NextBillion - A WDI Publication

A silent rural revolution in managing microfinance

KOLKATA: Call it a business with a good cause. A strong but silent social revolution is taking place beyond urban borders. Surpassing all targets, an overwhelming number of 18 lakh credit-linked ?self help groups? (SHGs), being predominantly women-oriented, are working wonders in rural areas and in managing micro finance matters. Cumulative bank lendings to SHGs have grown to almost Rs 8,000 crore till November 2005. The southern states of Andhra Pra...

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Daily News & Analysis India (link opens in a new window)

Cisco Systems Sees Massive Potential in Developing World

Many African governments were beginning to spend heavily on telecommunications networks, seeing them as a platform through which to connect communities and start to challenge poverty. Two problems were how Cisco could penetrate so many countries, and the shortage of skills to support its technologies. Networking company Cisco Systems expects to sustain annual growth of 10%-15% for the next few years as the volume of traffic carried on global networks surge...

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Business Day (Johannesburg), Lesley Stones (link opens in a new window)

Region

Sub-Saharan Africa

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...

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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,...

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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 ...

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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...

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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...

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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 ...

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The Daily Star (link opens in a new window)