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London, 6 May 2008?Joining the Business Call to Action, a dozen companies today announced concrete initiatives that apply core business expertise, utilizing their technology and innovative spirit to tackle the multiple challenges of poverty. The announcements were made at the Business Call to Action event, hosted by UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown and Kemal Dervi?, Administrator of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), and with the participation of more than 80 global bus...
UK Government and UN challenge Private Sector to decrease global povertyNews
By Preeti R Iyer & Aniruddha Ghosh For all the noise that it has generated, usage of technology to achieve financial inclusion is still far from what is being desired. Lenders such as Citi and GE Money have withdrawn from advancing small-ticket ...
Banks Yet to Reach Bottom of Wealth PyramidBlog Post
Location: Atlanta, GeorgiaOrganization: Gray Matters Capital Foundation is a charitable arm of Gray Ghost Ventures, a social investment company that seeks to invest in visionary people, with an emphasis on microfinance and education.? Since 1996, Gray Ghost Ventures has worked to foster...
Job: Gray Matters Capital Foundation, Program OfficerNews
The success of OLPC can no longer be judged against ?Negroponte’s early predictions and plans, nor by the technical merits of the laptop itself. Peru is what matters now. When I was in Lima, OLPC’s former chief technology officer, Mary Lou ?Jepsen (she has formed Pixel Qi, a startup dedicated to making even lower-cost displays for OLPC’s computers and others), visited the education ministry to offer help and show staffers how to repair the machines. But she acknowledged that OLPC&...
Una Laptop por Ni?oBlog Post
"What poor countries need most is not more microbusinesses. They need more small-to-medium-sized enterprises, the kind that are bigger than a fruit stand but smaller than a Fortune 1000 corporation.” These were the words of James Surowiecki last month in his New Yorker piece What...
SMEs Are What’s NextBlog Post
Today in New York, I had the pleasure of attending a round table organized by the Council on Foreign Relations entitled The Commercialization of Microfinance: The Good, The Bad and The Ugly. Moderated by CFR Senior Fellow Isobel Coleman, the discussion featured comments from Mary Ellen...
The Commercialization of Microfinance: The Good, The Bad and The UglyBlog Post
In my last post, I put forth a definition on scaling a BoP venture: increasing business transactions that positively affect the lives of the poor. In this post I’d like to address the importance of scaling a BoP venture. Apoovra Shah recently brought up the issue of BoP ventures...
Taking a BoP Venture to Scale, Part 2News
By Jen Haley Lovisa Asinde is a Ugandan widow who supports herself and her five children selling food. She started the small business eight years ago, and planned to open a larger restaurant in the center of her town. But when one of her children fell ill she was unable to work, and she lacked the $500 needed to buy saucepans, plates and food staples. So, strange as it may seem, Asinde went looking for international investors. She found s...
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