NextBillion - A WDI Publication

Reaching out to the missing middle

Deshantori, a heart-wrenching documentary which follows a group of young Bangladeshis through a harrowing journey in search of employment opportunities outside the country, has sparked soul searching questions for Bangladeshis wherever it has been shown. For me, the most poignant moment of the documentary was when one of the survivors of the journey sadly relates that nobody would lend him money to start a business, but they lent him money to pay for a dangerous and illegal passage overseas. Why...

Source

Daily Star (link opens in a new window)

CII focus on skill development

Prof. Prahalad is certain about the potential for India to be the home for at least 30 of the Fortune 100 firms; to increase the country’s share in global trade; become a source of global innovations with new businesses, technologies and business models; and become the world’s benchmark on how to cope with diversity. Advocating entrepreneurial transformation, the document insists that folding the future in rather than extrapolating the past is fundamental. Taking small a...

Source

The Hindu (link opens in a new window)

Mexican microfinance institution Compartamos breaks silence on IPO

Breaking their silence since their April 2007 IPO, Carlos Danel and Carlos Labarthe, co-founders of Compartamos, the leading Mexican microfinance bank, publish an excerpt of their newly released ?Letter to Our Peers? in the latest issue of the magazine Microfinance Insights. The authors, who have been criticized by members of the microfinance community since their IPO brought in extraordinary returns, acknowledge in the letter that social and economic goals can reinforce each other, but state th...

Source

Financial Express (link opens in a new window)

Karoo fish farm set to freeze poverty

IN A massive swing from agriculture to aquaculture, the dusty Karoo will become the centre of a commercial fish-breeding initiative that is set to haul about 250 women out of unemployment and poverty. The Camdeboo Satellite Aquaculture Project in Graaff- Reinet is the brainchild of a local company called Camdeboo Bream, and it is aimed at boosting the local economy and creating employment. The Graaff-Reinet firm?s objective is to become a leader in the breeding and suppl...

Source

The Herald Online (link opens in a new window)

Yoghurt maker’s recipe for funding social businesses

When it launched a nutrient-rich yoghurt for poor consumers in Bangladesh, Groupe Danone (NYSE:DA) , the French food company, hit an unexpected obstacle. It had trained a large sales and distribution team of women, but only a handful were still working after a week. The problem, Danone found after talking to a local charity, was that people there did not like women conducting door-to-door sales. With its partner Grameen, the microfinance institution, Danone decided to talk ...

Source

Financial Times (link opens in a new window)

Mexican microfinance institution Compartamos breaks silence since IPO

Breaking their silence since their April 2007 IPO, Carlos Danel and Carlos Labarthe, co-founders of Compartamos, the leading Mexican microfinance bank, publish an excerpt of their newly released Letter to Our Peers in the latest issue of the magazine Microfinance Insights. The authors, who have been criticized by members of the microfinance community since their IPO brought in extraordinary returns, acknowledge in the letter that social and economic goals can reinforce each other,...

Source

Financial Express (link opens in a new window)

Region

Latin America

Widow entrepreneurs of Gujarat working to earn a decent living

Around 2,000 women meeting on the city’s outskirts had something in common: poverty, business plans, widowhood. And an unfounded fear of earning big. When Hina Shah, director of the International Centre for Entrepreneurship and Career Development, or ICECD, asked how many wanted to earn more than Rs25,000 a month, none raised a hand. My first priority is to make a decent living, says Ameenaben. We are poor people. How can we hope to make so much money? Tha...

Source

Livemint.com (link opens in a new window)

Inclusive business model could serve the poor

Doing business with the poor need not be about philanthropy. Nor does it necessarily mean wafer thin margins. When the bottom of the pyramid is represented by 4 billion people with combined income of about $5 trillion, can companies choose to completely ignore them? Individually, they may be living on less than $8 a day, but as a group their income is equivalent to the gross national income of Japan, the world?s second largest economy. Importantly, the poor are willing to pay for good...

Source

Economic Times (link opens in a new window)