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Unlike Pablo, I haven't gotten explicit permission from Katherine Marshall of the World Bank to post an excerpt from her Davos notes, but I point you to PSDblog for her interesting summary of the last days' discussions.

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In response to the World Bank's Doing Business Index of 2006, which ranks many African countries quite low (with a few exceptions among countries that are working on pro-business reforms), the BBC is requesting testimonials from people now doing or who have done business in an African country.Their questions:

David at Microcapital reminds us of the Remote Transaction System, developed by Hewlett-Packard in conjunction with partner MFIs to widen the reach of financial services into rural areas. WRI was closely associated with the RTS project, at one time holding the intellectual capital in trust and later writing a full-length case study on the project’s results and potential.

David, meanwhile, wonders whether the open-source solution – now being shepherded by Sevak Solutions – will set an industry standard for microfinance software. Excerpts:

The RTS innovation will hopefully...allow for the creation of an industry standard and also achieve a breakthrough in the scale of microfinance services, because only open source might be affordable for all those tiny, cash-strapped microfinance institutions out there. Will this open source development create an industry standard? A standard is certainly needed. Banking software taken downstream to service microfinance is just too expensive to buy and maintain for most micro-lenders, while on the other hand, the new products from technology firms focused on microfinance are limited in the face of microfinance market challenges, namely varying language, regulation, maintenance (infrastructure is scarce) and of course, cost.

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"Putting Paid to Poverty" provides a hopeful scenario for the development of the 'base of the pyramid' over the next ten years. It was written by Allen Hammond, VP for Innovation and Special Projects and William Kramer, Deputy Director of the Development Through Enterprise initiative at the World Resources Institute. The article originally appeared in Value magazine.

It began slowly, with the dawning recognition that traditional development projects were not sufficient to accomplish the Millennium Development Goals and with a UN commission report citing the essential role of the private sector 1. Still, in 2005, there were only a handful of major companies putting serious money behind developing low-income markets. The Year of Microfinance celebrations focused on achieving 100 million clients of an estimated 500 million potential and the growing involvement of banks and other major financial institutions in scaling up, but overlooked the almost complete lack of “mesofinance” investment capital to enable small and medium companies to expand. At the same time, many countries experienced the hollowing out of development strategies tied to export-led growth, as they began to lose jobs to China’s emerging dominance as a manufacturing platform. But the potential of domestic low-income markets—the base of the economic pyramid—as a more sustainable driver of growth was not widely recognized.

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The 2006 Transparency International report is out, and this year's focus is on health services--apparently a sector particularly prone to corruption.  Why? The executive summary highlights three reasons: imbalance of information (health professionals know more than patients, and pharmaceutical companies know more about their products than public officials),  uncertainty in health markets (how many people will fall ill , where/when humanitarian disasters will strike makes it hard to manage resources), and the opaque, complex relations within the health system.

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Thanks , Rob, for submitting a news story on water research that highlights what is (hopefully) a trend: the delivery of clean water to the BOP and the increased efficiency of water usage during production of other goods.

For those of you who do not check the activity database faithfully, you might have missed the recent changes (Courtland and I updated and recategorized the 280+ activity capsules last week). There is now a "water" category, owing to the growing number of water-related activities. Some of these are focused on low-cost pumps for the BOP, others on individual or household water filtration , a village-wide solar-powered irrigation systems with delivery via "water credit cards." , and nutritional supplements to mix with water.

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John’s discovery of Value and subsequent post prompted me to probe a bit deeper into the site. First of all, it’s nice to see a business magazine that has the phrase “Tomorrow’s Markets” in the sub-title. Nicer still is that Value provides content of...well, value. Take for instance this excellent interview, The Global Economy's Immune System, conducted by John Elkington with Paul Hawken, the noted environmentalist and businessman.

Their conversation gets right to the point, and Hawken expresses some serious criticism of the bottom of the pyramid hypothesis. Excerpts:

I’m also more than a little concerned about the thinking that there are three billion new consumers out there, that the next big thing is the “bottom of the pyramid.” From the view of the global south that is not trained in corporations and business schools, it smacks of colonialism and imperialism all over again... It is about this idea that we can open up the bottom of the pyramid to a flood of Western-made goods that will vault them into the lower to middle classes. But then what? What the poor want are rights, not foil packets. I hope that you take these issues head on.

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“There will come a day when you will not be able to tell the difference between a for-profit and a nonprofit organization.” Those words, spoken by the late Peter Drucker to the Harvard Business Review in 1993, planted the seeds that have led to Value, the first new business magazine in a decade.

Value offers a new lens on tomorrow’s markets, enterprise and investment. According to the editors, “A large part of value creation has to do with maximizing economic value and financial returns for shareholders. Yet, it is increasingly obvious that in order to maximize economic value one must consider not simply the easily defined indicators we have traditionally relied upon, but rather the less easily defined aspects of value that are extra-financial often social and/or environmental in nature.”

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