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India’s microfinance, which is perhaps the ruling flavour of private equity players, is actually turning out to be a distribution highway for a variety of goods and services given the huge outreach of over one million customers each that large entities like Share, SKS, Basix and Spandana have managed to create.

Fuelled by private equity investment and expansion, many of these entities are looking at reaching as many as five million people each in the near term. While the creation of reach has been purely for their own businesses of vending micro-loans, it now transpires that their channel could be widely used, and profitably too, for peddling insurance, money transfer, procurement and supply chain financing for agri and allied activities.

Akin to banks tying with other services providers like insurance and raising their fee-based income, MFI players also stand to benefit from commission fees for routing various goods and services through their channel. In fact, the model not only reduces the transaction costs for the new services, but also would eventually reduce the cost of micro-loans from MFIs.

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So what are the best countries for entrepreneurs now? Where might American entrepreneurs think about setting up overseas? And where should they keep an eye out for global competitors? Some of the stars - such as Iceland and Denmark - might surprise you. Laggards include India.

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Sometimes thinking small can get things done. To bring artificial light to an isolated village or refugee camp could require building an enormous hydroelectric dam, followed by laying hundreds of miles of cable. Or it could take the donation of a $10 solar flashlight.

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Chander Singh and six other farmers huddle around a computer in the village of Bhaukhedi watching soybean prices rise. While the nearest road is a kilometer away, a portable satellite receiver connects them to the Internet.

Singh tripled his income over the past six years by selling beans to ITC Ltd., a 96-year-old tobacco and food company that has built a network of computers to provide information to farmers and convince them to buy the company's products. Growers who use the service say they receive higher crop prices, cheaper pesticides and scented hair oil that keeps their wives happy.

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Today Red Hat is announcing the upcoming availability of Red Hat Global Desktop. Global Desktop breaks through the price and performance barriers that have prevented many people from realizing the full benefits of state-of-the-art information technology. Red Hat and community members around the world recognized the need for a better solution to serve their local government and small business customers. This required removing the limitations that traditional desktop solutions imposed. In response, Red Hat developed the Global Desktop, which delivers a modern-user experience with an enterprise-class suite of productivity applications. Red Hat collaborated closely with Intel to enable the design, support and distribution of Global Desktop to be as close as possible to the customer. In addition, Red Hat and Intel are taking advantage of Global Desktop's high performance and minimal hardware requirements to support a wide range of Intel's current and future desktop platforms, including the Classmate, Affordable, Community and Low-Cost PC lines.

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The micro financing sector in Sri Lanka is to be streamlined under a regulatory framework to prevent aid wastage, duplication of funds and corruption in the implementation of projects aimed at alleviation of poverty which is one of the prime objectives of the government.

No government could solve this national issue on their own, according to microfinance experts, adding that it’s a collective responsibility of all sectors, including private, non-government and the civil society.

The Microfinance Institutions Act intended to be implemented by the Non-Banking Supervision Department of the Central Bank of Sri Lanka will be presented to parliament next month making it compulsory for all microfinance institutions to obtain a license to operate which is compulsory.

Continue reading "Microfinance Institutions Act soon in Parliament"

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YOU are a fisherman off the coast of northern Kerala, a region in the south of India. Visiting your usual fishing ground, you bring in an unusually good catch of sardines. That means other fishermen in the area will probably have done well too, so there will be plenty of supply at the local beach market: prices will be low, and you may not even be able to sell your catch. Should you head for the usual market anyway, or should you go down the coast in the hope that fishermen in that area will not have done so well and your fish will fetch a better price? If you make the wrong choice you cannot visit another market because fuel is costly and each market is open for only a couple of hours before dawn—and it takes that long for your boat to putter from one to the next. Since fish are perishable, any that cannot be sold will have to be dumped into the sea.

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Called the World Ahead program, the effort essentially expands on other programs Intel has conducted to bring computing to countries like India and China, particularly to people who live in small cities and villages. Though India has become a software powerhouse, it's estimated that the country a year ago had only 14 PCs for every 1,000 people.

Intel will provide equipment under the program as well as teacher training.

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The vast majority of designers put their talent to where the money is: crafting products and services that aim to beguile the richest 10% of the world's population. Nothing wrong with making a living. But could the tens of thousands of designers who fashion things that appeal to people's desires—rather than fulfilling their needs—be missing an opportunity to break into a much, much bigger market? Paul Polak certainly thinks so.

Polak, the maverick, septuagenarian founder of International Development Enterprises, argues that it's more than a little ironic that most designers, by creating extravagancies for the (comparatively) wealthy elite, have failed to tap into "the other 90%," the 4 billion people who live in relative poverty—and have a combined purchasing power that amounts to $5 trillion, according to the World Resources Institute. He has spent the past few years rallying the design community to apply its problem-solving skills to create tools that build markets for people living in or near poverty—and thereby transform them into tomorrow's entrepreneurs.

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