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Base of the Pyramid: Sustainable Business from the Bottom up
Martin Fisher and Upendra Bhatt are two of the most important people you’ve never heard of. And that’s fine by them. They would rather be popular among poor Kenyans and Indians than featured in the Western press. What do they do that’s so important? They are social entrepreneurs: Fisher’s KickStart and Bhatt’s Aavishkaar harness the poor’s ingenuity and entrepreneurship to build profitable businesses serving basic needs; from efficient irrigation and kerosene stoves to I...
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- North Africa & Near East
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AMD Intros Minicom PIC to Turkey
The cheap box that AMD hopes will allow more people to surf the web was introduced in Turkey today by Dogan Online. AMD said that only nine per cent of people in Turkey have net access. The box Dogan is pushing is bundled with Internet services from e-kolay.net, which is a division of the firm and will be sold through micro financing programmes. It will be sold at 19.95 Turkish New Lire ($14.72) a month. In old Turkish Liras that’s 19,993,625....
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- North Africa & Near East
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IFC’s Partnership With CAWTAR Strengthens Research on Women’s Entrepreneurship in the MENA Region
The International Finance Corporation, the private sector arm of the World Bank Group, has signed a memorandum of understanding with the Tunis-based Center of Arab Women for Training and Research to promote research on women’s entrepreneurship in the Middle East and North Africa. This project will help meet demand from development institutions and women’s organizations for more research on the importance of women’s entrepreneurship for private sector development. It will ...
- Region
- North Africa & Near East
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Nokia and Grameen Foundation USA Join Forces to Bring Affordable Telecommunications to Rural Village
Nokia and Grameen Foundation USA today announced a collaboration to bring affordable, accessible telecommunications to rural villages in Africa through microfinance. This collaboration builds on GFUSA’s global Village Phone initiative that helps people living in rural areas start self-sustaining businesses while providing affordable telecommunications to their communities. Access to affordable and reliable telecommunications services is a lifeline for rural communities and a crit...
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- North Africa & Near East
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A responsible profit from the war on malaria
?Business is for profit, and profit is for a purpose,? he says. ?This makes business sustainable and profit responsible.? When he was 19, Mikkel Vestergaard Frandsen left school, went hitchhiking and wound up in Cairo, where he met a couple of Nigerian wheeler dealers. They told him about some ?easy business? importing trucks, but he eventually decided he would be better off without partners. ...
- Region
- North Africa & Near East
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Housing Microfinance ’To Take Off in Africa’
The trend of providing microloans to poor people to buy houses is likely to rocket in the next few years as an alternative to conventional bank mortgages, says low-income finance expert David Porteous . While delegates to the African Microfinance Conference in Cape Town agreed that housing microfinance was gaining ground across Africa, commitments by the large South African banks could provide a fresh twist to this tale. Un...
- Region
- North Africa & Near East