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Zimbabwe: Communal farmers benefit from links with commercial buyers
Close to 125,000 rural households in Zimbabwe have seen an increase in crop yields and income following efforts by USAID to boost agricultural production in communal farming areas. Improved agronomic practices have led to higher selling prices, and higher turnover. Communal farmers are now thinking of their farming activities as businesses, and not just subsistence farming. ...
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- IRIN News
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Consumer rights and the fight against poverty
[M]ost debate about poverty, development and the benefits of trade focuses on production - the supply side of the market equation. In reality, markets cannot be effective without a well organised demand side. This requires the empowerment of consumers with information, legal protection and necessary regulation (especially of essential services) to balance the interests of the providers of goods and services. If market economics and the processes of globalisation are ever to realise the wi...
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- Consumers International
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Burkina Faso: Village co-operative works for electrification
The cooperatives in Burkina Faso act like any other client of the electricity company--buying power and then selling it to the villagers. While 60 percent of the start up funds is paid for subsidies and donor support, the villagers with the help of interest-free loans will fund the remaining 40 percent. ’Electricity is a powerful tool for the development and for poverty reduction, that is why we immediately saw the importance of the electrification project,’ explained El Hadj...
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- IRIN News
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Microfinance: A Way Out for the Poor
But the real success of microfinance is that serving the poor has the same benefits as anywhere else, he said: It attracts competition and creates an industry. ’The poor are part of the definition of business. This has dramatic impact,’ [Michael Chu, a poverty expert and HBS senior lecturer] said. Read full article here. ...
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- HBS Working Knowledge
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The Digital Village
The cover story of the June 28, Asia edition of BusinessWeek reports on the role technology is playing in eradicating poverty in India. [New efforts] have become successful and are starting to look like valid business opportunities. Now, the entrepreneurs are starting to discover one another: India has this year been host to three conferences on the use of technology for development in rural societies...With the number of success stories growing, though, Nasscom and the World Bank a...
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- BusinessWeek
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Editorials – Technology, The Poverty Fighter
The World Bank and an Indian software association plan to invest as much as $1 billion in grassroots technology businesses. Corporations should also step up such investments. By promoting local innovation and entrepreneurialism, the tech-for-the-masses movement could not only stimulate economic development in the countryside but also help find the key to turning the world’s poor into the next major source of global growth. ...
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- BusinessWeek International
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Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto has found a way to enrich the poor.
Mr. de Soto points out that multinational corporations are typically among the most direct beneficiaries of his work. Indeed, the formalization of developing country economies may well be the missing link that paves the way for multinational corporations in many industries to enter or expand in these countries, not in their stereotypical role as exploiters of cheap labor and extractors of raw materials, but as seekers of customers, talent, and capital. Trillions of dollars of dead c...
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- strategy+business
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Business & Development 2004
Mark Malloch Brown and Robert Davies argue that Engaging the poor in markets as consumers, employees or entrepreneurs and providing them with services are valid business opportunities - and are increasingly attractive ones as many of the less populous western markets mature and reach saturation point for many goods and services. ...
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- Financial Times
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