NextBillion - A WDI Publication

Occasionally, women with ties to Asia and Africa spend an evening with my fiber-arts group unveiling trunks of hand-dyed fabric, mud cloth, intricate beads and batiks. We sip wine, ooh and aah over the items, and haggle for them without mercy. This repositioning of a Third World marketplace into our first-world living rooms is at the core of eradicating global poverty. My friends and I want art-making materials as authentic as they come. We’re also attracted to temporarily eclips...

Source

Seattle Times (link opens in a new window)

Does international business investment help or hinder the fight against poverty?

Financial Times, 8 December 2005 - It takes a good deal of courage, some would say foolhardiness, for a multinational company operating in impoverished parts of the world to open its internal documents to scrutiny by campaigners for fairerglobalisation. But that is what Unilever has done in a groundbreaking project with Oxfam that sets out to explore the fraught question: does international business investment help or hinder the fight against poverty? For nearly two years,...

Source

Financial Times (link opens in a new window)

Selected for Its Work to Alleviate Poverty by Increasing Access to Microfinance, Unitus to Appear in

SEATTLE, Dec. 8 /PRNewswire/ -- Unitus, a Redmond, Wash.-based organization that alleviates global poverty by increasing access to microfinance, is among the 25 winners of the 2006 Fast Company/Monitor Group Social Capitalist Awards. ? The program honors non-profits, or social entrepreneurs, across the nation who combine creativity and ingenuity with business solutions to address the most challenging social problems today, ranging from poor healthcare in developing nations ...

Source

Yahoo Finance (link opens in a new window)

Tiny loans help 66 million of world’s poor hoist themselves out of poverty

Three years ago, Maria Gamara, 35, and her husband, Gustavo, were barely making ends meet by selling clothing at a city market in Asuncion, Paraguay. They lived with their son and daughter in a tiny house within the market. They had no savings and no plans for the future. That’s all changed, said Ms. Gamara, after a $200 (U.S.) so-called microloan from Montreal-based financial services company Desjardins Group and the Canadian International Development Agency let the c...

Source

Globa & Mail (link opens in a new window)

Calvert Foundation Wins Fast Company Magazine’s ’Social Capitalist Award’ for 2006

Bethesda-Based Organization Selected from 125 Award Finalists; Cited for Exceptional Model of Entrepreneurship in Not-for-Profit Service Sector Calvert Foundation, which is devoted to ending poverty through investments in affordable housing, small businesses, microfinance, social enterprise, and other community-based initiatives, is a winner of the coveted Fast Company magazine Social Capitalist Award for 2006. Selected from among 125 finalists...

Source

biz.yahoo.com (link opens in a new window)

BANGLADESH: Community radio to play key role in rural development

Speakers discuss the importance of community radio in South Asia at conference Speakers at a two-day National Consultation on ’Community Radio in Bangladesh’ yesterday said community radio will play a significant role at grassroots level for rural development. They said it can focus on issues of agriculture, gender inequality, education, trade and commerce, disaster, weather, natural calamities, poverty and social problems. The speakers said ...

Source

The Daily Star (link opens in a new window)

AMD Intros Minicom PIC to Turkey

The cheap box that AMD hopes will allow more people to surf the web was introduced in Turkey today by Dogan Online. AMD said that only nine per cent of people in Turkey have net access. The box Dogan is pushing is bundled with Internet services from e-kolay.net, which is a division of the firm and will be sold through micro financing programmes. It will be sold at 19.95 Turkish New Lire ($14.72) a month. In old Turkish Liras that’s 19,993,625....

Source

The Inquirer (UK) (link opens in a new window)

Region

North Africa & Near East

IFC’s Partnership With CAWTAR Strengthens Research on Women’s Entrepreneurship in the MENA Region

The International Finance Corporation, the private sector arm of the World Bank Group, has signed a memorandum of understanding with the Tunis-based Center of Arab Women for Training and Research to promote research on women’s entrepreneurship in the Middle East and North Africa. This project will help meet demand from development institutions and women’s organizations for more research on the importance of women’s entrepreneurship for private sector development. It will ...

Source

IFC (Washington, DC) PRESS RELEASE (link opens in a new window)

Region

North Africa & Near East