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Chavez Promises Plastic Houses for Poor
President Hugo Chavez toured a house made of plastic and promised to build thousands more like it for Venezuela’s poor as he marked the creation of a national petrochemical company. Chavez said the new Corporacion Venezolana de Petroquimica, or Pequiven, will step up production of products from plastics to fertilizer as it begins operating independently from the state-run oil company, Petroleos de Venezuela S.A. We are going to turn Venezuela into a petroch...
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- Associated Press
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IFC Invests in New Africa-Focused Microfinance Initiative
More than 300,000 small-scale entrepreneurs in some of the world?s most challenging economies are expected to be financed over the next five years by PlaNet Bank, a new global investment company for microfinance institutions launched this week. It is a joint initiative of the International Finance Corporation, the private sector arm of the World Bank Group, and PlaNet Finance , an international nonprofit organization dedicated t...
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- IFC
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Cheaper mobile phone-based POS could make African credit card sales easier, by Mapara Syed
For years credit cards have failed to penetrate developing nations the way they have impacted the rest of the world. This is down to the fact that many merchants and traders in these countries do not accept card payments, only cash or cheques. Conventional card payment processing terminals are expensive and most African merchants simply cannot afford them. However, with the rapid growth of wireless technologies new options to bring electronic transaction authorisation to non-traditional location...
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- Balancing Act
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Mani Shankar Aiyar’s Thai dream, by Sheela Bhatt
Union Minister for Petroleum & Natural Gas and Panchayati Raj Mani Shankar Aiyar on Saturday announced a highly ambitious project called Rural Business Hubs, which will aim to eradicate rural poverty and create employment opportunity in rural India. If it is implemented successfully, the project will have far reaching consequences, it is said. Learning from China, Thailand and Japan’s experience of commercialisation of the rural areas and its produces, India has de...
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- Rediff.com
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USAID Partnering To Help Africans Help Themselves Out of Poverty, by Bruce Greenberg
In sub-Saharan Africa, Natsios said, more than 2 million people die annually from malaria and many more succumb to AIDS-related complications even as millions more become newly infected with the virus. With the losses through death and the effects of the debilitating illnesses that prevent people from working, public services suffer, children are not properly educated, and economies begin to atrophy, he said. Natsios described projects USAID is spearheading to control the ravages of m...
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- USINFO
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Hydro Power Development: Private Sector’s Key Role, by Kamal Raj Dhungel
Poverty reduction, an agenda of the first quarter of the twenty-first century, is the main development goal of all developing countries. High economic growth rate is desirable to bring the dream of the goal of poverty reduction into reality. However, experiences have proved that high economic growth rate alone is not sufficient to eradicate poverty. Failures to achieve the national development goal are attributed to the declination of the policies as to how and where the resources of...
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- The Rising Nepal
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Block by block, by Ricardo Sandoval
[Cemex] set out to study the ?auto-construccion? market ? the do-it-yourself home building business that dominates Mexico?s transitional countryside, where farming no longer yields even subsistence incomes, and in the ad hoc neighborhoods that seem to pop up almost overnight on the fringes of Mexico?s cities. The company put its faith in Hector Ureta, an urban planner by training who believed the company had to radically alter its business model to achieve new sales in marginal neighborhoods.
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- Stanford Social Innovation Review
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BVGH Announces Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Grant to Expand Biotech Industry?s Role in Fight Ag
Four-year, $5.4 million grant will help companies overcome market and funding barriers BIO Ventures for Global Health today announced it will expand its efforts to enlist biotechnology companies in the fight to improve global health, with a new $5.4 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. BVGH is a nonprofit venture founded last year by the Biotechnology Industry Organization, with support from the Gate...
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- BIO Ventures for Global Health
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