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Mobile phones boom in Tanzania, by Simon Hancock
Call centres have sprung up all over Tanzania. Most people do not actually own phones, so this is how many people communicate. It is a good business, and once again these phones are connected via GSM rather than landlines. Others have developed even simpler businesses based around mobiles, such as reselling their air time to others, or make a living sending and receiving text messages. Mobile phones seem to have created a new sector of the economy, and some now ...
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- BBC News
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Chutzpah Science, by Elizabeth Corcoran
Bill Gates’ $28.8 billion foundation is more than double the size of the runner-up, the $11 billion Lilly Endowment, and the projects it has taken on are supersize. On the top of the agenda: battling the diseases that plague developing nations. The Gates Foundation has already pledged $1.5 billion to bring routine vaccines to the poorest children around the world. Now Gates wants to push scientists to create a more powerful arsenal. To put together its list of 14 challenges...
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- Forbes
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A Little-Explored Avenue for Expanding Outreach
Islamic financial services (IFS) can be viewed as an element of the broad process of financial innovation and diversification of the financial landscape. IFS are continuing to evolve in response to market demand and regulatory developments. Basic Principles of Islamic Finance Islamic finance is broader than interest rate prohibition. The general perception of Islamic finance is that it prohibits the practice of paying and receiving interest. Actually the prohibition i...
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- UNCDF: Microfinance Matters
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Indigenous Latin Americans Look Far North for a Model, by Marcela Sanchez
Some native peoples of the Andes are looking north for a new model of development -- but farther north than you might think. They are not asking for access to micro-enterprise loans or for ways to migrate to richer lands. They are thinking big and talking big money. They are imagining homegrown, for-profit corporations where indigenous people are shareholders and multinationals are business partners. To be exact, they are talking corporate capitalism according to the Alaskan model.
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- Washington Post
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Calvert Foundation Boosts Microlending To Women-Owned Businesses In Middle East
The non-profit Calvert Foundation is launching a new Middle East Microcredit Giftshare project in order to extend much-needed microloans to woman-owned small businesses owners and other entrepreneurs in the Middle East. Calvert Foundation is putting up $25,000 for investment in the Microfund For Women in Jordan (MFWJ). Recently, attention has focused on the growing demand for micro-financing in the Middle East. The number of women and others in desperate need of loans for small-busine...
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- CSRwire
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Business Boot Camp: Social Entrepreneurs From Around the World Come to Santa Clara U. to Grow Their
Armed with the knowledge that good intentions do not a successful venture make, 15 grass roots innovators from around the globe will come to Santa Clara University and Silicon Valley this summer to immerse themselves in a two-week business boot camp. Mission: To emerge with a cohesive business plan that will bring their ventures to resource-strapped regions of the world. Starting July 31, entrepreneurs and technology innovators will participate in a two-week incubator pro...
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- Business Wire
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Hatchery business: Dhala villagers set laudable example, by Mahmudunnabi
Only 14 kilometres away from the thana town Trishal in Mymensingh district, there stands a small hamlet named Dhala of about 7,000 people on the bank of the Brahmaputra. Inhabitants of the area were once seriously suffered due to poverty and finding no other option many of them used to resort to criminal activities just for survival. Commuters traveling by Dhaka-bound train when halted at the Gaforgaon rail-station cautioned one another of pickpockets and of theft, because ?Dhala was not far fro...
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- The New Nation
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VoIP on a bike, by Ephraim Schwartz
A bicycle-powered, Linux-based VoIP system: not your usual high-tech architecture. But what if you were one of the more than 1 billion people living without electricity? No power, no phone. The mission of Inveneo, a nonprofit group of inveterate high-tech adventurers, is to bring developing communities that never reached a 20th century level of infrastructure into the 21st century. Its bicycle-powered system brings not just VoIP but also e-mail and Web browsing to remote areas, ...
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- InfoWorld
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