The BBC's Damian Grammaticas sees how poor Indian farmers are using business text messages to get better prices for their goods.

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At the Khandova temple in Jhejuri it's festival time. The harvest is just in and it's time to celebrate.

Thousands of farmers, dressed in white, come from across Maharashtra state to climb the steep hill up to the temple. With them are their wives wrapped in brightly coloured saris and children too.

Inside the temple handfuls of turmeric powder are showered over everything. People sing, dance, and pray for good fortune.

Two hundred and fifty million Indians rely on the land for their survival.But many live in real poverty. And in Maharashtra the suicide rate among farmers is high.

So the pressing question for India is how to improve farmers' livelihoods.

By most accounts, UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown is genuinely passionate about reducing global poverty.

But he is not willing to challenge the structures of the global economy that generate poverty, or the corporations that build, benefit from and maintain those structures.

Nor, apparently, is he immune to gimmicky notions of corporate leadership to support development, or the lure of high-profile summits to shed light on new plans to do -- very little.

Thus, earlier this week the UK was treated to the spectacle of the Business Call to Action summit, which Brown's office co-sponsored with the UN Development Program. More than 80 CEOs of large companies gathered with Brown and other luminaries to discuss how they could help meet the Millennium Development Goals, which aspire to reduce global poverty by half by 2015. Roughly two dozen of these CEOs -- from Anglo American, Bechtel, Citigroup, Coca-Cola, De Beers, Diageo, FedEx, Goldman Sachs, GE, Merck, Microsoft, SAB Miller, Wal-Mart and others -- have signed the Business Call to Action, which states, "as leaders from the private sector, we declare our commitment to meet this development emergency."

A toll-free mobile service being launched in selected remote areas in Africa promises to save lives by connecting people with emergency medical cases to health personnel.

Under the initiative launched in Nairobi on Wednesday, health workers will also be trained through mobile phone sessions on day to day skills like collecting and sharing basic household health information.

Telecommunication equipment provider Ericsson and mobile phone service provider Zain have adopted the new approach in a bid to stimulate the demand of mobile solutions in areas they consider commercially challenging.
The two companies have entered into a partnership that will ensure they provide network access, mobile phone handsets, sim cards and toll-free emergency numbers in remote areas in order to stimulate demand for cellular phone solutions in those areas.

The initiative is being rolled out in Tanzania, Uganda and Kenya.

In Kenya, Ericsson and Zain subsidiary, Celtel, are rolling out a pilot programme in North Garissa in Dertu village targeting some 5,200 inhabitants.

According to the President of Ericsson, Mr Carl-Henri Svanberge, the partnership also includes the Earth Institute and will benefit 400,000 people in Africa.

In the partnership, Ericsson will provide network connectivity in the identified areas, while the mobile service providers will provide the SIM cards and airtime, while the handset manufacturer Sony Ericsson will provide the handsets.

A blizzard of advertisements for Indonesia's 11 mobile operators has covered the country, competing for the lowest prices, best call quality and cheapest deals.

So begins what is expected to be a major boom in mobile subscriptions and telecom revenue.

The national regulator slashed internet work connection charges by up to 40 per cent last month and these savings have largely been passed on to users.

The authorities are pushing operators to share towers, which will reduce costs and enable greater network expansion.

WELLESLEY, Mass., May 2 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ --

Women's entrepreneurship matters -- women are creating and running businesses around the world, contributing to economies that represent more than 70% of the world's population and 93% of global GDP (2007). Women's entrepreneurship is a key contributor to economic growth in low/middle income countries, particularly in Latin America and the Caribbean according to The Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) 2007 Report on Women and Entrepreneurship released today by The Center for Women's Leadership at Babson College.

View the report at: www.gemconsortium.org/about.aspx?page=special_topic_women

A gender gap persists -- both significant and systematic -- in new venture creation and business ownership. The gender difference is more obvious in high-income countries but exists throughout all regions, with Europe and Asia showing a greater gap than Latin America and the Caribbean.

GEM data suggests that women who are employed and have built a social network of entrepreneurs are more likely to become entrepreneurs. The social and economic benefits of working are driving women's entrepreneurship more than increased education or household income.

Women's level of optimism and self-confidence in starting a business is highly influenced by the culture and social norms of their native countries. Women entrepreneurs have less fear of failure than women who are not involved in entrepreneurial activity; yet they express a greater fear of business failure than men starting businesses.

"Women's entrepreneurship varies widely across the globe," says Babson Professor Elaine I. Allen, principal researcher of the study, "It's a surprise that developing countries in Eastern Europe have low rates of women's entrepreneurship, closely resembling their highly developed European neighbors, while the countries of Latin America and the Caribbean have rates of women's entrepreneurship two and three times higher."

The Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) 2007 Report on Women and Entrepreneurship, based on data collected through the Global Entrepreneurship Research Association (GERA), directed by Babson College, and is a comprehensive and up-to-date study of the role played by women in entrepreneurial activity across the world economy.

Ajit Singh, a farmer in the poor northern state of Uttar Pradesh, had never seen a computer until four years ago when ITC, the Indian agribusiness-to-hotels conglomerate, installed a PC in his village, Kurthia.

Now the thin 47-year-old farmer visits the ITC station, known as an "e-choupal" after the Hindi term for "gathering place", every day for online access to news-papers, crop prices, weather forecasts and farming techniques. As ITC's village manager, he passes on what he gleans to fellow farmers.

Knowing the fair market value of crops allows farmers to fetch better prices and circumvent local traders who used to dictate terms. Farmers can also sell wheat and other crops to ITC.

The result has been a big jump in crop productivity. Annual incomes in Kurthia have risen from Rs40,000- Rs50,000 ($1,000-$1,230) before e-choupal to Rs100,000- Rs120,000 now, says Mr Singh.
ITC has rolled out 6,400 e-choupals across India since 2000. The initiative has gained new relevance as New Delhi urgently tries to tackle threats to food security, the growing gap between rich and poor and stagnant agricultural growth that has added to soaring food prices,

India "needs another green revolution", the UN Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (Unescap) recently urged. "Growth and productivity in agriculture are slowing, and the green revolution has bypassed millions."

By Anisha Motwani

Rural India seems to be the latest flavour in town. From finance ministers to corporate India across industries, everyone seems to be shifting focus to the bottom of the pyramid. All boardroom discussions are getting centred on finding ways and means to grab a share of this lucrative pie. Numbers look seductive with statistics and data giving enough evidence of volume potential... smaller ticket sizes but more buyers, making it eminent for most industries to ignore this segment at their own peril.

With near saturation and cut-throat competition in urban markets, there is almost no debate left on the potential of the rural population whose incomes are rising and mindsets are changing. While certain industries like FMCG have made an early entry, others are learning the ropes with each passing day. Most industries are trying to test the waters through various forms of pilots and test launches, with no clear indicators of gains in the short run. But there is no denying that the long term potential is vast, but so are the challenges.

Till recently, a large part of marketing was done targeting the urban consumer, and with most marketers having no prior exposure to the rural audience, they are applying the same rules to connect with this completely different segment. The mistake that most companies make while chalking their rural strategies is to treat the rural consumer as an extension of their urban counterpart.

London, 6 May 2008—Joining the Business Call to Action, a dozen companies today announced concrete initiatives that apply core business expertise, utilizing their technology and innovative spirit to tackle the multiple challenges of poverty.

The announcements were made at the Business Call to Action event, hosted by UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown and Kemal Derviş, Administrator of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), and with the participation of more than 80 global business leaders who came to London to showcase innovative and creative initiatives to reduce poverty in the developing world.

By Preeti R Iyer & Aniruddha Ghosh

For all the noise that it has generated, usage of technology to achieve financial inclusion is still far from what is being desired.

Lenders such as Citi and GE Money have withdrawn from advancing small-ticket personal loans. Other banks are also going slow on such products, given the absence of contract enforcement and difficulty in following know-your-customer procedures.

Further, senior industry officials feel that much of the focus towards rural banking and financial inclusion has been generated by repeated statements made by the Union finance minister P Chidambaram and RBI governor YV Reddy.

In short, financial inclusion is seen in the same manner as priority sector lending - an obligation rather than an untapped opportunity. For banks, the bottom of the pyramid is clearly not an attraction. It continues to be unchartered territory involving experimentation and huge operational costs. Compare this with the telecom companies which are making money selling airtime to labourers in recharge packages for as low as Rs 10.

For more than a decade now, Coimbatore Krishnarao Prahalad, or C. K. Prahalad, has been the best-known management guru from India. Professor of Strategy at the Ross School of Business, University of Michigan, Prahalad shot to fame with his book Competing for the Future, which he co-authored with Gary Hamel. Since then, Prahalad, who studied and taught at IIM Ahmedabad before moving (back) to the US to join the University of Michigan as Assistant Professor, has written four more books, including the latest The New Age of Innovation, whose global release took place on April 17 in Delhi. In the book, co-authored with colleague M. S. Krishnan (he's Professor of Business Information and Technology), Prahalad, 57, argues that "we have finally reached the point where the confluence of connectivity, digitization, and the convergence of industry and technology boundaries are creating a new dynamic between consumers and the firm". "Traditionally," Prahalad and Krishnan write, "we have assumed that the firm creates value and exchanges it with its consumers. This firm- and product-centric view is being rapidly replaced by a personalised experience and a cocreation view of value." The authors use a shorthand ("it's not an equation," Krishnan clarifies) N=1 and R=G to drive home what they call the two pillars of the next generation of innovations, where N=1 stands for one consumer experience at a time, and R=G for all the resources that need to be tapped from multiple vendors and around the world to satisfy the experiences of one consumer at a time.

A day before the book was launched in Delhi, Prahalad spoke to BT's R. Sridharan on innovation and his own intellectual journey over the years.