The debate around SME finance is rapidly maturing. Development professionals and socially-minded investors are well aware of the difficulty entrepreneurs in emerging economies have in securing capital larger than microloans.

A World Bank conference to be held next Monday and Tuesday in Washington, DC takes the conversation forward - from acknowledging the challenges of SME finance to getting into the specifics of how to make SME finance work. Speakers including:

• Thorsten Beck - World Bank
• Allen Berger - U. South Carolina and Wharton; and
• Meghana Ayyagari - George Washington University

will discuss best practices and new mechanisms for channeling capital to this sector. See the IFC site for more details.

Via PSD Blog

A key concept when operating a business at the base of the pyramid, or in any place for that matter, is contextualization. And by contextualization I mean a deep understanding and embrace of local culture. A simple example of contextualization in business can be observed by comparing the McDonald's menus in Asia and the United States. For instance, it would be impossible to find any McDonald's in the state of Michigan serving a curry burger. Why? Because people in the state of Michigan don't have a taste for curry burgers and wouldn't buy the product. Indeed, it is critical that businesses be aware of local patterns of human behavior – such as lifestyles, tastes, and social involvement – and develop products and services that suit these behaviors.

What I have mentioned thus far is nothing new and probably very elementary to the NextBillion community. However, I would like to suggest that we have left out of the conversation a very important component of culture: religion. It is a subject that is very polarizing and often taboo to discuss in business. But it is important to bring up because religion is very important to people in the communities that we in the NextBillion community are trying to serve.

Recently, this dawned upon me as I listened to a presentation by some MBA students from the Ross School of Business on improving the penetration of insecticide treated nets in Ghana. One recommendation that particularly jumped out at me was the following: leverage the church's influence. The presenters noted that in Ghana, Christianity is widely practiced, and as a result, the church is a very powerful and influential social institution.

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