Thanks to a commenter’s suggestion from Munyaradzi Musamba, I checked out a new report from InfoDev about the role of private sector finance in small- and medium-sized enterprise development. The report, Scaling Up Innovation and Entrepreneurship in Developing Countries: The Role of Private Sector Finance, contains the preliminary findings of a workshop held last April; I’m still trying to find the summary findings (post-workshop), but this is pretty good reading for now. At only nineteen pages, it’s digestible and very valuable, if a bit technical. An excerpt from the foreword suggests what’s to come:

I was in Karachi this past weekend, where I addressed a packed seminar, Improving Access to Financial Services: Mobile Money Transfer and Beyond, convened by the Asian Development Bank and the State Bank of Pakistan. If audience enthusiasm is any indication, financial service provision over mobile phones continues to gain momentum in both development and private sector circles.

The topic of my talk was low-cost networks and their role in providing all kinds of services – not just financial – to rural communities where there is currently no coverage. I believe that connectivity is a key enabler to all kinds of business development, and that the other important ingredient is microfinance. Despite the rapid spread of mobile phone coverage and the exponential growth of microfinance (legitimized by Muhammad Yunus’ Nobel Peace Prize), there are still millions – billions – of rural, low-income villagers who remain off the network. Connectivity and microfinance can jump-start the latent economic potential of these billions – by giving them access to finance, markets, information, customers, suppliers, government tenders, large companies...the list goes on.

Another presenter at the seminar was a team from Globe Telecom (Philippines) who spoke about their G-Cash platform (previously noted on NextBillion). They now claim it can be implemented on any mobile system – a not-so-subtle indication that G-Cash is going to scale up, and soon. I am beginning to wonder if G-Cash is going to be one of the first BOP innovations to blow back to the West/North, and if we’ll be using the system here in the United States sooner than expected.