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The Fight against Latin Poverty
Governments are trying novel solutions in partnership with business--and the poor themselves San Juan de las Manzanas is a hardscrabble little village in central Mexico where families live in barren adobe hovels with dirt floors and no running water. They eke out a living raising pigs and coaxing corn out of the dry clay soil, as their parents and grandparents did before them. Their children rarely attend more than a few years of primary school before dropping out to take menial jobs to help sup...
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Doing Business with the Poor for Prosperity
The SNV ? WBCSD Alliance for Inclusive Business joins forces with the Inter-American Development Bank to increase business opportunities to benefit the poor in Latin America Ann Arbor, Michigan, 10 September 2007 - Building on the success of their Alliance for Inclusive Business in the Central American and the Andean Region, the Netherlands Development Organisation SNV and the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD) today signed a memorandum of understanding with the Inter-Ame...
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Rural B-School Empowers Indian Women
For less than three cents a day, largely uneducated women are learning how to invest their money and run their own profitable businesses On the first day of a 10-day business course, 15 women are gathered in an 8-by-10-foot classroom in western India, absorbing the nuances of finance. Teaching in the local Marathi language, the female instructor peppers her talk with examples to explain investments, credit, profit and loss, and market accessibility. The advanced finance course also will cover su...
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Low Technologies, High Aims
Beneath the bustling ?infinite corridor? linking buildings at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, just past a boiler room, an assemblage of tinkerers from 16 countries welded, stitched and hammered, working on rough-hewn inventions aimed at saving the world, one village at a time. M.I.T. has nurtured dozens of Nobel Prize winners in cerebral realms like astrophysics, economics and genetics. But lately, the institute has turned its attention toward concrete thinking to improve t...
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The World Bank, founded to fight poverty, is searching for the right role in places that need its he
A typical bank will do its very best to retain customers who are relatively mature and reliable. Whenever it deals with these favoured clients, it will try to offer a personalised service, devise innovative products and keep rival lenders away. The World Bank is certainly not a typical bank, but in this respect it follows the norm. It relishes dealing with its ?best? customers: the middle-income countries (MICs), a group whose GDP per head typically ranges from about $1,000 to $6,0...
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Nokia’s Big Plans for India
On a three-day tour of India in late August, the first since he became president and chief executive of Finnish telecom giant Nokia (NOK) last year, Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo highlighted just how important the fast-growing Indian telecom market has become. He visited Nokia’s manufacturing facility in Chennai and met telecom regulators in New Delhi and corporate customers in Mumbai. Nokia has long dominated the Indian mobile handset market, with a 70% share, and on his trip Kallasvuo announced tha...
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Mali’s Farmers Discover a Weed’s Potential Power
When Suleiman Diarra Banani’s brother said that the poisonous black seeds dropping from the seemingly worthless weed that had grown around his family farm for decades could be used to run a generator, or even a car, Mr. Banani did not believe him. When he suggested that they intersperse the plant, until now used as a natural fence between rows of their regular crops ? edible millet, peanuts, corn and beans ? he thought his older brother, Dadjo, was crazy. KOULIKORO, Mali ? When Suleiman Diar...
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IDB President Moreno Calls for Market-Based Solutions for Providing Basic Services to Low-Income Con
Announces partnerships with the World Business Council for Sustainable Development, SNV-Netherlands Development Organization Ann Arbor, Michigan ? IDB President Luis Alberto Moreno today called market-based solutions the key to providing water, housing and electricity and other basic services to low-income consumers in Latin America and the Caribbean. Speaking at a conference entitled Business with Four Billion: Creating Mutual Value at the Base of the Pyramid Moreno urged...
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