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Blog Post
Guest blogger Ben Powell is Managing Partner of Agora Partnerships. Last week, he traveled to Sao Paolo, Brazil, to attend Innovation for the Third Sector: Sustainability and Social Impact, and filed this report. Read below for Ben’s observations of the rapidly growing Latin American social...
Conference Report – Innovation for the Third SectorNews
This article highlights the difficulty of diving into the potentially massive, but messy business of selling clean water to poor people. Many have tried to help developing nations with their water problems; few have come up with a way to profit from the effort. KAIKALURU, India -- After draining this town’s pool of drinking water recently, cleaners found drowned rats and bloated lizards. But at least, as is common at other storage tanks across this parched land in eastern India, there were n...
Behind One Effort to Tap Into India’s Water MarketBlog Post
Some of my recent blog posts focused on venture capitalism (Wulff Capital, Agora Partnerships). Well, it must be a trend ? I just came across Echoing Green.Echoing Green is an angel investor for entrepreneurs focused on social change. They provide seed funding and support to entrepreneurs...
Social Entrepreneurs: Echoing Green’s 2007 FellowsNews
Recently, I was at a friend’s office in Lagos and we were discussing issues bordering on the economy and business. We were analysing the business climate in Nigeria vis-?-vis the prevailing government policies, especially with regard to banks. My friend is managing a medium sized private business in the aviation sector, which is apparently doing well with prospects for growth. He is looking forward to expanding and making the business bigger. We were also discussing the prospects of one star...
Can the Banks Fight Poverty?News
When Communications Commission of Kenya director-general Joseph Waweru told journalists last November that mobile phone call tariffs would drop by half in the next 12 months, very few believed such a feat was achievable. Then, the average cost of a wireless call within one network stood at a high of Sh30 per minute, while calls across networks were priced at as high as Sh50 per minute. Aug 13, 2007 (Business Daily/All Africa Global Media via COMTEX) -- When Communications Commission of Kenya dir...
Mobile Phone Charges Ripe for Free-Fall PhaseBlog Post
There has been a lot of controversy recently regarding biofuels - especially corn-based ethanol - and their effect on the global economic dynamic. While biofuels in general could be a very good alternative to oil, are they good for the BOP? Rob and Derek have blogged on this very subject...
Biofuels: Do They Help the BOP? There are Always Two Sides of a StoryNews
Don’t Overlook the Fact That Even Low-Income Consumers Have Needs They Want Help Meeting. For decades, the majority of multinational corporations marketing in Asia have focused on the affluent minority, those who tend to live in urban areas and have shopping habits and product needs that are quite similar to those in the West. But by focusing only on the upper-income urbanites, marketers are missing a vast opportunity at the bottom of the economic pyramid. About 4 billion people i...
How to Market to Asia’s MassesNews
Roughly four billion people, mostly in developing countries, subsist at the bottom of the economic and social pyramid. They are vulnerable not only to the risks associated with poverty, unemployment and social exclusion, but also to a host of environmental threats including poor air quality, contaminated water and climate change. Linking their entrepreneurial talent with the need to overcome the environmental conditions in which they live could accelerate the deployment of environmental technolo...
Environmental Technologies and the Bottom of the Pyramid
