NextBillion brings together the community of business leaders, social entrepreneurs, NGOs, policy makers, and academics who want to explore the connection between development and enterprise.
Our staff scans hundreds of news sources every day to create a custom newsfeed. When the mainstream media covers the development through enterprise space, you can expect to find it here
Excerpt: VIRGIN founder Richard Branson has launched an assault on the second high-fee industry in SA within a week — ploughing R120m into launching the cheapest credit card in SA yesterday and setting his sights on a full-blown financial services business.
Excerpt: Big business has something of a poor reputation when it comes to Africa.
Critics accuse multinational oil and mining companies in particular of exploiting local people, damaging the environment and helping to prop-up some of Africa's more odious regimes.
It was at the end of a long, dusty road in Guatemala that Mike Galgon, a Seattle tech entrepreneur, became a believer.
He met a woman who used a $50 loan to buy a simple metal-bending machine, allowing her to increase her daily production of buckets from two to 10. By selling the extra buckets, she was able to buy medicine for an ailing daughter, send several other children to school and purchase a second machine to expand her business.
Excerpt: Bewildering bureaucracy, endless paperwork and one of the world’s most onerous tax systems mean that thousands of Brazilian businesses can only survive by operating illegally, according to a report published on Wednesday.
The report by the International Finance Corporation finds wide differences among the 13 Brazilian states surveyed but concludes that Brazil needs to radically simplify procedures in order to compete more effectively with other emerging markets.“There is still a big distance between the best Brazil offers and the ease of doing business in cities such as Bangkok and Johannesburg and reforms are necessary,” says the report.
“States should look to combine the best practices inside Brazil – such as the way the property registry has been computerised in the northern state of Maranhão, and at the same time look to keep up with the rhythm of reforms in countries like Chile, Vietnam and Slovakia.”
Excerpt: Every morning, 65-year-old Dhondu Chaudhary picks up a lunchbox from Arpana Rao's home in the suburbs of Mumbai.
Mrs Rao relies on Mr Chaudhary to get her husband's daily lunch delivered to Mumbai's financial district where he works.
Summary: KickStart is a company hoping to help lift African farmers out of poverty by selling them simple water pumps for their crops. Scott Simon talks with Martin Fisher, co-founder of the non-profit company.
Excerpt: Ann Brown and Maria Martinez have never met, but last March Brown loaned Martinez $50. It was part of a $400 loan Martinez needed to get her clothing store up and running in Danli, Honduras. She used the cash to buy colorful hairbands, bright shirts, frilly button-downs, and baby onesies. Sales have picked up, and now Martinez is paying Brown back in monthly installments via the Web site on which they found each other, Kiva.org. "When I was starting my handbag business, a neighbor wrote me a check for the startup capital," says Brown, who sells bags at the Pike Place Market in Seattle. "I had nothing, and that made it possible for me."
Friends and neighbors have been lending one another money forever, but as the Web makes virtual neighbors of strangers, Kiva, which is Swahili for "agreement" or "unity," is harnessing the power of social networking to support microenterprise in the developing world. From Honduras to Uganda, microfinance institutions post MySpace (NWS )-like profiles of people who need capital to start or expand their businesses. Then lenders -- aka you and I -- can sift through pages of business ideas and grant loans in increments as tiny as $25. PayPal (EBAY ) processes the transactions for free, and lenders receive monthly repayments. The lender is out the money if entrepreneurs don't pay up, but microcredit has earned a reputation for high payback rates. In the five months since its launch, says Kiva, the site has had no defaults. It has processed $200,000 in loans, disbursed among 450 entrepreneurs.
Excerpt: Johannesburg - Electronics giant Philips said on Tuesday that it hoped to build a compact fluorescent lamps (CFL) assembly factory in the SADC region - the first of its kind in Africa.
"Millions of Southern Africans living in both rural and urban households do not have access to electricity, and those that do often struggle to afford quality lighting. Instead, they rely on hazardous paraffin, kerosene or candles which are not only major pollutants, but also often lead to fires," the statement said.
Excerpt: In a quest to give access to affordable lighting to millions of households in Southern Africa, an electronics company will host a conference to explore the feasibility of building a factory to manufacture Compact Fluorescent Lamps (CFLs) in the region.
This because the majority of citizens in the Southern African Development Community (SADC) region do not have access to electricity while those who use it "still struggle to afford quality lighting".
South Asia
Excerpt: The Tata Group and three other top business houses have joined hands with the Jharkhand government to ensure medical treatment to the state's below poverty line population.
Apart from the Tatas, Birla, Essar and Jindal group have formed the Sarva Swasthya Mission Trust -- which will be the first of its kind private-public partnership in the country.
