NextBillion.net - Development Through Enterprise - North Africa & Near East

Free Medical Tool Tackles Disease

Joseph Bornstein — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 13:06:12 -0500

Our mission is to build a health records system in support of direct patient care, on the ground for the very poorest of the poor," Dr Paul Biondich, a paediatrician at the Regenstrief Institute in the US and one of the co-founders of OpenMRS told the BBC World Service's Digital Planet.

OpenMRS was formed in 2004 and is a free application that has already been rolled out in many African countries, including, Kenya, South Africa and Rwanda.

The system has been designed so that information can be stored in a way that makes it easy to summarise and analyse patient information.

"In taking care of patients there is a process of both being able to gather and interpret information to make informed decisions about what should be done with an individual.

Sorting information

At its core, OpenMRS has a so-called "concept dictionary" that stores all diagnoses, tests, procedures, drugs and other general information.

"In some cases - especially in the context of HIV in Africa - we are seeing that an increasing amount of care is being provided by practitioners that have had less direct experience", said Dr Biondich.

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Cash In Hand: Why Africans Are Banking On The Mobile Phone

Joseph Bornstein — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 08:02:21 -0500

For consumers in developed markets, using a mobile phone for banking services is a smart add-on to a bank's branch network. But to people in the developing world, the arrival of mobile banking - or m-banking - is potentially revolutionary.

If money is an economy's lifeblood, improving its circulation plays a critical role. Many Africans living in rural areas, for instance, rely on money sent home by members of their family who work in towns and cities. But getting that cash to a village that could be hundreds of miles away is a tricky business. In Kenya, for example, workers in urban areas hand wages over to bus drivers, who promise to stop off at the worker's home village en route to their destination.

Even those who do have a bank account - and they make up only a few per cent of Africa's 950 million population - are restricted in what they can do with their money because of the dearth of branches in rural areas.

But the dramatic growth in mobile phone use in Africa - phones now outnumber cash machines by several thousand to one - is paving the way for a new set of services that turn the humble handset into a banking tool with the potential to transform Africa's economy.

iBOP Website Makes Time Magazine's 50 Best Websites 2008-- Afrigradet.com

Joseph Bornstein — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 09:21:46 -0500

There's a lot of international development news that doesn't make it onto CNN. So bookmark AfriGadget, a site dedicated to simple, sustainable inventions in Africa. Recent entries have covered efforts to create biodiesel fuel out of local pine nuts in Sierra Leone, and programs to build bicycles out of bamboo in Ghana and Kenya. AfriGadget isn't updated every day (and sometimes not even once a week), but it offers such distinctive reporting that you won't want to miss a single post. For other good sites addressing sustainable development in Africa, check out the African Uptimist and Timbuktu Chronicles.

Economic Opportunity as a Path for Peace in the Middle East

Francisco Noguera — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 09:51:08 -0500

By providing small businesses with incubators, Israeli industrialist Stef Wertheimer hopes to give Israelis and Arabs economic opportunities that will lead to peace.

About five years ago, Stef Wertheimer came across Gamila Hiar, a Druze woman with no formal education who had learned the ancient art of making soap from wild herbs and olive oil as a child. At the time, Hiar was supplementing her family's income, producing about 500 soap bars a week, from a corner in a room underneath her house in Pqi'in, a village in the Galilee region of northern Israel.

When Wertheimer met Hiar, her soaps had a devoted local following and were referred to as "the magic soaps of Gamila" for their restorative properties. Wertheimer was impressed. "We found that she was an entrepreneur," says Wertheimer. "She just needed more space to dry her soaps. I asked her if she wanted to come to one of my industrial parks."

Developing Exports

Hiar, now 68, ended up at Tefen Industrial Park, a bold philanthropic enterprise located about eight miles from the Lebanese border. Wertheimer (BusinessWeek.com, 3/14/08), the founder of Iscar Metalworking, established Tefen in 1985 in order to encourage entrepreneurship in one of Israel's most undeveloped and low-income regions, with a population split largely between Arabs and Jews. According to Wertheimer, 81, "there are no unemployed, only people who are unlucky to find a job."

The Tefen model is based on a business and social incubator concept. In a country with few natural resources and a tiny domestic market, its purpose is to help develop businesses that manufacture for export. Startups are given space to rent and a number of business and administrative services (usually at reduced fees or for free) such as help in business planning, marketing, and entrepreneurship, and access to postal and banking facilities. Although many of the companies are small, the park's structure allows each firm to operate and export on a much larger scale than it could were it operating independently. After a company has established itself, it is expected to leave and become independent. On average, the companies stay between 5 and 10 years. That allows new businesses to take their place.

Currently, Tefen houses 21 companies employing 500 people-many of them Arab and Druze. They include a research and development arm of SanDisk (SNDK), a flash memory device company with worldwide sales of $3.9 billion, a glassmaker, and Kolsint, a maker of lenses for imaging cameras for nuclear medicine that reportedly supplies 50% of the world market. Tefen is also home to Iscar's headquarters and its bright yellow high-tech plant where whistling robots travel the factory floors. In May, 2006, Berkshire Hathaway's (BRK) Warren Buffett acquired an 80% stake in Iscar for $4 billion (BusinessWeek.com, 5/8/06).

A new report identifies the developing world's most promising multinationals

Manuel Bueno — Fri, 07 Dec 2007 16:31:06 -0500

"WE STARTED out abroad as ‘accidental tourists’,” says Anand Mahindra, managing director of Mahindra & Mahindra, an Indian maker of tractors and off-road vehicles. Owed money by a Greek manufacturing plant, it took an equity stake instead, and so Mahindra Hellenic was born in 1984.

Mahindra & Mahindra is now one of 100 companies from the developing world that Boston Consulting Group (BCG) thinks have the clout and ambition to upset the world's multinationals. The consultants sifted over 3,000 companies from 30 countries, picking firms that had revenues approaching or surpassing $1 billion last year and are expanding overseas aggressively (not accidentally). They measure this expansionism by five criteria, including the firms' international sales and assets, and the money they can tap for foreign raids and acquisitions.

The result is a list that cunningly appeals to the pride of the aspirants and the insecurity of rich-world incumbents. According to Fortune magazine, Jeff Immelt sent last year's list to his underlings at General Electric, ordering them to identify the companies it could sell to and buy from, and those it would have to compete with.

Arab Meeting for SMEs Proposes New Business Bank

Abigail Keene-Babcock — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 13:44:41 -0500

The fourth Arab Meeting for Small and Medium Industries, which was held in Sana’a from 25-26 November, has recommended establishing an Arab Investment Bank to finance small and medium industries, to be approved at the next pan-Arab summit. The meeting called on Arab countries to set up a legal framework to organize small and medium industries and to unify government efforts to assist this sector.

It was recommended that Arab countries should create financial mechanisms which cover the operational needs of small and medium industries through setting up co-operative banks, on the lines of those found in European countries.

Endeavor Invites 12 High-impact Entrepreneurs from South Africa, Brazil, Chile and Egypt to Join Its Network

Abigail Keene-Babcock — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 13:18:24 -0500

Endeavor (www.endeavor.org) invited 12 high-impact entrepreneurs from South Africa, Brazil, Chile and Egypt to join its network last week at an International Selection Panel in Cape Town, South Africa.

These entrepreneurs represent nine companies operating in fields ranging from voice-over IP mobile telecommunications and broadband communications from South Africa, affordable dialysis care in Brazil, yarn production in Chile and wireless technology based in Egypt.

Can Greed Save Africa?

Abigail Keene-Babcock — Wed, 05 Dec 2007 17:10:08 -0500

By Roben Farzad

It isn't easy for Masoud Alikhani to check on his investment. The Iranian-born Briton owns a facility in Mozambique that turns jatropha, a hardy, drought-resistant plant, into biodiesel. An October visit starts with an 11-hour flight from London, his home base, to Johannesburg. From there he jumps into a four-seat Piper Seneca II for a wobbly three-hour flight to Maputo, Mozambique's capital, during which one of the passengers, this writer, gets violently ill. On landing at Maputo's airport, where soldiers stand guard on the roof, Alikhani spends an hour wading through the bureaucratic muck of visa clearance and immunization checks. Then it's back on the plane for a 90-minute flight along the Indian Ocean coast to the province of Inhambane. At the 7-Eleven-size airport there, Alikhani is met by his brother and business partner, Said, for a 90-minute drive past wayward livestock and random brush fires to the village of Inhassune. At the end of a long dirt road, on a vast tract of reclaimed scrubland, sits the Alikhanis' massive biofuel complex. They try to visit every two months.

The brothers are among a growing cadre of intrepid investors looking for treasure in the 30-plus sub-Saharan African nations stretching from Mauritania and Somalia in the north to the continent's southern tip. There's no blueprint for this kind of investing: The best opportunities must be dreamed up and then created from scratch. The Alikhanis saw upside in a fallow cotton plantation. In Nigeria, U.S.-based private equity firm Emerging Capital Partners last year helped acquire an abandoned factory in hopes of supplying the continent with desperately needed fertilizer. South Africa-based microlender Blue Financial Services, energized by an investment from Wall Street last year, now has 171 branches in nine countries, with offices opening soon in Rwanda, Cameroon, Swaziland, and elsewhere. All told, at least $2.6 billion in private equity deals have been struck this year in the region (excluding more-developed South Africa), nearly seven times the 2005 figure.

This is the investing world's final frontier, so undeveloped and impoverished that it makes other extreme emerging markets like Colombia and Vietnam seem like marvels of modernity.

U.S. Plans $250m for Three New African Investment Funds

Abigail Keene-Babcock — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 10:10:51 -0500

The United States pledged on Monday to provide up to $250 million to jump-start three new African investment funds aimed at developing the continent's capital markets so African businesses can more easily raise money.

The announcement came on the final day of a five-day African visit by Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, who said Africa needs all the investment it can get from anywhere in the world.

Paulson and the president of the U.S. government's Overseas Private Investment Corp (OPIC), Robert Mosbacher, said OPIC will provide initial financing to get the funds started.

Financial Times and IFC Launch Sustainable Banking Awards

Abigail Keene-Babcock — Mon, 05 Nov 2007 17:18:52 -0500

The Financial Times, in partnership with IFC, the private sector arm of the World Bank Group, today launched the 2008 edition of the FT Sustainable Banking Awards, the leading awards for triple bottom line banking.

Two new categories - Banking at the Bottom of the Pyramid, and Sustainable Investor of the Year - have been added to the ground-breaking programme.

The awards, now in their third year, were created by the FT and IFC to recognise banks that have shown leadership and innovation in integrating social, environmental and corporate governance objectives into their operations.