October 31, 2006 — 11:13 am
So much to read, so little time…but these activities are definitely worth a look-over.
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October 31, 2006 — 09:20 am
Sheri Willoughby is a Senior Manager in the Markets and Enterprise Program at WRI. She holds an MS in chemistry from University of California San Diego and a MBA from the Kenan-Flagler Business School at the University of North Carolina.
Where do MBA students and alumni go to get inspired, informed, and meet others who want to change the world? To Net Impact. The Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University hosted the 14th Annual Net Impact Conference over the weekend. 1200 b-school students and 200 professionals attended the 2-day conference entitled "Navigating Global Change." As an alumnus of the University of North Carolina and a current member of the DC Net Impact Professional Chapter, I attended the conference for professionals, which had its own sessions at the Navy Pier and Fairmont Hotel in Chicago; students had most of their sessions at Kellogg in Evanston. I would have preferred to have the option to go to some of the student panels, especially the "Global Trends" track, but as it turned out, the professional panels were great, and selecting among the five tracks offered to the professionals (technology, corporate social responsibility, philanthropy, environment, social entrepreneurship) was difficult enough.
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October 30, 2006 — 09:25 am
Guest blogger Brian McBrearity will be reporting from time to time about his experiences working in Zambia on SME and financial services development. His Zambia Journal posts will appear about once a week here on NextBillion.net. This is the second in the series; read his previous post here.
I spent the last week traveling north of Lusaka to the Copperbelt Province, near the Congo (DRC) border. This is the heart of industrial Zambia—rather, was at one point.
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October 29, 2006 — 08:38 am
Since our launch in May 2005, NextBillion.net has remained more or less the same as far as functionality and usability are concerned. Sure, we added the Events Calendar and the Activity Database, but the basic interactions on-site have remained the same.
At the same time, we’ve experienced tremendous growth in terms of user numbers (over 1250!), content quantity and quality, staff writers, and regular commenters. To make the site work even better for our growing community, World Resources Institute has invested significant time and money upgrading NextBillion.net, with help from our excellent web team at Development Seed. These changes will be taking hold on-site over the next few days; some have already begun.
What does this mean for you, the user? Well, we’re out to make it as easy as possible to interact with our content in terms of reading, commenting, submitting, and subscribing. Spam is a problem – we’re moving aggressively to ensure that everything you see on NextBillion is legit; search options will be overhauled to enable tag-based search, along with topic taxonomies and keywords. Here’s the full run-down:
- Submitting ideas: The rather complicated process of submitting a story will be streamlined into an easy-to-use "Suggest a Story" field.
- Log in and password: We’re going to open up the whole site, so you won’t need to log in with a hard-to-remember username and password
- Networking: Out-of-date or incomplete member profiles often frustrated folks most interested in networking. Now, when you comment or submit an idea, you’ll be able to include a link to your own online bio or web site, so that other readers can find and contact you
- Search, Archives, and Blogroll: Our search feature will be updated to include tag-cloud functionality as well as keyword search and taxonomy filtering. A chronological archive and blogroll will help you find that long-forgotten post or refer you to one of our friends.
This has been a long time coming. We’re very excited about these new changes, and we hope you are too. If you have any questions, drop a comment below or contact us directly.
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October 26, 2006 — 12:29 pm
What’s a hundred dollars from the perspective of a low-income, base of the pyramid community? That question should be viewed in a new light in the weeks after Muhammad Yunus was announced as the Nobel Peace Prize winner. A hundred bucks? That’s a micro-loan, of course, to be made through Yunus’ Grameen Bank or any of its surrogates around the world. Perhaps the cutting edge answer is to loan the hundred peer-to-peer through Kiva, or invest it in a for-profit microfinance fund, as reported in a lengthy, well-researched New Yorker article. All are worthy responses, but microfinance is not the be-all, end-all answer to the perspective question.
In the new APP (After Peace Prize) world, the barrage of media coverage about microfinance has overshadowed an important fact: some people are too poor for loans, or simply scared of credit. What does this mean for the development, philanthropic, and policymaking communities? Perhaps they should take a closer look at organizations like Trickle Up, a non-profit that provides seed grants (not loans) of $100 and business training to aspiring microentrepreneurs worldwide.
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October 25, 2006 — 01:41 pm
Last week, I reported on a conference in Pakistan organized by the Asian Development Bank (and in which I played a small role) to catalyze mobile phone banking in that country. The major banks all showed up, and heard the banking regulator tell them to get with the program. Later that same week, the Pakistan Minister of Information Technology, Awais Ah Khan Leghari, delivered the same message to the telecom regulator and all the major mobile phone carriers, with the Governor of the State Bank in attendance. In effect, both the banking industry and the mobile phone industry, and their regulators, are being told to remove barriers and develop workable systems, so that the huge unbanked population of the country (in which mobile phone use is spreading rapidly) can benefit. The government announced a coordinating committee to facilitate this, as well as a permanent focus group between the IT ministry and the State Bank, as well as a commitment to strengthen IT/telecom infrastructure.
Announcements don’t always translate into action. But Pakistan is moving with impressive speed to cut red tape and link the banking and telecom industries in ways that could have a major impact on commerce, especially for small businesses and ordinary individuals. In Southeast Asia, the Bridge Alliance of seven major mobile carriers is also coordinating technical standards to facilitate cross-border mobile phone banking. In the Philippines, the Smart and Globe mobile carriers now each have millions of customers for their competing mobile financial services models. These and other developments suggest that Asia is developing a lot of momentum, and could turn out to be the launch pad for truly large scale access to financial services for low income populations.
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October 25, 2006 — 08:59 am
The announcement yesterday morning was buried deep inside most newspapers: a WiFi capable cell phone that, for $20/month extra, enables T-Mobile subscribers to access the company's 7000 HotSpots across the US. The Mobile Gadgeteer has a good description of how the whole thing works. It also enables users to call over their own wireless modem at home (if they have a broadband connection). The bait is that phone calls over WiFi links (via Voice over Internet Protocol) are not charged by the minute--its all you can eat for the $20/month, saving your cell-phone minutes for when you are out of range of the hot spot cloud. The service appears to be targeted to a younger, price-sensitive mostly student market, who are already abandoning fixed-line phones. The multi-mode phones (with a WiFi radio chip in them) will cost about $45.
What's interesting about this, to me, is that it may well be the template for phone service (and Internet service) for many of the BOP, probably with a slightly different business model. The rural connectivity platform we have been exploring and will soon pilot in rural Vietnam is a VSAT-WiFi-VOIP model, which will use WiFi phones as the end user device and for which the core user costs are likely to be about $1 per household per year (essentially, the cost of a VSAT broadband link for each commune).
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October 25, 2006 — 08:45 am
The Ashden Awards reward outstanding and innovative projects which tackle climate change and improve quality of life through the generation of sustainable energy at a local level. As you can imagine, the winners had some amazing ideas with the potential to drastically change the lives of the communities they are reaching out to.
Four awards were given in recognition of the way in which sustainable energy has been used to improve access to Light, to Food, to promote Enterprise and to improve Health and Welfare. An Africa Award was given in recognition of the urgent need to address the combined challenges of environmental degradation and lack of access to resources in the region. More general information on the awards can be found in the press release.
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October 24, 2006 — 04:48 pm
I was also in Mexico City to help with the launch of the BOP Circle, a group of companies who gather to share experience and learn from one another. What was impressive is the degree of commitment by some of the companies. Microsoft now has two separate divisions focused on new BOP products. AC Nielsen regularly collects market research data on BOP consumer product spending from a large panel. Grupo Elektra's Banco Azteca has become one of the major sources of credit to the BOP. These companies are in the BOP to stay.
I also met with two of the major Mexican mobile communications companies to explore their interest in a low-cost way to extend their networks into rural areas and their services downmarket into the BOP. One of them in fact was very interested, and responsive to the argument that the coming wave of financial services over mobiles would be a "killer app" that would drive customers and traffic within lower income groups. Pertinent, since a recent announcement by major banks and mobile companies presages the launch of mobile payment systems for Mexico. It's hard not to come away with the feeling that movement toward taking BOP markets seriously has an irreversible momentum in Mexico.
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October 24, 2006 — 04:00 pm
Amy Sprague joined WRI's Sustainable Enterprise Program in August 2000. She is the Manager for Mexico, India, and the Andes in the New Ventures project and coordinates the New Ventures Mentoring Program.
The launch of the BOP Circle in Mexico City last week presented a window into the BOP. In the first presentation, Mauricio del Villar showed us a slice of the remote Indian villages in the Mexican State of Chihuahua where he has been living for about two years. The village does not readily accept outsiders, so Mauricio had to earn their respect and acceptance over several months. He presented many of their customs and views, showing the differences between our "Western" goals, expectations, beliefs, and timelines, and the villagers'. The effect of this presentation on the audience was clear: We have no business even getting near these villages with the products we think could improve their lives. To me, BOP initiatives belong where the market has already penetrated. Villages that are virtually removed from the market and who have a healthy distrust of outsiders would not be the place to start market-based BOP initiatives.
Next, the workshop featured three panels that included members of the BOP. This was a first for all of the attendees. Two or three people from poor communities from in or surrounding Mexico City sat with BOP "experts" and answered questions about their daily lives. Many traveled three or more hours to arrive at the venue and would have to leave early to make sure they would reach the final bus connections to their communities.
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