Mr Vasquez has come with friends from his village in a remote part of Cajamarca, a department in Peru’s northern highlands, to pick coffee in the Moyobamba region on the edge of the jungle…He and his co-workers work from 6am to 4.30pm, for which they are paid 10 soles a day (about $3) – better than the eight soles a day some coffee farmers pay, he says. However, the amount is below the 11.20 soles a day that is the legal minimum he should receive.

This quote is from an article in Friday’s Financial Times, and it reminded me of why we at NextBillion.net have relentlessly promoted development driven by the underserved themselves.

MIT's entrepreneurship, innovation, and engineering for the BOP have been on our mind lately. Here's another shout-out for the Techies. On September 21, the New York MIT Enterprise Forum will host Global Entrepreneurship: Inefficiency as Opportunity in the Developing World. The event features a New York-based panel discussion and a broadcast panel, live from Cambridge, with on-campus faculty members.

The speaker list is a who’s-who of the entrepreneurship/poverty set: Eric Cantor (Acumen Fund), Iqbal Quadir (GrameenPhone), Sandy Pentland (MIT Media Lab) and many more. The private equity community is particularly well-represented (since this is a New York-based event, that’s not surprising).

I was thinking of what to express as the United States enters a fifth year of reflection on the WTC attacks in 2001. Instead of getting into the charged debates over which countries were okay to invade, who has or has not told the truth and the like- instead of engaging in discussion over what role the US should play in the world, I want to focus on what role marginalized peoples everywhere can and should play in the global system (be it economic, political or social).

When 9/11 comes up in debates, pundits and scholars often wrangle over what the long-term causes of these attacks were; what drives ‘terrorists’? Is it pure hatred for US incursion or the American lifestyle? Is it the result of a hopeless nothing-to-lose attitude fostered by poor living conditions and little upward mobility? Many academics argue that data shows there is no correlation between poverty and terrorist acts (see, for example, this recent UNC paper). This may be the case, but even these studies have found something interesting- that there is in fact a correlation between political violence and social cleavages within a society. As the Piazza paper I linked above shows, countries with heavily divided political factions, for example show a greater level of unrest largely attributable to the exclusion that can occur if a rival faction takes power.