Results
News
LONDON: He had two wives, three children and two acres of land scattered in the hills of Nepal. One acre produced maize, pulses and monsoon vegetables to feed them, and the other monsoon rice. In good years they made $100 by selling surplus rice, but in bad ones they ran out of food before the monsoon harvest. Like 800 million other people in the world, Krishna Bahadur Thapa and his family had less than $1 a day to live on. How could they escape from poverty? That w...
Prescriptions for helping poor people help themselvesNews
IDE News - Press Release International Development Enterprises (IDE) today announced a grant of $27 million over four years from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in support of its micro-irrigation programs for Indian smallholder farmers. Bill Gates, co-chair of the foundation, announced the project as part of a package of agricultural development grants at a press conference with Amos Namanga Ngongi, President of the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa...
IDE Receives Second Grant From Bill and Melinda Gates FoundationNews
Intel’s move into affordable computers, and Tata’s launch of the $2,500 car, signal growing recognition that redesigning for currently excluded low-income customers may be the only way to avoid a profit-scrapping scramble for the affluent minority. With disposable incomes threatening to stagnate in industrial countries, and still comparatively low in those newly industrialising, affordability might even displace the currently fashionable drive for sustainability.? By Alan Ship...
Chip and Car Makers Fire Cheap Shots in Low Spending BattleNews
So, given the stakes, it’s understandable why top product designers are a hot commodity in the high-tech arena. But for an increasing number of designers, the stakes are even higher elsewhere: global poverty. Imagine taking the industrial design smarts behind the iPod and applying it to the far more basic technology needs of the extremely poor. In the past, few top designers would have bothered. But that’s changing. At MIT, Stanford, and other universities, youn...
Businesses Have Designs for the PoorNews
Bill Gates? address at Harvard?s commencement ceremony this year brought much-needed attention to the idea of ?creative capitalism?. Talking about the world?s sharpest inequities, Gates convinced his audience that the answer to them lies in making markets work better for the poor. In his words, creative capitalism is about stretching the reach of market forces so that more people can make a profit, o...
Social development v2.0?Blog Post
Pop!Tech session two is about to start, and I’m pumped. As you’ll see from the schedule, the speakers in session two (Jessica Flannery, Paul Polak, and Adrian Bowyer) are probably the most apropos for our “base of the pyramid” audience here at NextBillion.net. Not only that,...
Pop!Tech – Innovation From the Bottom UpBlog Post
Every fall, a small seaside town in Maine hosts an ideas festival called Pop!Tech.? In the past, I’ve jealously followed conference coverage on the blogosphere, trying to picture myself wedged between Bruce Sterling and Stewart Brand while they discuss the future of environmentalism (for...
NextBillion Goes to PopTech This WeekNews
The vast majority of designers put their talent to where the money is: crafting products and services that aim to beguile the richest 10% of the world’s population. Nothing wrong with making a living. But could the tens of thousands of designers who fashion things that appeal to people’s desires?rather than fulfilling their needs?be missing an opportunity to break into a much, much bigger market? Paul Polak certainly thinks so. Polak, the maverick, septuagenarian founder of In...
Design for the Other 90%
