Just a reminder, the deadline to submit your business plan for the BiD Challenge is this Monday, March 20th.

The Bid Challenge is offering €150.000 in start-up finance for plans that
combine income generating business with poverty reduction in a feasible way. Both new ideas and plans to expand an existing business can compete.

Click here for more details.

Jeff Sachs, Director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University in New York City, spoke Tuesday, March 14 at the Center for Global Development here in Washington. Professor Sachs has long been identified as a strong proponent of a publicly-led drive against global poverty. As Director of the UN Millennium Project, Jeff has been highly influential in defining the Goals and the pathways to achieving them. While I agree wholeheartedly with him on the diagnosis of the disease, I have found it hard to put much stock in his cure: more public money. Not because it wouldn’t help. Of course it would. It is the moral course of action., and the politically wise thing to do. But years of observation have made a cynic: it’s simply not going to happen. And yet, Jeff’s talk at CGD this week lead me to believe that the Millennium Village projects on which Earth Institute has embarked are perhaps less distant in practice from the private sector-led development approach we take here at Nextbillion.