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Professionals, entrepreneurs new pillar of China
Excerpt: China’s 150 million entrepreneurs and freelance professionals are being recognized along with workers, farmers and intellectuals as a new pillar of Chinese society and economic development. The Outlook Weekly, Xinhua’s news magazine, reports that entrepreneurs and professionals contribute one third of the country’s total tax revenues. Emerging as a new economic force they include private enterprise owners, technicians and managers and independent pro...
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ICT Access Centers to be introduced in rural areas
Excerpt: The government for the first time is going to introduce ICT Access Centers for the rural people to attach the underprivileged section to the technology-based knowledge society, reports UNB. The rural ICT Access Centers, to be equipped with modern computers and Internet facilities, will provide ICT-enabled services to the rural people to bring them into the mainstream of development. ?Within next two months, we?ll be able to introduce such knowledge centers,? Sc...
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Seattle may shape “Microfinance 2.0”
Excerpt: It’s not hard to understand why the idea of microfinance appeals to technology entrepreneurs like Kintan Brahmbhatt. Making tiny loans to help very poor people start businesses fosters entrepreneurship, he said. Brahmbhatt, a Microsoft program manager, is convinced this innovative approach to dealing with poverty has the potential to change the world. He’s become an advocate for microfinance at the company, in the Seattle area and in his native India.
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India?s farmers switch faith to mobile phones
Excerpt: FOR centuries, Indian farmers have relied on ancient rituals, the study of wind direction and local gossip to ascertain the annual onset of the unpredictable monsoon rains. Deciding when to sow their crops and when to take their produce to market is based on experience and instinct. In Jaipur, in the desert state of Rajasthan, landowners continue to put their faith in a 16th-century ceremony that is performed every year on the eve of Guru Purnima, the full Moon day in the Hin...
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Poverty-stricken Rwanda puts its faith and future into the wide wired world
Excerpt: Office workers talking over Skype. Fibre-optic cable snaking hundreds of miles underground and to the top of a 4,500-metre volcano. Paperless cabinet meetings with every minister using a laptop. This may sound like an advanced western country rather than a tiny, poor African state. Yet this is Rwanda, now in the midst of an extraordinary development plan to leap into the 21st century. More mobile in every pocket than chicken in every pot, the Vision 20...
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Africa and the G8: A business perspective on progress one year later
Excerpt: Governments and development agencies are starting to take the private sector seriously as a vehicle for development, argues Graham Mackay, chief executive of SABMiller. A year on from the Gleneagles Summit - and governments, NGOs, multilateral organisations, civil society and the private sector are taking stock of what has been achieved in the past year. As an African-originated multinational business committed to helping achieve the millennium development goals w...
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Cheapest Credit Card in South Africa
Excerpt: VIRGIN founder Richard Branson has launched an assault on the second high-fee industry in SA within a week ? ploughing R120m into launching the cheapest credit card in SA yesterday and setting his sights on a full-blown financial services business. This follows Virgin?s launch at the weekend of SA?s fourth cellular company. Virgin?s aggressive move into the banking and cellular sectors promises to bring compet...
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’Let business lift Africa out of poverty’
Excerpt: Big business has something of a poor reputation when it comes to Africa. Critics accuse multinational oil and mining companies in particular of exploiting local people, damaging the environment and helping to prop-up some of Africa’s more odious regimes. It’s an unfair charge and one that’s all too familiar, argues the former boss of an oil giant who now heads one of the world’s biggest mining firms. There is in ...
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