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Optimism brewing in Africa, Graham Mackay
The Africa World Economic Forum starts today amid high hopes for the continent. This year is being hailed as a significant one for Africa with the New Partnership for Africa?s Development (Nepad) and the Commission for Africa having succeeded in making Africa a central item on the Group of Eight (G-8) agenda. It is easy to be cynical about the prospect of another confe...
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- Business Day
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Economic growth alone will not solve Africa’s woes, By Ed Stoddard
Countries like Angola and Equatorial Guinea should be in a headlong rush to affluence -- at least that’s how it’s supposed to look on paper. Sub-Saharan Africa’s second and third biggest oil producers have seen the kind of huge growth and investment that ought to translate into rising living standards for people in both countries, according to conventional wisdom. Try telling that to the Angolan slum-dweller or the shoeless peasant in Equatorial Guinea,...
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- Reuters
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Designing a better world, by Richard Goering
Engineering at its best is about solving problems, not just cramming more megabytes onto a bus. And one place that’s crying out for solutions is the Third World. Can the problems there be met by interesting engineering solutions that lead to sustainable businesses? Increasingly, corporations and academics are saying yes. February brought news of ultralow-cost PCs in the works from the likes of AMD, HP and Via Technologies. The idea is to wire up the developing world with l...
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- Electronic Engineering Times
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Summit seeks business buy-in for Commission for Africa plan, by Kevin O’Grady
Top businessmen, government ministers and central bankers gather in Cape Town this week for the World Economic Forum’s (WEF) Africa Economic Summit , with the focus on making the Commission for Africa?s proposals a reality. Haiko Alfeld, the WEF’s director for Africa, said at a press conference in Johannesburg on Friday that this week?s gathering ?should be the place w...
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- Business Day
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Vietnam receives WB’s award for innovative environment project
Vietnam has received about US$131,000 in a World Bank competition for the project Environmental Radio Soap Opera for Rural Vietnam. The project is aimed at reducing chemical pollution of the soil and farmer exposure to pesticides by developing a radio soap opera that educates farmers on environmentally-sound farming practices. The soap will be broadcast twice a week over the Voice of HCM City radio and other provincial radio stations to reach about 10 million farming hous...
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- Asia Pulse
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Coca-Cola using up water, foes in India contend, by Moni Basu and Scott Leith
In the holiest of Hindu cities, water is worshipped every day. To touch the Ganges River in Varanasi is to be blessed; to die on its banks and have your ashes scattered in the waves is to find eternal peace. But Coca-Cola has found little peace at its plant in Mehdiganj, a village near Varanasi where life’s essential elixir is turned into 600 bottles of soda pop a minute. Some villagers want to close the bottling plant because they say Coke uses too much water,...
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- The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
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Ripples of India’s prosperity touch its poor, by Saritha Rai
It has been a year since the government of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh came into power promising to embrace those excluded from the country’s new economic prosperity. While the impact of his government’s efforts to help the poor - like increasing credit to the country’s many farmers and pumping in money for infrastructure, especially in rural areas - will not show for another few years, experts say, the bounty from the expansion in manufacturing and services that has b...
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- The New York Times
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Micro finance is now bankable, by Keya Sarkar
Given the amount of press that micro finance as an activity has got in recent times, coupled with a few pronouncements of the finance minister on the subject, a host of banks and finance companies are examining it as a business opportunity. But the way to go about it has eluded many of them, used as they are to the norms of lending for agriculture or corporate finance. It is in this context that I thought a documentation of the experience of ABN AMRO might prove useful. Especially s...
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- Business Standard
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