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Blog Post
Readers of nextbillion may have noticed recently that the company profiles I’ve been blogging on every week have taken on a new theme. This is because the New Ventures program (also part of the World Resources Institute and a partner of nextbillion) decided to make these featured...
Announcing the Rising Ventures SeriesNews
Excerpt: Johannesburg - Electronics giant Philips said on Tuesday that it hoped to build a compact fluorescent lamps (CFL) assembly factory in the SADC region - the first of its kind in Africa. Millions of Southern Africans living in both rural and urban households do not have access to electricity, and those that do often struggle to afford quality lighting. Instead, they rely on hazardous paraffin, kerosene or candles which are not only major pollutants, but also often lead to...
Philips keen on SADC region factoryBlog Post
In Ecclesiastes, the son of David describes the resilience of earth and the futility of human action, explaining that, ?One generation goeth, and another generation cometh; but the earth abideth for ever.? In the last two decades, ever since China began liberalizing its economy, a new...
In China, The Sun Also RisesNews
Excerpt: Markets can work for everyone but this requires an innovative approach that unleashes entrepreneurship at the local level, the WBCSD argued at a recent United Nations (UN) hearing. Many of our members are already promoting sustainable and inclusive business activities with partners from the development community and civil society, and we believe there is much more we can do. The objective of the UN General Assembly?s hearing was to create a space where...
Real business ventures are the only way to provide financially self-sustaining solutions to povertyBlog Post
In one of his most famous and eloquent passages, Karl Marx expresses awe at the transformative power of capitalism, writing that, ?All that is solid melts into air, all that is sacred is profaned.?? In the last two decades, Wal-Mart, the embodiment of global capital, has almost single...
Banking on Wal-MartBlog Post
For someone like Marcia Regina da Cruz, a Brazilian janitor who earns just over $150 per month, grocery shopping is a painfully difficult task.? What this mother of three can buy to feed her children is almost always determined by the amount of spare change she can muster on a given day.? So...
Consumer Credit Hits BrazilNews
Opinion Excerpt: INDIA is a roaring capitalist success story. So says the latest issue of Foreign Affairs; and last week many leading business executives and politicians in India celebrated as Lakshmi Mittal, the fifth richest man in the world, finally succeeded in his hostile takeover of the Luxembourgian steel company Arcelor. India’s leading business newspaper, The Economic Times, summed up the general euphoria over the event in its regular feature, The Global India...
The Myth of the New IndiaNews
Excerpt: With malaria spread across southern Mozambique, executives at the international mining company Billiton expected some workers to call in sick as it began building a massive new aluminum smelter amid the cornfields here. What they did not expect was that nearly one in three employees would fall ill ? 6,600 cases in just two years. And they certainly did not expect 13 deaths, not after the company had built a medical clinic, doused the construction site with pesticides and hand...
Business Joins African Effort to Cut Malaria
