For NextBillion readers interested in China, Knowledge @ Wharton has a special section out this month that will be of interest. Selling in China is the third in a series of reports on the world’s most populous nation; this issue covers a range of topics, including the dichotomy between rich and poor consumers, sales and distribution, and competition between Western and local manufacturing firms. A glance through the first article demonstrates that K@W understands and addresses BOP challenges:

But once multinational companies get past the excitement of imagining the opportunities offered by the world's largest consumer market -- growing richer and more status conscious with each passing year -- there is the sobering thought of figuring out how to go about unlocking the secrets to selling to all of these people. Who are they? How much money do they have? What do they want to buy? What motivates their purchases? What are the peculiarities of the Chinese consumer?

I’m happy to introduce NextBillion ally Brian McBrearity as our latest guest blogger. Brian is a reformed Wall Street asset manager – now he’s working in the SME development and financial services field as he tries to apply his finance background to serve the BOP. He recently accepted a 3-month position in Lusaka with FINCA, and has generously agreed to post weekly about his experiences from the field. His first post will appear on this page later today.

Brian McBrearity is a nine-year Wall Street/asset management veteran who spent most of 2004 working in East Africa, where he taught math to underprivileged primary and secondary students in a rural village school in northern Tanzania. Following this work he joined Eco Inn Experiences in the fall of 2005. The prior nine years were spent in the global equity portfolio management and the new business development groups of Sanford C. Bernstein (now part of Alliance Capital, a large New York-based asset manager). In that position, he acquired extensive knowledge of U.S. and international equity portfolio management, brand management, product development, accounting, and operations. Brian holds an MBA from Columbia’s Graduate School of Business and a BA in Economics from Boston College.

Welcome, Brian!

It was reported last week that Nicolas Negoponte and Libya reached an agreement to supply 1.2 million of the $100 computers to Libyan schoolchildren for $250 million. I was intrigued by the agreement, the math for which points up one of the problems with the effort - the computer itself may ultimately cost $100, but the infrastructure necessary - pipe, training, deployment, content etc. - takes a lot more money to make the deployment useful in local conditions. Will the Libyan money actually materialize? Who knows?

Myself, I would tend to exercise some caution when dealing with Col. Qaddafi and his bureaucracy. And the extra $130 million is just the down payment. But that is no argument against. It takes money to build infrastructure, and there will be broad benefits when a more robust IT network covers Libya. Rob and I argue whether OLPC is a "real" business. I say that $250 million is money, and even if the government is the buyer, there are lots of companies making lots of money selling things - real and imagined - to governments. Selling to governments is a business model, and if you can jumpstart the production - get the costs down - by selling to them, go for it. As my last post on this topic pointed out, the real benefits of the OLPC may accrue to all of us and the industry in general. We'll see.

Guest blogger Brian McBrearity will be reporting from time to time about his experiences working in Zambia on SME and financial services development. His Zambia Journal posts will appear about once a week here on NextBillion.net. This is the first in the series.

I am not a development expert, nor do I pretend to be one. I cannot say that I have spent years in the industry, or have vast amounts of knowledge. In fact, this is my first international development role, and it happens to be in the area of microfinance.

I landed here in Zambia a couple of weeks ago. My base of operations is the capital city of Lusaka, with planned field visits to more rural parts of the country. While I did have some expectations, having spent a good portion of 2004 volunteering in rural Tanzania, I was not expecting the level of commercialization and consumerism that I was confronted with upon landing in country.