UPDATE: Michael Jarvis has posted notes from another meeting, this one called Business Reaching the Poor. Based on his post, it sounds like the second seminar was more focused and less rhetorical than the first (although that's not saying much.)

Thanks to PSD Blogger Michael Jarvis, we have a short update from the World Bank – International Monetary Fund annual meeting, currently being held in Singapore. Jarvis attended a seminar entitled "Raising the Stakes: New Frontiers for the Private Sector in Development", and has this report:

Prahalad called for consumption-led, not investment-led, development, with business providing greater choices to the poor and helping reduce the poverty penalty where the poor pay more for the same goods than the wealthy. [He] argued that boardroom debate no longer focuses on the "why" of reaching out to 5 billion poor consumers - it just makes sense - but on the “how”. Innovation is required in marketing, pricing and across company operations.

[Full disclosure – C.K. Prahalad is a Director of World Resources Institute, my employer]

Innovation is required in marketing, pricing, and across company operations? We’ve heard it before – so was anything new or interesting said at this seminar?

The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project gets a lot of hype, which I have no problem with- the more attention the media devotes to development issues the better, in my opinion. But it always bothers me a bit that this MIT creation gets all the press when it hasn’t even reached the implementation stage yet, and other NGOs are already on the ground wiring thousands of villages ala FirstMile Solutions.

As heads of the World Bank battle it out over how to curtail corruption in beneficiary countries, a curious trend is forming that could be a far greater threat to the open, global economic system they favor than any graft or bribery scheme. Over the weekend 116 countries were represented at the Non-Aligned Movement meeting in Cuba. These countries largely comprise the symbolic “South” in the North-South view of global economic and political power.