Last week, Harvard Business School brought together committed scholars and corporate, non-profit and government leaders to discuss the role of business in poverty alleviation. The 3-day conference, Global Poverty: Business Solutions and Approaches, featured case studies on and empirical research of successful business models, the role of civil society and government, and the ethical and operational challenges faced by businesses who seek out poor customers.

Nextbillion.net has added information about the event to our Conference Resources section. The Harvard conference page details the topics and speakers for all seven panel sessions, and includes links to abstracts for more than 30 papers presented. Powerpoints will be added soon.

This is my second posting about Islamic banking. I hope to share some information about practices that few people hear about, but are pertinent to doing business in the Muslim world--especially regarding microcredit.

For a loan to conform to Islamic law, it must be riba-free; "riba" is usually translated simply as "usury," and literally means "an increase, addition, expansion or growth which is non-trade related e.g. a loan, advances." . The purpose of such a law is to prevent the burden of charging interest rates on loans. In order to extend credit fairly, but remain profitable institutions, Islamic banks use 3 different methods for risk-sharing and profit-sharing. :