Blog

For those of us in the United States, tonight marks a tradition - the tradition of Thanksgiving traffic.  This is especially true on the eastern seaboard, where air and car traffic get particularly bad as families attempt to gather and celebrate the holiday.

So, since NextBillion.net is based in Washington DC, we're taking a few days off.  Who knows, we might just log on and do some blogging from the airport or while stuck in traffic - you never know.

Continue reading this article

Interested in mobile technology applications for development?  Need $10,000?  If you answered "yes" to both of the above, then the Development 2.0 Challenge is made for you.

The Development 2.0 Challenge is an initiative of the Global Development Commons, which works to crowdsource solutions to pressing development problems.  What's interesting about this particular effort is (a) it's focus on mobile phone applications to development, (b) the $10,000 winner's prize - double that of the Changemakers collaborative competitions - and (c) the community voting process that will help determine the winner.

Continue reading this article

Guest blogger Bree Olivari is a second-year MBA candidate at Thunderbird Global School of Management and is a leader of the Net Impact chapter.  At Thunderbird, Bree integrates her interest in sustainable business with her degree in supply chain leadership. Her projects include mapping best practices of supplier codes of ethics, organizing Thunderbird's Sustainable Innovation Summit and greening procurement practices on campus.

During a recent internship Bree helped design the distribution of micronutrient sachets to undernourished children in Mexico.

By Bree Olivari

Continue reading this article

For all our readers who have been following the mobile phone banking debate, there is a great opportunity coming up to hear about first hand experiences of the implementation of  mobile banking solutions at scale in multiple markets.

CGAP - the Consultative Group to Assist the Poor - is organizing an online conference open to everyone interested on December 11th and has invited a great group of speakers to share their perspectives and insights about this budding industry. Please remember that your participation has to be confirmed by email before November 30th to technology@cgap.org with 'RSVP' in the subject line.

The conference - entitled "Mobile Banking for Poor People: Pioneer Perspectives" - welcomes the following panelists:

• Nick Hughes, Vodafone Group (UK/Worldwide)
  
• Rizza Maniego-Eala, Globe Telecom (Philippines)
• Sam Kamiti, Equity Bank (Kenya)
• Ali Abbas Sikander, Tameer Bank (Pakistan)
• Ganhuyag Ch. Hutagt, XacBank (Mongolia)
• Brian Richardson, Wizzit (South Africa)
• Maldives Monetary Authority (Maldives)

For additional details of the conference, please go to their original announcement here.

Although gender equality is a desirable aim in itself, there are also underlying economic reasons for female empowerment. In the words of the 2007 Global Monitoring Report (partially devoted to gender issues) from the World Bank: "Improving gender equality reduces poverty and stimulates growth directly through women’s greater labor force participation, productivity, and earnings, as well as indirectly through beneficial effects on child well-being."

Plainly speaking, improving the status of women has two effects. On the one hand there is a short term economic effect, since women seem to be better investors and bookkeepers than men – and there are many studies out there to prove it.  Some examples of the many around are the following:

• Small loans to women in Bangladesh increase family income twice as much as similar loans to men (Source: "The Impact of Group-Based Credit Programs on Poor Households in Bangladesh: Does the Gender of Participants Matter," by Pitt and Khandker, 1998).
• Distributing farm inputs equally to women and men in Kenya would increase outputs by one-fifth (Source: "Gender, Growth and Poverty Reduction," by Blackden and Bhanu. World Bank, 1999.)

(For a good recent summary of empirical analyses of the role of gender equality and women's empowerment in reducing poverty and stimulating growth see "Gender equality, poverty and economic growth", by Morrison, Raju, and Sinha. World Bank, 2007)

Additionally, when women have a greater economic say, a bigger portion of the household budget will tend on average to be invested in children's well-being. Again, there is abundant empirical evidence supporting that increased female control over resources leads to better child development outcomes, including educational attainment and nutrition and thus reduced child mortality. For example:

• It is estimated that the mothers’ income has 20 times the marginal impact on child survival as the fathers’ income.
• Furthermore, female income’s effect on nutrition was found to be between four and eight times as large as male income’s effect (for more details of women’s effects on children wellbeing, check out the “Engendering Development - Through Gender Equality in Rights, Resources, and Voice” by the World Bank, 2001)

Last, but not least, when women have greater economic power they have greater control of the decisions that affect their wellbeing. This results in less domestic violence (which includes sexual abuse), lower rates of AIDS/HIV infection and better access to sexual and reproductive health services (it is estimated that one woman per minute dies from complications of pregnancy, child birth or abortion).

Continue reading this article

Guest blogger Katherine Yue is a second-year MBA student at Thunderbird School of Global Management where she has assisted in research on business and capacity growth in microfinance and health microfranchises. She interned for FINCA Jordan in its founding year, strengthening business risk management disciplines.

Prior to Thunderbird, Katherine was a project manager at the largest health care organization in the US, leading in process redesign and enterprise risk management systems. She graduated from UC Berkeley with a degree in economics with a focus on society and technology.

Continue reading this article

Back in April I posted news about the World Challenge competition, hosted by BBC and Newsweek. Well, I just got an e-mail from a friend reminding me about it so I went to the competition's website, only to find out that the final round is on and that votes for one of the finalists will be accepted until tomorrow.

So I encourage you to visit World Challenge, take a look at the twelve finalists and cast your vote! There are interesting projects coming from Latin America, Africa, East Europe and Asia.

Continue reading this article

Guest blogger Christi Huizenga is a second-year MBA student at Thunderbird School of Global Management.  Before Thunderbird, she spent five years in project management and business development for International Justice Mission, a human rights NGO.  Christi has a B.A. in Business Communications from Calvin College in Grand Rapids, MI.

Christi Huizenga

The days when development finance organizations were the only ones pouring capital into emerging markets are long gone. Private Equity firms are increasingly chasing returns into emerging markets.  A panel last weekend at the Net Impact North America Conference brought together both private equity firms and development finance organizations to discuss the trade-offs between profitable returns and the social impact of these investments. 

Continue reading this article

(Editor's note: Today, November 19, is World Toilet Day, part of an awareness campaign led by Water Aid. This post is timely to stop for a second, think about and learn more a crisis that keeps 2.5 billion of the world's poorest citizens away from basic sanitation services)

Guest blogger Mike Pezone is a returned Peace Corps volunteer from the Philippines and a 2nd year MBA from The Johnson School at Cornell University.  He focuses on Base of the Pyramid business models at Cornell's Center for Sustainable Global Enterprise.  This past summer he worked in Mexico conducting the BoP Protocol to develop a water purification business model for an early stage startup.

By Mike Pezone

Water touches everything. This was reflected in the diverse backgrounds and interests of the panelists at the Saturday morning session about "innovative solutions to water and sanitation challenge".  Hailing from different corners of the water problem, panelists included Mikkel Vesterdaard - CEO of the company that created the Life Straw, Andra Tamburro - Program Director at Water Advocates (the first nonprofit organization dedicated to increasing American support for the global water problem), and Jeff Seabright - VP of Environment and Water Resources at the Coca-Cola Company.

Stan Laskowski, President of the Philadelphia Global Water Initiative Board moderated an engaging session between panelists and participants.  In my opinion the panel was less a discussion on innovative solutions and more of a call to action as each panelist cited statistics reminding us of the gargantuan scale of the current water crisis.

• 1,000,000,000 people lack access to safe drinking water
• 2,600,000,000 people lack access to proper sanitation
• 50% of the schools in developing countries lack access to clean water
• 75% of the schools in developing countries lack access to proper sanitation
• Every 15 seconds a child dies from a water related illness

Continue reading this article

Guest blogger Matt Austin is a second-year MBA student at Thunderbird School of Global Management focusing on the intersection of international development, entrepreneurship and venture capital. He spent this past summer advising a group of Endeavor High Impact Entrepreneurs in Turkey on their capital raising and expansion efforts.

Prior to Thunderbird, Matt was a private equity and M&A attorney for nearly seven years. He is a graduate of Harvard Law School and the University of Iowa with a degree in Economics.

Continue reading this article