NextBillion - A WDI Publication

Social Venture Network Announces SVN Innovation Award Winners

Organization Rewards Innovation and Social Change Among Leaders of Emerging Enterprises SAN FRANCISCO, CA - October 1, 2007 - Social Venture Network (SVN), the country’s leading network of socially responsible business leaders, today announced the recipients of the SVN Innovation Awards. The winners were selected though the Imagine What’s Next: Ideas that Will Change the Way the World Does Business contest that SVN launched earlier this year as part of its 20-Year Annivers...

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CSR Wire (link opens in a new window)

Business-friendly Reforms Best Way to Advance Latin America Economies

What irony! When it comes to cutting government red tape and creating a pro-business atmosphere, communist-ruled China, Vietnam and former Soviet-bloc countries in Eastern Europe are moving much faster than most of Latin America. A new World Bank report - Doing Business 2008 - which looks at the ease of doing business in 178 countries around the world, says countries such as Croatia, Georgia, Estonia, China, India and Egypt were the most aggressive last year in adopting pro-business ref...

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San Jose Mercury News (link opens in a new window)

Region

Latin America

The Role of the Private Sector in International Development

Kurt Hoffman from the Shell Foundation says we should celebrate the growing acceptance that the private sector has a key role to play in international development - but says there is still a long way to go. We have long argued that Africa?s entrepreneurs need to be at the heart of the war on poverty not more aid and debt relief - the topics that dominate the development agenda. During 2005, when almost everyone was jumping with joy at the G8 commitments to double aid, Shell Foundation w...

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EGov Monitor (link opens in a new window)

Managing Nonprofits: Doing Good Takes Some Doing

You wouldn’t know it from the headlines, but the nonprofit world is facing a crisis. Thanks to staggering and heavily publicized donations by Bill Gates, Warren Buffett and other big donors, funds for nonprofits have nearly doubled in the past decade. They grew last year by 12 percent, more than three times as fast as the rest of the economy. But all this generosity leaves these organizations with a problem they didn’t have before: They will need 640,000 new senior ...

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Newsday (link opens in a new window)

Microcredit Gets Texas-Size Makeover

The microcredit ideas of Nobel Peace Prize-winning Bangladeshi economist Muhammad Yunus?providing tiny loans to help poor people start businesses?succeeded wildly in the developing world, but lenders hoping to transplant the strategy to Dallas had to do some serious retooling to ward off disaster. Michael Hall writes in Texas Monthly that a nonprofit called the PLAN Fund saw Dallas as a natural candidate for microcredit: Nearly three-fifths of the city was in the low-to-moderate income range, a ...

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Wall Street Journal (link opens in a new window)

Ericsson’s Growth Heals the World

We had this discussion when we looked at what we called the next billion, he said, whether we should do another, what we call, a poor man’s network, a poor man’s phone, or something. But nothing is more cost-efficient than to build another billion of what you already [built a billion of]. So, whether it’s Bangladesh, or downtown Tokyo, or in New York, it’s the same equipment. That creates economies of scale right through. Telefonaktiebolaget LM Ericsson? (...

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The Motley Fool (link opens in a new window)

Rural India is Next Big Market for Mobile Cos

It is surely a concept come true for C K Prahalad, whose idea that fortune now lies at the bottom of the pyramid is bearing practical results. Breaking the misconception that only the urban centers power the phenomenal growth in mobile telephone, is latest data compilation introduced by the telecom regulator, TRAI, which shows that rural India is going to be the next big market for the mobile companies. The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India data shows that rural mobile ...

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Newindpress.com (link opens in a new window)

The Geometry of Empowerment

Is India Inc deliberately turning its face away from the hard realism of have-not India?? What indeed can India Inc do to change the face of the country? If such a question is posed to sound byte-savvy CEOs, one would normally expect a welter of one-liners on what can be done. Strangely, however, when this writer asked Nandan Nilekani, CEO and president of Infosys Technologies, at the recent India Economic Summit 2006, as to what corporates can do, he was somewhat circumspect in his response, &q...

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Hard News (link opens in a new window)