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Thirty Chinese NGOs recently won awards totaling $650,000 from the World Bank. The winning ideas included projects that supply environmentally sustainable bio-gas to single mothers, create support networks for waste collectors, and establish community service centers to teach deaf youngsters vocational skills.

Support for such projects may come as a surprise to those more familiar with hearing about the Bank's funding of mega-projects, such as the building of dams or power plants. The Chinese grassroots initiatives were funded through the Development Marketplace (DM), a competitive grant program of the World Bank that funds innovative, small-scale development projects. DM’s primary objective is to identify and support creative ideas that deliver results and have the potential to be expanded or replicated. Read: those that have a sustainable business model component.

The global business plan competition had humble enough roots. In 1998, the first event was held in the lobby of the World Bank building here in DC. A hundred or so projects set up booths and a handful were granted funding to further scale their activities. The competition proved so successful that it quickly outgrew its venue.

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Interested in design for the base of the pyramid? MIT’s Amy Smith is your kind of person. Ethan reminded me about Dr. Smith’s work designing “really simple things needed by an enormous number of people” with his blog post from the TED Global conference in California.

I was lucky enough to meet Amy Smith about 2 years ago in Philadelphia, when my dad’s MIT alumni chapter hosted the good doctor for a talk (she was the crowd favorite, although it doesn’t take much to out-do rubbery hotel chicken). Anyway...she discussed how she and her students at the D-Lab have been doing field work at the BOP, working with communities to engineer simple solutions to complex problems. There’s her charcoal work in Haiti, as well as the work she’s done with Honduran communities to bring regular supplies of clean water to rural areas. The list goes on.

The best part about Dr. Smith’s work is two-fold: first, she emphasizes working with, not for, communities (a product of 6 years in the Peace Corps undoubtedly); second, she gets undergraduate engineers out of Cambridge and into the “real” world, solving real problems. That might not please the Institute’s theoretical physics profs, but that’s the kind of professor that everyone would like to have. And not to go overboard, but Ethan reports that she’s working on simple technologies for microenterprise and microfinance. Can’t wait to see the results...

(Via WorldChanging)

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Earlier this week I wrote about the rapid rise in mobile phone penetration in emerging markets and the resulting impact on poverty reduction. Now a first-of-its-kind report titled “Mobility for One Language, Diverse Cultures” details the socio-economic impact of mobile phones in the Arab world.

Its conclusion: the mobile phone industry in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region is creating hundreds of thousands of new jobs inside and outside the industry, boosting economic growth and fostering social harmony and security.

Economic Impact
With a 2005 penetration rate standing at nearly 25% - compared to 15% in 2003 – mobile phones have become a big driver for economic development and job creation. The report reveals that for every job created in the mobile sector in Egypt, up to eight other jobs are created in different sectors of the economy. As a

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Let’s play a game of name-that-quote. I’ll reproduce a quote below, and you guess who said it. Ready? No cheating...

Business does good by doing business

Did anyone guess Milton Friedman? Heck, how about Adam Smith? Maybe Martin Feldstein? Wrong. Here’s another excerpt from the same source:

...the leading global companies of 2020 will be those that provide goods and services and reach new customers in ways that address the world’s major challenges – including poverty, climate change, resource depletion, globalization, and demographic shifts.

Did anyone guess Joel Makower? How about John Elkington? Or Stuart Hart? Maybe WRI’s Jonathan Lash, known for his forward-thinking pronouncements about the role of business?

If you did, you wouldn’t be guilty of bad reasoning. But you would again be wrong. These quotes can be attributed to a group of eight multinational corporate execs convened by the World Business Council for Sustainable Development as its “Tomorrow’s Leaders” group. The eight include some heavy hitters from companies like SwissRe, GrupoNueva, BP, and P&G. They’ve just published From Challenge to Opportunity: The Role of Business in Tomorrow’s Society, a 40-page “manifesto for tomorrow’s global business.”

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Hardly a day goes by where I don’t read something about the rapid expansion of mobile phone services in emerging markets. According to one recent article, “industry analysts forecast that 80% of the next billion mobile phone customers will come from emerging markets. Africa, for example, has the fastest growing mobile market in the world. The continent's subscriber base grew by 66% in 2005 to 135 million users, compared with growth of just 11% in Western Europe during the same period.”

Craig Ehrlich of the GSM Association, a trade association representing more than 680 million mobile operators around the globe, asserts that “the global mobile industry is now connecting more than one million people a day. Within a few years, the mobile industry will have more customers in the developing world than the developed.”

This pent up demand is “putting pressure on infrastructure and handset providers to start tailoring some of their products to these emerging markets.” How they handle this opportunity will be one of the first examples of a mature industry retooling its strategies to meet market demand at the base of the pyramid.

So far, it’s primarily been about cost reduction. The wholesale cost of entry-level mobile handsets has fallen dramatically in the past 18 months – from $100 to below $30. Much of the credit for this belongs to the GSM Association, which has catalyzed the market for these low-cost phones through its Emerging Market Handset Program. Motorola was chosen to supply the first GSMA endorsed handset for this new segment, 12 million of which have been ordered since last year.

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What does green look like at the base of the economic pyramid? SustainAbility’s John Elkington and Mark Lee take that question on in a recent article, Fatigue of Nations, published by Grist. Elkington and Lee write in the engaging, tongue-in-cheek style embraced by Grist, and the result is eminently readable. The authors discuss the potential role of business in greening the base of the pyramid:

In the business world, there are several levels of response to all of this. At the grassroots level, a growing number of social entrepreneurs are working to create new markets for, among other things, renewable energy and waste-management services. In the middle are the corporations that are being teased by the notion of the fortunes to be made at the bottom of the wealth pyramid. And then, perhaps the potential solution that really dares not speak its name, there is Wal-Mart and its globe-straddling supply chain.

The much-hammered $300 billion-a-year behemoth has begun pledging itself to sell everything from organic cotton baby clothes to sustainable fish. While its supply chain initiatives still lag way behind the likes of Nike and Gap, the potential for allying Wal-Mart's cost-reduction power with the green agenda should tempt us to at least think the unthinkable. What if Hurricane Katrina really did turn out to be CEO Lee Scott's Road to Damascus, and Wal-Mart really were to embrace sustainability? If Scott stuck with this long and effectively enough, would we put his name up in lights alongside the likes of BP's Lord John Browne and GE's Jeff Immelt? We shouldn't count on it, but stranger things have happened.

I like that environmentalists such as Elkington at least acknowledge the potential for companies to create wealth – sustainably – at the BOP. There’s been a knee-jerk reaction among the green crowd to corporate involvement in emerging economies for a long time, but that’s starting to change. And when you get down to it, the so-called BOP isn’t going to care about the environment unless they have enough income to put food on the table, a roof over their head, send their kids to school, and stay healthy. Unfortunately for the hard-core green set, the best way to do that is with a job. Fortunately for the green set, the companies out to provide those jobs are increasingly interested in doing so in environmentally sustainable ways. Yet to be seen, but food for thought.

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Here at NextBillion, we know the importance of good data to good research, which is why we have nothing but the deepest respect for our WRI cousins working on EarthTrends: The Environmental Information Portal. Now, they’ve gone and upped the ante – literally. EarthTrends has opened up an essay contest; the winners will receive cash prizes and have their work published on WRI’s most-visited web site.

You might be asking, “What is EarthTrends, anyway?” It’s a comprehensive, online database focusing on the environmental, social, and economic trends that shape our world. Their essay contest, which closes April 1, 2006, seeks “fact-based analysis of an important condition or trend related to the environment and sustainable development...Entries should discuss issues that have a global or regional (larger than single country) impact.”

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William Easterly's Monday column in the Washington Post, "The West Can't Save Africa," was unreservedly caustic toward all the big talk and promises in 2005 about ending poverty. Easterly pinpoints a most fundamental error in Western aid's orientation toward poverty alleviation--its assumption of a savior complex toward Africans who are cast as an altogether destitute, disease-ridden, starving population. They are shut out from participating in discussions on how to "save" their own communities. Easterly's basic point is well-made and articulates the motivation behind NextBillion: "Economic development in Africa will depend--as it has elsewhere and throughout the history of the modern world--on the success of private-sector entrepreneurs, social entrepreneurs and African political reformers." NextBillion's database catalogues scores of local enterprises that are providing services and creating jobs in low-income communities--the bedrock of societies that can meet the needs of their citizens.

But what of aid? The G-8 has plans to double aid from $25 billion to $50 billion. Easterly grazes the subject of how to redirect aid by calling for "achievable and accountable programs" subject to "independent evaluation" and "with high potential for poor individuals to help themselves." Examples he gives are investments in children's education and nutrition, and SME development programs. Another intriguing possibility for aid money is to serve as initial investments or subsidies for products developed for the BOP but as yet unable to reach economies of scale and costs per unit low enough to be sold directly to the BOP. The question is how best to leverage the increasing billions in aid and philanthropy, often culpable in the past of decapacitating economies? How do we convert aid into investment dollars for local economies? The below technologies, recently in debate by NextBillion staff, might yield critical opportunities.

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Google announced this week that it has selected Abuja, Nigeria as one of about seven African cities the company will fully connect with a wireless network. Although described as one of Google's "social responsibility projects", the announcement follows the company's proposal last October to create a citywide Wi-Fi network for San Francisco. Could Google's activities in Africa be a central part of its long-term business strategy?

This is just the latest example of Google focusing its resources on the "base of the pyramid". Last year, the company announced the creation of a foundation with the explicit goal of “giving on world poverty and the environment." One of the most interesting aspects of the fund is that it will support for-profit enterprises. The company has also chipped in $2 million to MIT's One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) program, which aims to distribute cheap laptops to millions of children in emerging markets.

So what is Google's plan for its Wi-Fi network? The company confirmed last month that it is preparing its own distribution of Linux for the desktop.

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The following was written by Lee Thorn of the Jhai Foundation, originally sent to us via the Foundation's newsletter.

I think it might be useful to look at rural ICT and development from a social perspective. What works from this perspective? What doesn't?

What Jhai does is consulting about processes that are critical parts of economic development for people who have been left out. We are especially concerned about people left out of the opportunity to use information and communication technology tools that might help them increase earnings and deepen their social networks, business relations, and friendships.

"A quantum universe is enacted only in an environment rich in relationships. Nothing happens in the quantum world without something encountering something else. Nothing is independent of relationships that occur. I am constantly creating the world - evoking it, not discovering it - as I participate in all its many interactions. This is a world of process, not a world of things." - Margaret Wheatley, Leadership and the New Science, Barrett-Koehler (pb), 1994, p. 68

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