"Putting Paid to Poverty" provides a hopeful scenario for the development of the 'base of the pyramid' over the next ten years. It was written by Allen Hammond, VP for Innovation and Special Projects and William Kramer, Deputy Director of the Development Through Enterprise initiative at the World Resources Institute. The article originally appeared in Value magazine.

It began slowly, with the dawning recognition that traditional development projects were not sufficient to accomplish the Millennium Development Goals and with a UN commission report citing the essential role of the private sector 1. Still, in 2005, there were only a handful of major companies putting serious money behind developing low-income markets. The Year of Microfinance celebrations focused on achieving 100 million clients of an estimated 500 million potential and the growing involvement of banks and other major financial institutions in scaling up, but overlooked the almost complete lack of “mesofinance” investment capital to enable small and medium companies to expand. At the same time, many countries experienced the hollowing out of development strategies tied to export-led growth, as they began to lose jobs to China’s emerging dominance as a manufacturing platform. But the potential of domestic low-income markets—the base of the economic pyramid—as a more sustainable driver of growth was not widely recognized.