It's heartening to come across real stories of people, who are by no means rich or well educated, entering and supporting the market economy. In India's financial capital of Mumbai, Dabbawalas, whose job is to carry and deliver freshly made food from home in lunch boxes to office workers, are making a mark for themselves.

Every day, 5000 semi-literate Dabbawalas transport 200,000-boxes in a 3-hour period, through a 25 km of public transportation involving multiple transfer points. Forbes magazine, in 1998, gave this service the highest quality rating of Six Sigma. They do this without any IT support. Their business model is a case study at the Harvard Business School. Last December, students at Stanford GSB met them as part of their India Study trip.

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Editor's note: NextBillion staff writer Courtland Walker recently returned from a 10-day trip to Rwanda. Over the next week, he will post reflections on his trip as part of the Rwanda Journal series. This is the third post in the series; read the first two here and here.

In high-income countries, the SME sector has been estimated to contribute more than 50% to gross GDP, not to mention being the engine of new job creation and a source of as much as half of the innovation in these economies. In low-income countries, however, the contribution of the SME sector to gross GDP has been estimated at 16% and, in most African countries the SME sector has been estimated at less than 10%.

I read the above quote, over a year ago, in "Venture Capital for Development," a paper by Alan Patricof and Julie E. Sunderland.

While the growth of the SME sector is crucial to the future of developing country economies, there are tremendous difficulties inherent in fully private sector investments in smaller firms. While there are a handful of groups - namely SEAF, GroFin, and Aureos - that are operating fully private sector SME-targeted funds, many, including Patricof and Sunderland have called for the participation of the development institutions to help mitigate the risk faced by the private sector.

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Mobile phone companies have found innovative ways to give consumers at the bottom of the pyramid the services they need in a cheap, barebones way that takes few resources or knowledge to use. Despite efforts to tailor designs to the BOP in a similar way, the makers of cheap PCs are far from penetrating the market with the depth of cell phone technology. Novatium has recently rolled out a server-based PC that offers an answer somewhere in-between the two – the question is: how to reach the BOP?

Nova netPC is a network computer, designed on a completely new hardware platform without using any of the typical PC or thin client components. Check out “Novatium unveils pilot of low-cost PC” in the newsroom for more info.

The technology addresses a number of important issues for SMEs in emerging markets:

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