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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?News
For a good part of 2006, Craig Mundie has been on a jet plane visiting Microsoft customers and political leaders in other parts of the world. Craig Mundie was one of the premier speakers at the December 2004 WRI Conference; ’Eradicating Poverty Through Profit.’ I found one quote from this article particularly interesting: I’ve been the liaison to China for the last seven years, and India for the last four years, and Russia for the last three years. So in many of t...
Microsoft’s Mundie: A bottom-up approach to techNews
PRIVATE equity investment flows into SA over the next couple of years are expected to help support the rand and partly compensate for a drop in foreign direct investment, according to experts. Following a surge in investment over the past couple of years, driven by deals such as Barclays’ purchase of a majority stake in Absa and Vodafone’s purchase of a further stake in Vodacom, it was feared that foreign direct investment would dry up. However, this could be supple...
Private Equity Inflow ’May Support Rand’News
Thailand and Japan have agreed to co-operate with each other and exchange experiences and knowledge to establish a university for small and medium- enterprise (SME) development in Thailand. The organisation of Small and Medium Enterprises and Regional Innovation of Japan (SMRJ) has agreed to prepare a second master plan to develop SMEs in Thailand from 2007 to 2010. The plan would focus on SME development in terms of future globalisation, said Jhitraporn Techacharn, the director-general of the O...
Thailand and Japan join up to drive SME development
