Tonight, many PBS affiliates will feature the premiere of Small Fortunes: Microcredit and the Future of Poverty, an hour-long documentary exploring issues of poverty and microcredit. The program’s web site includes an easy-to-use station finder that allows viewers to find out when it will air in their area. The site also features videos, borrower profiles, and additional resources on microfinance. Don’t forget to watch!

Between Small Fortunes and the previously-released “New Heroes” documentary, I’m excited to see mainstream media picking up BOP topics. If you’re interested in either of these programs, but don’t get PBS (or you missed New Heroes altogether), both web sites include information on how to buy the video or DVD.

WRI's New Ventures program held its third Investor Forum in Mexico last week and honored four enterprises as winners of the Business Plan competition. All nine companies that presented in the competition were selected for their commitment to environment and their financial profitability. Winner's included Itanoni Flor de Maiz, a gourmet tortilla franchise promoting native Mexican varieties of corn; Indesin, a company producing cogeneration plants for clean energy; Lightcom, a company with several patents for innovative solar lighting solutions for both indoors and outdoors; and Proteak, a commercial teak farm that will improve degraded lands. Other companies included Tema, which uses water lilies to clean contaminated lakes; BioPremium, which produces organic mushrooms; Alibio, which produces organic fertilizers and water treatment systems; Rio y Montana, which provides active ecotourism excursions; and Movere, which specializes in ecologically-friendly pallets and logistics services.

Of all the hi-tech products and services that have been made available to the BOP, perhaps none has received as much attention as digital connectivity. And with good reason – information and communication technologies (ICTs) have been used in a wide variety of ways to create social and economic dividends in poor communities throughout the developing world. WRI’s Digital Dividend program tracked more than 1000 such initiatives, each utilizing the power of ICTs to provide benefits in a diverse number of areas, including agriculture, education, healthcare, microfinance, e-governance, and SME development.

The most well-known and fundamental of these applications, however, continues to be the telecenter – a shared access cyber café through which many of the services mentioned above are made available. It’s not surprising then that a good deal of research has documented the various models.

The latest analysis I’ve come across – and the reason for this blog post – is a report written by two Intel ethnographers that have spent nearly four years criss-crossing the globe to find out how computers are being used by typical people in different cultures. The piece, reproduced below, focused on three models - one in India, one in Peru, and one in Hungary: