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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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BELGRADE (Reuters) - As recession squeezes the fledgling middle classes of emerging economies, special shops for the poor are seizing the opportunities.

Slovenia and Serbia are among countries opening "SOS" shops that allow custom only from those officially registered as poor, who need special cards to access them.

"We see this effort as a new retail concept," Trade Minister Slobodan Milosavljevic said at a ceremony in March to open the first SOS shop, a whitewashed old house with a bright red sign. "The gauntlet has been thrown to other retailers and we can already see somewhat cheaper food in other markets."

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The way Noble Peace Prize winner Muhammad Yunus sees it, the micro-credit revolution is running its course in his home country of Bangladesh. Between his Grameen Bank and other NGOs, which together make Bangladesh the most heavily micro-credit-enabled place on earth, he estimates that about 80% of the poor families that might want to participate are being served already. His goal is for Grameen to help finish the job by 2012.

What's next? Health care. "This is the biggest project. With micro-credit, we only reach the poor," he told me. "With this health care project, we reach everybody-and we bring state-of-the-art health care to even the poorest."

When I visited with Yunus in his office in Dhaka, Bangladesh, today, he had just returned from a stay in Amman, Jordan. In fact, he's been traveling almost non-stop since he got the Peace Prize in 2006, first taking advantage of his new fame to press his ideas on the global stage, and more recently publicizing his new book, Creating a World Without Poverty: Social Business and the Future of Capitalism, which went on sale in most places early this year. But now he's planning on spending a lot of time in Bangladesh on the health care project.

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Migrant workers sending money home has become the biggest source of foreign income in some poor European countries, the World Bank has said.

In a report on European and Central Asian (ECA) nations, the bank said that remittances sometimes beat foreign investment aid and exports in size.

Officially recorded payments in the region - which includes former Soviet states - were over $19bn (£9.67bn).

The largest amount of remittances, as a share of GDP, were sent to Moldova.

The study, using data from 2004, indicated that money sent there by migrants was equivalent to 27% of GDP - an estimated $705m.

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The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) signed its first project in Mongolia on Wednesday, a $5 million loan to XacBank, which specialises in microfinance.

The funds will be lent on to small and micro-businesses throughout the country.

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The International Finance Corporation, the private sector arm of the World Bank Group, today signed an agreement to provide a $2.2 million financing package to Micro Credit Agency Bai Tushum Financial Foundation, one of Kyrgyzstan’s leading micro lending institutions.

Through the package, IFC will support the transformation of Bai Tushum from its present not-for-profit status to a more sustainable, commercially-oriented, deposit-taking financial institution that can serve as a model for similar microfinance organizations in the Kyrgyz Republic.

IFC’s Director for Global Financial Markets, Jyrki Koskelo, said, "The IFC financing will enable Bai-Tushum to expand its lending activities to farmers, private entrepreneurs, and micro and small enterprises and extend its reach to other remote regions of the Kyrgyz Republic.”

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