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There are skeptics in any field ? base of the pyramid business is no different. Over the years, however, the nature of BOP skepticism has changed. At first, many questioned whether low-income, emerging markets really mattered to businesses’ bottom lines and growth strategies. While...
Wal-Mart’s Base of the Pyramid PlayNews
Microfinance can provide tangible commercial opportunities for banks in the region notably if they partner with a microfinance institution, said Debbie Arnold, VP of Emerging Markets at Visa International, the world’s leading provider of electronic payments. Local commercial banks can benefit in various ways from commercial microfinance opportunities. They gain access to a new customer segment, can cross-sell non-competitive products and also benefit from new deposits and ne...
Visa encourages banks to partner with microfinance institutionsBlog Post
As a site dedicated for the past year and a half to the “next billion” and the business strategies that can empower them as micro-consumers and micro-producers, its good to see the Wall Street Journal using that headline in a mainstream business story about tech firms and their...
Welcome, WSJ – A Next Billion RetrospectiveNews
On the same day that Muhammad Yunus, founder of the Grameen Bank and chief apostle of the church of microcredit, received the Nobel Peace Prize, the Center for Global Development (CGD), a Washington nonprofit, published a study by David Roodman and Uzma Qureshi with the title Microfinance as Business. Microfinance is generally taken to mean the provision of small loans -- microcredit -- and other financial services to very poor people, and Yunus is widely acclaimed as the ...
How The World Works: The Difference Between Calves and CowsBlog Post
Guest blogger Brian McBrearity will be reporting from time to time about his experiences working in Zambia on SME and financial services development. His Zambia Journal posts will appear about once a week here on NextBillion.net. This is the second in the series; read his previous post here....
Zambia Journal: Industry WoesBlog Post
The Ashden Awards reward outstanding and innovative projects which tackle climate change and improve quality of life through the generation of sustainable energy at a local level. As you can imagine, the winners had some amazing ideas with the potential to drastically change the lives of the...
2006 Ashden AwardsNews
Mobile phone technology is being developed to help manage the spread of diseases such as HIV and bird flu. The software is designed to allow field workers using handsets to send and receive data on disease outbreaks along with patient and drug information. The project is a collaboration between technology firm Voxiva and the trade association for mobile operators, GSMA. Trials of the relatively low-cost application are underway in Rwanda, Afric...
Mobiles to help track diseasesBlog Post
It was reported last week that Nicolas Negoponte and Libya reached an agreement to supply 1.2 million of the $100 computers to Libyan schoolchildren for $250 million. I was intrigued by the agreement, the math for which points up one of the problems with the effort - the computer itself may...
Is the Hundred Dollar Laptop a Real Business?
