Subprime Loans
By Dan Gross What the world needs right now is more subprime lending?a lot more of it. Yes, I know that in the public imagination, subprime lending is the scourge responsible for crippling the U.S. financial system. The massive extension of credit to people who lacked extensive credit histories and documented wages seems, in hindsight, supremely stupid. But far from the madding, depressed crowds of Wall Street, billions of people are starving for credit. Lending tiny sums t...
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HUL to take water purifiers to villages
The country?s largest consumer products company by turnover, Hindustan Unilever Ltd, or HUL, plans to launch Pureit, its water purifier brand, in rural markets by year-end, targeted at relatively well-off village households that are able to afford its recurring cost. Pureit, which marked the company?s entry into the consumer durables business, was introduced in 2005 in Chennai and then in other southern markets before its national launch early this year. Once the roll-out o...
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Pop!Tech Launches Social Innovation Fellows Program
Pop!Tech (www.poptech.org), the renowned annual ideas summit and social innovation network, today unveiled the 2008 Pop!Tech Social Innovation Fellows: a corps of high-potential change agents incubating breakthrough ? or ?big bet? ? approaches to the world?s most pressing social, economic and environmental challenges. Each Fellow is working on a transformative solution to a critical global challenge, in categories such as sustainable energy, human rights, education, economic developme...
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CavinKare to take on HUL, ITC in bottled shampoo biz
CavinKare, a Chennai-based unlisted FMCG company known for its Chik brand, has embarked on a strategy which will test its mettle as a low-cost bottled shampoo-maker in the southern markets. The company, which has successfully competed with multinationals, including Hindustan Unilever (HUL), in the sachet segment to retain leadership in key southern markets, will now have to prove its acumen in the bottled shampoo segment, which is increasingly getting competitive with the new marketin...
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Power to the Bottom
By Lily Huang In Tajikistan, Georgetown graduate student Dan Zuckerman is the face of Kiva, a San Francisco-based microlending organization operating in a region that currently hums with nearly 3,000 Kiva-sponsored entrepreneurs. Zuckerman has to get to know them and act as their bridge to their remote lenders by sharing their stories, both with the people providing loans and with the local microcredit institution, MLF MicroInvest, which is Kiva’s partner. In all ...
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