Newsroom

It comes as no surprise that Nokia's new handset chief, Rick Simonson, chose an Indian newspaper for an interview setting out his 2010 plan to fight back against Samsung and Apple. India is the market where Nokia's market share is largest, and where it has the most convincing growth strategy based around web services for the 'next billion'. It is also a territory where many key rivals are floundering.

But the message from Simonson, who moved from the CFO position to his new role in October, was aimed at the whole world, not just India. He predicts that Nokia will ship over 500m handsets this year, bringing it back to its customary targeted market share of 40%. However, a Nokia spokesperson told news agency Reuters that the firm had not changed its official forecasts for 2010, which are for its market share to remain flat (it is likely to end 2009 around 37% or 38%) against an overall industry increase of 10% in unit terms.

Nokia will stick to a three-platform strategy based on Symbian, the emerging Linux-based Maemo at the high end, and Series 40 at the low end. Given the huge breadth of the vendor's range, three operating systems for different target markets is not excessive, Simonson argues. But overall, especially in the smartphone segment, "there is definitely not enough room for more than four or five operating systems." He played Nokia's trump card, its massive scale, which underpins its supply chain efficiencies, and should enable it to appeal to developers. "Scale is critical," he said. "For instance, Palm's OS is very good, but with less than 1% of the global volumes, it won't be too appealing to developers."

He admitted that, despite these advantages, Nokia had lost ground in the smartphone sector since mid-2008, though said that decline had been arrested in the second half of 2009 and would be reversed in 2010, even against Apple. "The New Year will see our recovery in smartphones with the introduction of Maemo and the stabilization of the Symbian operating system, which by the way, continues to be the platform for the largest number of smartphones, globally," he said, reminding us that 50% of the world's smartphones run Symbian OS.

He also repeated a common Nokia complaint, that analysts are only interested in north America, its worst major market, and tend to assume the pattern is the same globally. "There is a lot of money to be made in the north American market and since we are not doing too well there, it has resulted in our stock performance - this issue has played up and media coverage makes it appear it the same across the world, which is not the case."

It is clear that Nokia's real growth opportunities lie in emerging markets though, and its chief stalking horse application is simple email for first-time users. Its apps are now available in 180 countries and Simonson says: "We don't think that people in emerging markets need hundreds of thousands of apps, but rather they need ones that are relevant to them, those that can improve the quality of their lives. We will emerge successful here because an application that has relevance for emerging markets can be used across Asia, Africa and Latin America because of our reach. We will win because our size and scale enables us to have an active dialog with over a billion customers who use our products."

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I spend my life sitting in boardrooms across from chief executives asking me to help them find that mythical beast, "the big idea". To them, I say this: "Small is the new big."

I feel this even more strongly after a recent visit to Bangladesh to meet Muhammad Yunus, recipient of the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize. I wanted to better understand the Grameen organisation, its micro-financing banking system, and its collaboration with the global French food group, Danone. There, I would see with my own eyes what social enterprise looks and feels like when the rubber hits the road. In recent years, Ideo's client base has increasingly been about designing not only for financial but also for social impact, and a visceral sense of the opportunities and realities was what I was looking to learn.

What hit me was the scale of the enterprise and how a small seed of an idea could be world-changing in its impact.

Prof Yunus talks about scale in the context of poverty: "To me, poor people are like bonsai trees. When you plant the best seed of the tallest tree in a flowerpot, you get a replica of the tallest tree, only inches tall. There is nothing wrong with the seed you planted, only the soil base that is too inadequate. Poor people are bonsai people. There is nothing wrong in their seeds. Simply, society never gave them the base to grow on."

Grameen Bank gives tiny, collateral-free loans, mainly to women,along with huge amounts of trust that they will reliably pay the loans back. Small local branches are run by the "Grameen lad-ies", who take pride in making their own and their customers' loan repayments - treating everyone well and behaving, frankly, more professionally than many bank professionals.

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EGHEL, the Netherlands — With AIDS, malaria and other diseases costing millions of lives every year, worrying about the vision of people in the developing world may seem like an indulgence.

But supplying glasses for the world’s poor may be one of the most valuable investments around. Hundreds of millions of people — some put the estimates as high as two billion — do not have the corrective lenses that would allow them to lead better, more productive lives.

A study published in a World Health Organization journal in June estimated the cost in lost output at $269 billion a year. Moreover, tackling vision problems early can help prevent later blindness.

Now efforts are under way to find a means of distributing inexpensive glasses on a wide scale. One promising technology is self-adjustable spectacles, which let untrained wearers set the right focus themselves in less than a minute, greatly reducing the need for trained optometrists, who are rarely available in Africa and many parts of Asia. Though these adjustable glasses cannot yet help with conditions like astigmatism, at least 80 percent of refractive errors can be fixed.

At least three organizations are now offering their own versions of low-cost adjustable spectacles. Two are relatively new groups based in the Netherlands that have received little international recognition. The third, based in England and championing a Britishinvention called AdSpecs, has been attracting widespread media attention for more than a decade.

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NAIROBI/TRANSMARA, Kenya – Two years ago, fed up with a husband who drank too much and provided too little, Julie Amunga, who lives in the sprawling Mathare slum in the capital, Nairobi, decided to start a business that would enable her to support her family.

“My friends and I all had husbands who drank too much and beat us at home and yet they were not providing anything for the home,” she told IRIN/PlusNews. “We would sleep with other men secretly to provide for our children but we realized we were not helping our children because prostituting would only make us acquire HIV and die early.”

Amunga and five friends decided to pool their savings and use them to start small businesses; they also got a microfinance loan from the Jamii Bora Trust, which works to empower youth and women in Nairobi’s slums.

While she and another woman have managed to sustain successful small businesses – she grows and sells vegetables and fresh fruit juice in the local market – the other three found it much harder to make the loans work for them.

“Their husbands cheated them and took all the money yet we were supposed to pay back the loan,” she said. “Others took the money without knowing which business they want to start, so … they ended up spending the money.”

According to Joseph Kwaka, executive director of Community Aid International (CAI), an NGO that runs a micro-credit programme in Nyanza and Nairobi provinces, making micro-credit available to women – and especially widows – helps cushion them from poverty, but without proper preparation and training, can just as easily backfire.

“Our experience with offering credit facilities to women is that many take the money and end up using it to buy family needs like food, clothes, without even starting a business for which you gave them the money,” he told IRIN/PlusNews. “Others will tell you the husband took all the money and used it for drinking or maintaining another woman, forgetting that this money should be repaid and the only way you can repay it is by starting a business enterprise.

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In the a quiet and laid-back Coastal Region, a pioneering new project involving poultry farming is giving ordinary people a chance to lift themselves out of poverty.

Research Into Use (RIU) is a programme based in Dar es Salaam which aims at promoting innovations and utilisation of new knowledge and research output, to eradicate poverty.

RIU has so far enabled a community in the Rufiji District to rear a hundreds of chicks each with the intention of selling them at markets in six month's time.

The location poses lots of challenges to the farmers because of the distances people have to travel in order to access the necessary support services like buying chicks, feed, vaccines and other veterinary drugs, as well as competing in at the market-place.

By developing sustainable local systems and capacities to provide such services at affordable prices, entrepreneurs in the local chicken industry have the chance to create a small business and improve their lives.

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Their mission is to bring light to millions of households that do not have access to electricity. Betting big on solar lighting products, Sam Goldman and his team have embarked on an enduring journey to remove darkness from the remotest corners of the world.

Sam was moved by an unfortunate incident, while working as a US Peace Corps volunteer in the West African nation of Benin between 2001 and 2005, which led him to focus on this segment.

"My neighbour's son in Benin was badly burned by a kerosene lamp. It was disturbing to see that when we made so much progress in terms of technology, we still did not have a solution to this grave problem. So I had made up my mind to provide a source of light that is safe and cheap."

He then joined Stanford University to pursue an MBA in social entrepreneurship. The idea got a fillip at the 'Entrepreneurial Design for Extreme Affordability' class at the Stanford University's Hasso Plattner Institute of Design.

Sam Goldman then joined hands with classmate Ned Tozun to start D.Light Design, a company that makes affordable solar lighting solutions to serve the bottom-of-the-pyramid households in India and other markets across the globe. The initial research and early prototyping of what became D.light products, began in 2006.

The company was officially founded in mid-2007 with the ambitious mission to reach out to about 1.6 billion people in the world without electricity, and another billion or more who have unreliable electricity.

The company's latest product, Kiran (which means a ray of light), is a low-cost solar lighting solution, designed especially for households without access to electricity. Dubbed the 'kerosene killer', Kiran is priced at Rs 499 ($10) making it the most affordable, quality solar lantern in the world.

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FORT COLLINS – Engineering researchers at Colorado State University have found a new way to detect traces of tuberculosis bacteria in fluids that would allow for a more sensitive and accurate detection of the deadly disease.
The research by Diego Krapf, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering and a faculty member in the School of Biomedical Engineering, was recently recognized by the Optical Society of America for its potential use in developing countries that face a greater risk of TB and its prospective use to detect latent cases of TB.

Working with Krapf on the research are Mike McNeil, Mike Scherman and John Spencer in the Department of Microbiology, Immunology and Pathology at Colorado State.

The end goal of the project is to develop a platform for the detection of TB that is portable, affordable and does not require highly trained personnel.
Krapf has developed a biosensor that uses a combination of chemistry and lasers to isolate proteins prevalent in TB. Krapf mixes a sample with fluorescent antibodies for the targeted TB proteins and coats the glass slide with a molecular brush that will stick only to those proteins. Using a home-made microscope, Krapf can determine whether a large number of the proteins are present, which indicates the test is positive for TB.

Also on Krapf’s team, working on this project, are biomedical engineering graduate students Kristen Jevsevar and Aubrey Weigel. Undergraduate students Jeremy Stone and Nathan Proper are working to develop a smaller and cheaper version of the biosensor – now tabletop size – to use in the developing world.

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Cassava's profile as a food security and poverty-reducing crop got a boost with the commissioning of five new processing centres in Sierra Leone, thanks to the Common Fund for Commodities (CFC), International Institute of Tropical Agriculture and Sierra Leone Agricultural Research Institute and other partners.

"It will also improve livelihoods, and incomes of farmers and stakeholders in the cassava enterprise," says Prof Lateef Sanni, project coordinator, for the CFC funded project. "More importantly, this will create markets and drive the production of cassava."

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By Ketaki Gokhale

Mahabubnagar, India

The practice of making tiny loans to poor people, or microfinance, was supposed to help drive traditional village moneylenders from rural India.

Instead, traditional moneylenders, who typically charge high interest rates, are thriving, even in areas most heavily targeted by microfinance, which was begun as a way to help combat poverty by granting the poor access to capital to start businesses. Muhammad Yunus, the Bangladeshi founder of microfinance, won a Nobel Peace Prize.

Even as the government and nonprofit organizations came together to create the Indian microfinance market in the 1990s, traditional moneylenders' share of total rural Indian household debt grew to 29.6% from 17.5%, according to a government survey. Another recent survey by the Reserve Bank of India found that between 1995 and 2006, the number of registered traditional moneylenders increased 56% to 19,627 from 12,601. Though much harder to quantify, unlicensed lenders are believed to have made similar gains, the survey says.

One potential reason for their growth: Some microfinance borrowers say they need village moneylenders to help them pay their debts on time. Some academic researchers believe the moneylenders are keeping afloat many microfinance groups.

Peer pressure to pay back microfinance loans is intense, because microlenders almost always require borrowers to join small, tightknit groups. If one member defaults, none can get another loan. Microloans have a stellar repayment rate -- close to 100% -- and some analysts believe a hidden reason is the stopgap provided by moneylenders.

Microfinancing has boomed in recent years. Though founded as nonprofits, the Indian microfinance industry has been turbocharged by private-equity firms, nearly doubling in the year ended March 31, delivering $2.5 billion in loans. Many microfinance lenders have recently registered as for-profit finance firms with the Reserve Bank of India, the Indian central bank, giving them wider access to funds but limiting them to "reasonable" interest rates. Those rates are still high -- between 20% and 40% annually, according to the Consultative Group to Assist the Poor, or CGAP, hosted at the World Bank.

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