For someone like Marcia Regina da Cruz, a Brazilian janitor who earns just over $150 per month, grocery shopping is a painfully difficult task.  What this mother of three can buy to feed her children is almost always determined by the amount of spare change she can muster on a given day.  So when she bought three irons as presents for $32 she had done the impossible.  Thanks to a new set of policies at Brazil’s largest grocery and retail stores, Marcia and other low-income Brazilian consumers can now make purchases in monthly installments with almost no interest.  According to the New York Times, the new policies, which provide “low-cost credit for low cost-items,” are an attempt by retailers to “squeeze more spending from the big, but cash-short, bottom of the consumer base in Brazil, South America’s biggest economy.”

Thanks to President Bush, there is nothing more patriotic these days than looking for ways to end America’s oil addiction. So when I came across this article, Tapping the Latent Power in What's Left Around the Barnyard, while perusing the New York Times on the 4th of July, I knew I had done my civic duties. Of course, here at Nextbillion being patriotic is not enough; we must also be cosmopolitan. So once I washed down my hotdog with a Sam Adams, I got on the computer and did a little research. As it turns out, anaerobic digesters like the ones discussed in the New York Times are being used throughout the developing world. Perhaps the most intriguing case I read about was a prison in Rwanda, “which reduces cooking fuel bills by using methane gas from inmates' toilet waste.”