“The ultimate aim of policymakers must be to create the conditions for private enterprise to make poverty history in Africa”

Vodafone is at it again – first, with their Social Impact of Mobile report; now, CEO Arun Sarin has penned an op-ed in today’s Financial Times (subscription required). As “make poverty history” rings out across the UK and G8 in advance of next week’s summit, big business remains strangely quiet. Not Vodafone. Sarin’s op-ed urges policymakers to learn from African telecom’s success – principally, that demand-driven investments in communications technology catalyze economic growth.

I've been attending a conference -- the International Forum on Remittances -- sponsored by the Inter-American Development Bank here in Washington for the past several days. The IADB has been very active in analyzing remittance flows, and just put up a new website on the subject at http://www.iadb.org/mif/remittances/.

The conference attracted more than 600 registrants -- microfinance types, commercial bankers, civil society and development community professionals. It's clear that the issue of remittances has reached a tipping point, and why not? The numbers are pretty staggering. Officially they're currently counting about $125 billion annually, but the real number is undoubtedly over $200 billion. Of the known 175 million adult migrants in the world, 125 million send remittances regularly, and they constitute a significant part of the disposable income of many of the world's poor people.