NextBillion - An Initiative of the William Davidson Institute at the University of Michigan

USD 7.7 Mn Japanese Aid for Nepal to Fight Poverty

Kathmandu: Japan has granted USD 7.7 million to help Nepal reduce poverty and child malnutrition. The Japan Fund for Poverty Reduction has granted the amount for three projects which will be administered by the Asian Development Bank (ADB). The ADB has teamed up with the government of Japan and government of Nepal to help reduce child malnutrition, develop new livelihood opportunity for the poor and provide greater access to clean energy for poor rural woman through ...

Source

ZeeNews.com (link opens in a new window)

Region

Asia Pacific

When Communities Identify Their Own Poor, Aid Has the Most Effect

When governments and NGOs plan on giving assistance to the most needy, how do they know who needs the most assistance? It’s a question people are at great pains to answer, yet social welfare programs around the world are still plagued by error and abuse. That has not deterred the development of programs to help people escape extreme poverty. But because the poor--especially those earning less than $2 or $3 per day--typically hold informal jobs with no official records about their earnings...

Source

Fast Company (link opens in a new window)

Region

Asia Pacific

East Asia Invests in Basic Sanitation

A series of reports by the World Bank’s Water and Sanitation Program highlights that households that invest in basic sanitation have a better standard of living and thus could increase up to seven fold the return on investment in economic benefits in East Asia. The reports are a follow up to the Economics of Sanitation Initiative (ESI) launched in East Asian countries in 2007. The new reports contain a case study analysis on the costs and benefits of investing in basic improvements ...

Source

Microfinance Focus (link opens in a new window)

Region

Asia Pacific

Rags2Riches Empowers Impoverished Women to Turn Recycled Scrap into Haute Couture

Reese Fernandez-Ruiz was teaching children math, science, and reading skills in Payatas--one of the Philippines’ biggest dump sites--when she noticed something: local mothers were making foot rugs out of scrap cloth that was furnished to them by a group of middlemen, who got the cloth directly from a factory and retrieved the finished products to sell. The mothers made a total of 20 cents per day. Before the middlemen came along, the mothers took the scrap cloth directly from the local du...

Source

Fast Company (link opens in a new window)

Region

Asia Pacific

Rural Chinese Shake Off Poverty Through Self-Development

BEIJING, July 31 (Xinhua) -- On a muggy summer day in Xiuning County of central Anhui Province, Wu Fengfeng still chops wood with a five-kilogram carpenter axe in a workshop of the non-profit Desheng Carpentry School. The 18-year-old boy, who is from a poor rural family in Xiuning, said his only task now is to master the techniques of making the four-sided "immortal eight" table and palace chair -- two types of traditional Chinese furniture -- so that he can "graduate soon and make mone...

Source

Xinhua (link opens in a new window)

Region

Asia Pacific

Bringing Light to the Poor, One Liter at a Time [Video]

A bottled liter of water with a few teaspoons of bleach is proving to be a successful recipe for dwellers in the light-deprived slums of the Philippines. The simple technology is spreading sunlight in places where it has never been, and saving residents money at the same time. Gemma Haines reports. ...

Source

Reuters (link opens in a new window)

Categories

Education

Region

Asia Pacific

Nestl? to Continue (BoP) Expansion in Philippines

Consumer goods giant Nestlé Philippines Inc. will be investing more in the country in the coming years, in a bid to offer new products to more markets, particularly consumers on the extreme top and bottom of the economic pyramid. In an interview with the Inquirer on Thursday, Nestlé Philippines chairman and chief executive John Martin Miller said the company, while already serving a wide spectrum of Filipino consumers, still had markets that were largely untapped. "W...

Source

Inquirer.net (link opens in a new window)

Region

Asia Pacific

Roads and Rice: How Innovation and Infrastructure Can Feed the World

As a new diplomat in 1968, I was assigned not to the chandeliered ballrooms of Europe (as I had hoped) but to the Mekong Delta of Vietnam , as a rural development adviser. The green revolution was just beginning to spread around the world, and a new "miracle rice", known as IR-8, developed at the International Ric...

Source

Guardian.co.uk (link opens in a new window)

Region

Asia Pacific