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Since joining the World Resources Institute in 1990, Al Hammond has been mixing things up.  Against steep odds, he built the World Resources Report into a best-in-class publication featuring extensive datasets of environmental indicators – putting it on par with the World Bank's World Development Report and the UNDP's Human Development Report.  He built on that experience to write a widely-read book – Which World? Scenarios for the 21st Century – that laid out scenarios for how the world might develop over the next 50 years given the twin constraints of climate change and poverty.  

Al then convened a group of leading technologists, business leaders and development experts to discuss the importance of bridging the digital divide - a meeting that spawned WRI's Digital Dividends research initiative and gave the first public platform for the base of the pyramid message. Along the way, Al directed numerous internal initiatives at WRI and served as an advisor for the UN Commission on Sustainable Development, the Global Environment Facility and the Human Development Report - among many others.

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What: Unitus is seeking highly motivated social entrepreneurs to participate in the Entrepreneur in Residence (EIR) program for 2008. EIRs at Unitus spend up to one year launching their venture with the deep support of a dynamic community of socially-commited business professionals with passion for alleviating poverty through microfinance.

The EIR program will provide strategic support to entrepreneurs dedicated to building social businesses that can scale to improve income generation potential of millions of disadvantaged people in emerging markets.

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During a recent workshop at the M-banking conference in Cairo, Egypt, a number of practitioners and interested parties discussed the state of mobile banking or-more properly-mobile transactions. One of the interesting insights that emerged comes from the experience of the Vodafone company Safaricom in Kenya with its M-PESA mobile transaction service.

Launched in March, 2007, the service has been an astounding success, reaching 2 million customers by May of 2008. New field research by Olga Morawczynski on use of M-PESA's by low-income customers in the Kibera slum of Nairobi-now posted in our resources section-sheds some light on both the how and why.

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Guest blogger Sasha Dichter is Director of Business Development at Acumen Fund. Before joining Acumen, Dichter held senior positions in the corporate citizenship departments of GE Money and IBM. He earned a B.A., M.A., and M.B.A., all from Harvard University.

By Sasha Dichter

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The International Chamber of Commerce (ICC), the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), and the International Business Leaders Forum (IBLF) have opened nominations for the 2008 World Business and Development Awards in support of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).

The awards recognize the contribution of the private sector to help achieve the MDGs through their core business. Recent winners of these awards have been De Beers for its HIV/Aids programme, ITC eChoupal and Procter and Gamble's PuR water purifier.

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Guest blogger Karen Bennett is a Research Program Coordinator at the World Resources Institute. Her current work focuses on mainstreaming an ecosystem services approach to assure ecosystems' capacity to provide humans with needed goods and services. She also provides support to projects in the People and Ecosystems Program.

By Karen Bennett

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According to the National Network for Child Care, a typical three year-old is "full of wonder and spends a lot of time watching, observing, and imitating. Their days are filled with busy exploration of their world."  Yesterday, on the occasion of NextBillion.net's third birthday, I found myself reflecting on this description – and wondering if it applies to our community as it would a child.

We are certainly busy exploring our base of the pyramid world – a world that itself has grown leaps and bounds since the site's initial launch.  I remember when we could go weeks without posting a relevant mainstream news story related to BoP; now, we post two or three per day.  When NextBillion got started, "next billion" wasn't in the business or development lexicon.  Now, influential actors from the Boston Consulting Group to Microsoft to the World Bank have adopted the term to signify the next billion people to rise from the base of the pyramid, and the next billion in profits for businesses that strive to fill market gaps by integrating the BoP into healthy economies.

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I am glad to announce the release of "Los Siguientes 4 Mil Millones: Tamaño de Mercado y Estrategia de Negocios en la Base de la Pirámide", the Spanish language version of WRI and IFC's milestone report "The Next 4 Billion: Market Size and Busines Strategy at the Base of the Pyramid". This report was made possible by the Network for Inclusive Markets, formed by WRI, Avina and Fundes, strong regional players in the BoP space.

With 360 million people living at the Base of the Pyramid, Latin America presents itself with a vibrant market with enormous opportunities for market-based approaches to economic development. Los Siguientes 4 Mil Millones will hopefully serve as a tool for the Latin American business community to design creative business models that enable economic opportunity for the region's BoP.

The strong analytical scope of this report will present this community with a concrete sense of opportunity, thus multiplying the outreach and impact of already successful initiatives like those set into motion by IDB's Opportunities for the Majority initiative, among others.

The full version of the report may be downloded here. We look forward to hearing reactions to the report and learning about new ventures and lessons learned as the Latin American BoP space continues to unfold.

Editor's note: This job with Satya Capital has been filled.  The company is no longer accepting applications.  Please check our Career Center for updated job listings in the BoP space.

Position: Associate/Director

Location: London

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A quick announcement for readers who only caught bits and pieces of the sector scaling series we ran last week and others who just want to see all of the commentary in one place - we recently packaged all of the series in PDF format and posted it in our resources section.

For those who haven't followed it:

"Taking Base of the Pyramid Strategies to Scale is a series of eleven blog postings that debate a radical new approach to scaling BoP business models, which its proponents call a "transformative sector strategy." In the series, Al Hammond introduces the conceptual framework for this new development model and provides examples of the strategy in action from the Health and ICT sectors. Six BoP experts comment on the strategy in subsequent guest commentaries, followed by a fifth concluding post from Hammond.

This is the first of what we hope will be more NextBillion.net blog series that explore BoP issues and debate them with experts in the field. Check out the pdf and stay tuned for more...