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The minimum wage in South China's industrial heartland Guangdong Province, is to be raised by 21 per cent on average to a range from RMB 660 renminbi to 1,030 ($96 to $ 150) a month from May 1st in a bid to attract migrant workers, local authorities said Thursday.

Guangdong, north of Hong Kong, in the Pearl River delta region, which is responsible for a third of China's exports and would rank as one of the world's 10 largest exporters if it were a country, is finding it harder to attract migrant labour as other regions develop. So on Thursday, it was announced by the Guangdong Provincial Human Resources and Social Security Department that the minimum wage of both full-time and part-time workers will be raised.

The adjusted minimum wage is divided into five categories ranging from RMB660 to 1,030 yuan/renminbi ($96 to $ 150) a month, depending on the financial situation in different cities in the province. The move came a month after the country's second biggest exporter, Jiangsu Province, raised its minimum wage by about 12 per cent to 960 yuan ($140.64) from the current 850 yuan ($124). East China's Fujian Province increased its minimum wage by 24.5 per cent from March 1st.

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NAIROBI, Kenya, Mar 19 - Prime Minister Raila Odinga on Friday called on African leaders to enhance the continent's economic competitiveness by ensuring that women have access to financial services and occupy key leadership positions in the financial sector.

The Premier said that Africa must pursue inclusive financial sector policies, which are accessible and therefore enable the participation of a greater number of women -to ensure that they contribute to the decisions that are shaping the overhaul of the global financial system.

He said that 50 percent of Africa's population comprised of women and emphasised that investing in them was the best way to emancipate the continent from poverty.

"No country can tackle poverty when the majority of its people especially women have limited access to financial services," he noted.

Mr Odinga spoke while officially opening the African Women Economic Summit in Nairobi. The summit with a theme "investing differently in women" brings to the fore the importance of the role of women in the economy, and particularly in the financial sector.

He said that a recent national survey carried out in Kenya in 2009 revealed that an astounding 66 percent of women have no access to formal financial services and 33 percent of them are completely excluded from accessing any financial services.

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ROME, Mar 18, 2010 (IPS) - Employees at the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) may have cause to fear for their jobs after Yukiko Omura was appointed vice president of the United Nations' rural poverty agency in February.

The Japanese economist is not one of those ruthless job-slashing executives that organisations bring in when they want to downsize to efficiency though. But, she is a determined, capable woman who believes that IFAD's mission is to help create a world where the agency is no longer needed, by empowering rural people to haul themselves out of poverty. 

Omura, who joins the Rome-based agency after being head of the World Bank's Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency, and some 20 years in the private sector as an investment banker before that, recognises that this is a massive challenge, with around three-quarters of the planet's 1.02 billion hungry people living in rural areas. 

She believes a key component to meeting it is to tap the enterprising spirit of women farmers in developing countries. 

Q: Your previous job was as a senior executive at the World Bank, a body that many non-governmental organisations blame for exacerbating the poverty IFAD is trying to combat. Is this switch like changing sides from the baddies to the good guys? 

A: No. I did not leave the World Bank because it is a bad institution. I left because I thought I could do something different to add more value to development. I worked in political risk insurance, a very specific field within the World Bank group. I wanted to do something that is even more effective by getting involved in grants, loans and investments, reaching out to the poorest of the poor and helping them become effective private sector business people. 

Q: How do you intend to do that? 

A: I'm here to support the president [Kanayo Nwanze] to ensure we become an even bigger contributor to assisting small-holder farmers worldwide, increasing projects and becoming more flexible in terms of satisfying our clients' demands by becoming more of an IFI (international financial institution) than we are today. We are also going to keep supporting women and women small-holder farmers because we firmly believe, as do many development IFIs and agencies, that they are an important part of economic development in any part of the world. 

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RACINE, Wis., Mar. 17 /CSRwire/ - SC Johnson, A Family Company, today announced a collaboration with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) on global efforts to combat malaria. The organizations will jointly support research programs conducted by Cornell University Center for Sustainable Global Enterprise and a consortium of Indonesian research institutions to advance the development and use of consumer products in the fight against the spread of the disease.

This collaboration allows SC Johnson to build on its experience in malaria education and prevention, as well as enhance its efforts to bring economic growth to some of the world's poorest communities.

It also supports BMGF's mission to reduce global health inequities in order to save lives and dramatically decrease the burden of disease in developing countries. "The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is making huge strides in fighting poverty and disease in developing countries," said SC Johnson's Chairman and CEO Fisk Johnson. "We are honored to be affiliated with a group that is committed to implementing solutions that significantly change people's lives for the better."

The collaboration, with financial support from both SC Johnson and BMGF (and in-kind personnel and product resources from SC Johnson), will fund a study through Cornell University Center for Sustainable Global Enterprise. The project, led by Dr. Mark Milstein, will work to develop a consumer-level, market-based solution to malaria infection among at-risk populations. Its ultimate goal is to create a business model that will implement change in a base of the pyramid (BoP) market. Currently, SC Johnson has two existing BoP partnerships in place in sub-Saharan Africa.

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For the last decade, cultural issues as well as a lack of information, capital and opportunity have been advanced as reasons why there are few women in technology-related businesses in Africa, but trends are slowly changing.

For the last decade, cultural issues as well as a lack of information, capital and opportunity have been advanced as reasons why there are few women in technology-related businesses in Africa, but trends are slowly changing.

The emergence of mobile money services led by the growth of GSM networks has allowed many women to work from their homes or trading centers, helping them avoid traveling long distances for business.

The growth of mobile phone service companies has led to more demand for engineers, growth of engineering services companies such as telecom mast construction and the expansion of fiber optic cable networks. All this has provided more opportunity.

While there has been some activism on women's issues, it's mainly the increasing availability of jobs that pay relatively well and career talks in schools that have helped many women to explore opportunities in technology.

"The girls need to have more information on careers and they can choose science subjects that will allow them to take technology related courses at the university; previously girls would concentrate on arts subjects, which limits their choices at the university," said Gladys Muhunyo, a member of Linux Chix Kenya

For the last decade, cultural issues as well as a lack of information, capital and opportunity have been advanced as reasons why there are few women in technology-related businesses in Africa, but trends are slowly changing.

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The government targets to create 4,000 women entrepreneurs among the hardcore poor, who are those with a household monthly income of less than RM440, by 2012.

Women, Family and Community Development Minister Datuk Seri Shahrizat Abdul Jalil said this was one of the measures taken to move 44,643 people out of hardcore poverty.

She said to date, 1,400 names had been identified for the entrepreneurial programme carried out with the cooperation of 18 ministries and government agencies, including Tekun Nasional, Amanah Ikhtiar Malaysia (AIM) and Small and Medium Enterprise Corporation Malaysia (SME Corp. Malaysia).

"They will be given assistance in the form of capital and training, and the fields they will venture into include catering and cottage industries like making handicraft," she said after the Avon Awards function, here, on Wednesday.

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Royal DSM N.V., the Netherlands headquartered global life sciences and materials sciences company is looking at the bottom of the pyramid market in India for bringing in their micronutrient business.

DSM plans to bring in its rice fortification programme to India and is ready to demonstrate the benefits of rice fortification to fight micronutrient malnutrition, Nico Gerardu, member, managing board, DSM N.V. said.

This has been in testing phase in India and China and the pilot project has demonstrated that these micronutrients did improve health of the people involved in the pilots being carried out in southern parts of India as it is a staple diet there, Gerardu said.

In India, the average consumption of milled rice is around 200 kg per year. This rice just provides mass and lacks in micronutrients, points our Gerardu.

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"Microfinancing is banking, and banking is our core competence, so why not have a look at it?" says Arthur Vayloyan, head of Investment Services and Products at Private Banking Credit Suisse in Zurich (MBA 95D).

Switzerland's number two investment bank became active in the microfinance domain in 2000, driven by clients who were asking for solutions in socially-responsible investments. Several CS colleagues, having travelled around the world, had first-hand knowledge of microfinance initiatives and Credit Suisse took up the call.

"There's a huge potential out there," Vayloyan points out.  "It's probably tenfold what has been done so far; 25 per cent in the last year. We talk nowadays about some $30-$40 billion worth of credit out, and estimates indicate that could easily go to $200-$300 billion." Microfinance recipients are at the bottom of the pyramid - and it's only been partially tapped: "We're talking about 4-5 billion people," says Vayloyan; that's the potential of this market: 2/3 of the world population."

Financing the financiers, rather than individuals

"We couldn't possibly be present in 40 countries around the world with individual borrowers," says Vayloyan. We refinance the microfinance institutions, and they themselves use the money to give the loans out. It's a refinancing of successful, sustainable microfinancing institutions ... our partner network all over the world, including groups like Planet Finance, etc., gives us access to individual microfinance institutions ... We're talking about institutions with $10-15 million balance sheets."

Returns are significant. "We look for around LIBOR (London Interbank Offered Rate) plus nine, ideally," confirms Vayloyan. Our Responsibility Global Microfinance Fund has returns relative to the LIBOR market in the midst of the crisis. The best year actually was 2008, when we saw about five to six per cent in Swiss Franc returns to the client."

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An equity fund focused on poverty? Sounds odd, I know. But Chris Brookfield, who managed funds for Unitus, and his partners at Elevar said today they have raised $70 million to invest in companies providing services to people at the bottom of the economic ladder. Elevar told me a bit about the fund last June.

Seattle-based Elevar will invest in companies involved in microfinance and other services targeted at the working poor in countries such as India, Mexico, the Philippines and Peru.

Elevar is the second fund of Unitus Equity Fund, initially run as a for-profit arm of Unitus, a Seattle-based non-profit organization. Elevar is now independent of Unitus, though it remains a strategic partner, Brookfield said.

Besides microfinance, Brookfield said Elevar will also seek to invest in financing low income housing, agriculture and information services. The idea is to bring more commercial capital into development.

Improving incomes of billions of poor people -- the so-called "Next 4 Billion" -- has benefits for companies here, too. Economic growth in developing countries "is the strongest opportunity for long-term business growth," according to this report by the IGD, since the poorest two-thirds of the world's population represent $5 trillion in purchasing power. The more development can be supported through investment, the less dependent countries will be on foreign aid. The majority of poor countries don't attract much private investment, so it will be interesting to see whether a socially motivated fund can create a path for it.

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Kenyan farmers can now insure some of the costs of growing crops against bad weather by using mobile phone technology that links solar-powered weather stations to an insurance company. 

Farmers can cover the cost of seeds, fertilisers and pesticides at local agricultural supply shops by paying an extra 5% of their value. 

If their harvest fails due to bad weather they are reimbursed and can plant again. 

For now, the policy only covers wheat and maize and is available for the agricultural inputs of Syngenta and two Kenyan partners supplying seeds and fertilizer not sold by the Swiss agrochemicals company. The companies in turn subsidise some of the insurance costs. 

"Last year, when I took out the insurance policy, we had a total crop failure. The crop didn't even reach the flowering state, it dried up," said Jane Gathoni Simon, a maize farmer who took part in a pilot programme last year. 

"But at the end of the year we were compensated. I managed to get the (replacement) seeds in time and planted." 

Food prices rocketed in much of east Africa in 2008 and 2009 after a succession of failed rains hit staple crops such as maize. 
The region is now being deluged by above normal rainfall, causing widespread flooding in many areas. 

On purchase, dealers use a camera phone to scan a barcode that automatically registers the policy with Kenyan insurance provider UAP over Safaricom's mobile phone network. 

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