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• News
  The “Next Big Thing” for Global Business

  Businesses are not philanthropies. So doing business at the so-called bottom of the pyramid (BOP) requires new strategies and tactics that are generally not familiar to traditional businessmen. There is a real market at the BOP, and that market could evolve more quickly with the help of the business community. But to capture the interest of multinational corporations, they must see clearly how they can profit from this opportunity. The first step is being convinced that th...

• Blog Post
  Wal-Mart’s Base of the Pyramid Play

  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...

• News
  Visa encourages banks to partner with microfinance institutions

  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...

• Blog Post
  Welcome, WSJ – A Next Billion Retrospective

  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...

• News
  How The World Works: The Difference Between Calves and Cows

  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 ...

• Blog Post
  Zambia Journal: Industry Woes

  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....

• Blog Post
  2006 Ashden Awards

  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...

• News
  Mobiles to help track diseases

  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...