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Nestl?: Corporate Citizenship and the Value Chain
Nestl? is traveling its own road with a proposed new corporate social responsibility model. By Ken Stier Nestl?’s recently unveiled Latin America corporate social responsibility report is the food giant’s bear-hug attempt to understand its operational impacts across a vast sourcing, production and distribution chain. It is also a stab at defining a new corporate responsibility model, one that sits more comfortably with the firm’s defiantly unap...
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- Latin America
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Incubating Entrepreneurs
In Chile, a novel training program pairs business-school students with low-income entrepreneurs in a mutually enriching partnership. By Nicole Keller When M?nica Civilo decided to start her own business, she felt disadvantaged because she had no access to financing. (Banks generally require businesses to be up and running, or at least to put up collateral for a loan.) Once she did manage to get the money together, the family toymaker found herself in a complicated situation. ?...
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- Latin America
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Chip maker moves forward with plans to sell an affordable desktop PC in developing countries. Jeremy Kirk Intel has partnered with a Mexican telecoms company to sell an affordable PC designed for first-time computer users in developing countries. It’s the latest effort by technology vendors to develop products for emerging markets. Advertisement Intel said the PC would be a small, energy efficient system with full-featured PC technologies. It will be cheaper than...
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- Latin America
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Fonkoze Helps Transform Microfinance to Reach the Poorest of the Poor in Haiti
After convening a summit on how to modify microfinance to serve the extreme poor, Fonkoze adapts a model pioneered by the Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee. SocialFunds.com -- Marie and Roland may seem like perfect candidates for microfinance, which extends small loans and technical support to the poor to help lift themselves from poverty. Marie sold items at market in Thomonde, Haiti, and her husband Roland worked as a sharecropper planting millet and corn--until they were diag...
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- Latin America
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Switch to the Low-Income Customer
?We?ve changed our standard of innovation so we can serve more of the world?s consumers. So it?s now a better brand experience for the target consumer and a lower product cost structure than the competition can deliver.? Gilbert Cloyd, Procter & Gamble?s chief technology officer, unfolds a disposable nappy on a table at the company?s Cincinnati headquarters. With a lightly elasticated edge and a basic inner lining, it is a prototype that, if proven commerciall...
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- Latin America
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Pro Mujer Launches Integrated Microfinance Program in Argentina, Targets the Most Impoverished
Pro Mujer, a non-profit organization dedicated to helping Latin America’s poorest women help themselves through micro-credit, business training and health care linkages announced today the launch of operations in its fifth Latin American country, Argentina. With financial support from the JP Morgan Chase Foundation, Pro Mujer plans to initiate operations in the province of Salta, Northern Argentina at the beginning of December 2005. An Argentine wine tasting event will be held Nov...
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- Latin America
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Latin American companies find new business partners in unexpected places
?We need to provide opportunities all the way down to the base of the pyramid to alleviate poverty? International companies in Colombia and El Salvador are learning what it takes to do business with the low-income communities in their own backyards. Sustainable livelihoods is a practical way to do business in Latin America, sa...
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- Latin America
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Banco Uno Panama and Banco Uno El Salvador are granted a seven-year loan totaling USD 27.5 million by the Netherlands Development Finance Company (FMO) and its German partner DEG. The loan is to be used to extend Banco Uno’s credit card services to lower-income households. This will give many such households in Central America for the first time access to financial services. This will allow them to borrow and save money and thus gain access to the formal economy. Grupo Financiero...
- Region
- Latin America