NextBillion - A WDI Publication

Green Businesses in Developing World Get $60M Boost, Along With Microfinance

The International Finance Corp. (IFC), a member of the World Bank group, is launching a $60 million equity financing mechanism to "promote homegrown green innovation in developing countries while encouraging the transfer of clean technologies from developed countries to developing countries." The Cleantech Innovation Facility will help small, highly innovative start-up companies that offer products or services that mitigate carbon emissions. It will n...

Source

SustainableBusiness.com (link opens in a new window)

Categories

Health Care

Region

Latin America

International Medical Corps Helps Haiti in its Long Haul

International Medical Corps is a model for global not-for-profits, with a plan that goes way beyond drop-in disaster relief. In Haiti, IMC is training locals, building communities, and doing everything it can to put itself to pasture. Dan Khodabakhsh doesn’t require a whole lot of sleep. It’s perfectly normal, in fact, for the 33-year-old doctor to work a double shift bandaging up drunks and pulling bullets from teenagers in the emergency room of UCLA’s Harbor Medical Center...

Source

Fast Company (link opens in a new window)

Region

Latin America

Seattle Microfinance Nonprofit Looks Beyond Loans to Education

Global Partnerships , a Seattle-based nonprofit that provides microfinance to the developing world, has shifted its strategy in recent years to expand its focus beyond the traditional microloans that it started with 17 years ago. ...

Source

Puget Sound Business Journal (link opens in a new window)

Region

Latin America

Peru Has Best Environment for Microfinance in Global Ranking

Lima, Oct. 11 (ANDINA). Peru has finished atop the Global Microscope on the Microfinance Business Environment 2011 for a third straight year, buoyed by an excellent legal framework, sophisticated regulators and a government commitment to use microfinance to expand financial access to the poor. This annual study, prepared by The Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU), ranks the business environment for microfinance in 55 countries and provides a perspective on both country-sp...

Source

Andina (link opens in a new window)

Region

Latin America

Banmujer: Benefitting Over 300,000 Venezuelan Families Since 2001

One of Venezuela’s most important public institutions created to assist impoverished women through micro- credit lending celebrated its 10-year anniversary last week. Banmujer first came into existence on September 21, 2001 as government run bank with the specific purpose of funding socio-productive business initiatives for women in particularly dire economic conditions. Since that time, the women’s bank has granted more than 138 thousand micro-credits, benefiting over 300,...

Source

venezuelanalysis.com (link opens in a new window)

Region

Latin America

Global Partnerships Makes First Investments in Colombia

Global Partnerships (GP), a nonprofit social investor based in Seattle, Washington, and Managua Nicaragua, announced today that it has made its first loans to two partner organizations based in Colombia: Fundación Amanecer and Contactar. With the addition of these two partners to its portfolio, GP is supporting the work of 33 microfinance organizations and cooperatives in eight countries in Latin America, including Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, El Salvador, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua an...

Source

Global Partnerships (link opens in a new window)

Region

Latin America

Loan Ranger

On a hot summer day in Manaus, Brazil, Diana Taylor, the former banking superintendent of New York and longtime companion of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, was strolling through a slum. A city of about two million in the middle of the Amazon, Manaus is where the Boston-based microfinance group Acción International started an ambitious lending operation in February, and Taylor, who is chairwoman of the group’s board, had flown down with a delegation...

Source

The New York Times (link opens in a new window)

Region

Latin America

Grameen Foundation and USAID Providing $3 Million for Peruvian Microfinance Institutions

Grameen Foundation and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) today announced that they are jointly providing a $1.5 million credit guarantee to the Peruvian savings and credit cooperative Cooperativa de Ahorro y Credito (ABACO) to support approximately $3 million for local currency financing to two socially-focused Peruvian microfinance institutions (MFIs). Peru has an established microfinance sector, with mature institutions having relatively easy access to internationa...

Source

MarketWatch (link opens in a new window)

Region

Latin America