NextBillion brings together the community of business leaders, social entrepreneurs, NGOs, policy makers, and academics who want to explore the connection between development and enterprise.
Our Staff Writers and Editors offer insights on the latest news, events, interviews and other happenings from the development through enterprise and base of the pyramid universes
October 31, 2005 — 11:58 am
In mid-September, users of Malawi's Telecom Networks (TNM) received a text message saying "With TNM you can now recharge your friends mobile using TNM direct top up service. Just use the following command: *112*phone number*recharge pin*. Its that easy"
2154 Views
October 28, 2005 — 03:18 pm
NextBillion.net has been selected as an "editor's pick" in BusinessWeek's Best of the New Web feature. Under the category "Giving Back," NextBillion.net shares space with DonorsChoose.org, Omidyar.net, OneWorld.net, and WorldChanging. Talk about good company!
I just want to say that NextBillion.net would never get this kind of recognition were it not for our diverse, dynamic, and passionate community. Keep posting ideas and comments - people are noticing.
Congratulations to the other winners as well. Check out the full list here.
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October 27, 2005 — 05:00 pm
Of all the hi-tech products and services that have been made available to the BOP, perhaps none has received as much attention as digital connectivity. And with good reason – information and communication technologies (ICTs) have been used in a wide variety of ways to create social and economic dividends in poor communities throughout the developing world. WRI’s Digital Dividend program tracked more than 1000 such initiatives, each utilizing the power of ICTs to provide benefits in a diverse number of areas, including agriculture, education, healthcare, microfinance, e-governance, and SME development.
The most well-known and fundamental of these applications, however, continues to be the telecenter – a shared access cyber café through which many of the services mentioned above are made available. It’s not surprising then that a good deal of research has documented the various models.
The latest analysis I’ve come across – and the reason for this blog post – is a report written by two Intel ethnographers that have spent nearly four years criss-crossing the globe to find out how computers are being used by typical people in different cultures. The piece, reproduced below, focused on three models - one in India, one in Peru, and one in Hungary:
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October 27, 2005 — 02:14 pm
WRI's New Ventures program held its third Investor Forum in Mexico last week and honored four enterprises as winners of the Business Plan competition. All nine companies that presented in the competition were selected for their commitment to environment and their financial profitability. Winner's included Itanoni Flor de Maiz, a gourmet tortilla franchise promoting native Mexican varieties of corn; Indesin, a company producing cogeneration plants for clean energy; Lightcom, a company with several patents for innovative solar lighting solutions for both indoors and outdoors; and Proteak, a commercial teak farm that will improve degraded lands. Other companies included Tema, which uses water lilies to clean contaminated lakes; BioPremium, which produces organic mushrooms; Alibio, which produces organic fertilizers and water treatment systems; Rio y Montana, which provides active ecotourism excursions; and Movere, which specializes in ecologically-friendly pallets and logistics services.
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October 27, 2005 — 08:50 am
Tonight, many PBS affiliates will feature the premiere of Small Fortunes: Microcredit and the Future of Poverty, an hour-long documentary exploring issues of poverty and microcredit. The program’s web site includes an easy-to-use station finder that allows viewers to find out when it will air in their area. The site also features videos, borrower profiles, and additional resources on microfinance. Don’t forget to watch!
Between Small Fortunes and the previously-released “New Heroes” documentary, I’m excited to see mainstream media picking up BOP topics. If you’re interested in either of these programs, but don’t get PBS (or you missed New Heroes altogether), both web sites include information on how to buy the video or DVD.
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October 25, 2005 — 12:54 pm
What is the impact of development aid on economic growth?
This critical question has been the topic of debate among development experts, economists, policymakers, civil society, and business – especially here on NextBillion.net. Some answers may be emerging, and they point out that development aid is not sufficient to stimulate broad economic growth (thanks, AdamSmithee):
The conclusions: aid had a small, statistically insignificant positive effect on investment and a small, statistically significant negative effect on savings. Overall, aid has a small, statistically insignificant positive impact on growth, with more recent studies suggesting an ever-smaller impact. The evidence for aid working better in good policy environments is very weak, the evidence for declining marginal returns is a little stronger...Ignoring the issue of significance, the metastudy results suggest that aid has increased the income per capita in poor countries as a whole by 20 percent since the 1960s.
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October 24, 2005 — 03:30 pm
Rama Bijapurkar of the Times News Network just wrote an interesting piece on what may be the most difficult aspect of successfully engaging the market at the BOP – the creation and maintenance of cross-sector partnerships. He writes:
"One of the key ideas of the book (Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid) is that the last, but most important ‘get to, and get the consumer’ mile can only happen if private sector works in partnership with the development sector organisations.
The latter have access, influence, trust and knowledge, about people at the bottom of the pyramid, as well as the cost-right grass-roots organisation infrastructure; and hence are the best market development and channel partners for any company wanting to find the fortune at the bottom of the pyramid. That’s where the theory ends. In practice, wherever I have been a part of such initiatives, even sustaining a constructive dialogue has been tough. What we have is parallel monologues, with different mental models and different processes of 'getting the job done'."
1908 Views
October 20, 2005 — 04:20 pm
In August, mainstream media attention focused on the plight
of thousands of Americans living in domes - most notably New Orleans' Superdome
and the Houston Astrodome - after being displaced by Hurricane Katrina. For those looking to read a vastly more positive
story about dome-dwelling, here it is: Cape Town-based N'Kozi Homes.
5339 Views
October 20, 2005 — 03:24 pm
This Stanford Social Innovation Review reports on SOFOLES --a Mexican microlending program (read more about it in a 2000 Harvard report) that has succeeded in making home ownership more affordable for low-income residents.
It's not the newest idea, but the report has interesting sidenotes; referencing the impact of money sent from migrant workers to their families in Mexico (these remittances are famously influential, both economically and politically), they mention that Margarita Quihuis has a start-up idea for a debit card company called Indigo Financeras, that would allow migrants to deposit directly to Mexican ATMs.
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October 20, 2005 — 01:28 pm
Kiva is an organization that empowers individuals to make charitable, microfinance loans. Anyone can look at the profiles of businesses (all rural entrepreneurs, currently all in Uganda), make a loan of as little as $25 through PayPal, and stay in contact with their sponsored business for the 6-12 months (average time) it takes to have the loan repaid.
This is a truly innovative platform for BOP microfinance, and although currently subsisting on seed money from its partner (Village Enterprise Fund) Kiva intends to be eventually financially sustainable.
(Editor's note: this post was picked up by WorldChanging; a nice discussion is ongoing)
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