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Senior-level managers will gather in Riga beginning May 12 for an intensive, two-week Strategic Management Program (SMP) organized by WDI in cooperation with the Stockholm School of Economics in Riga (SSE Riga). Five of the participants are Teeter Scholarship recipients, named in honor of the late Robert Teeter who served on WDI’s Board of Directors.

WDI, along with its Brazilian partner Institute GESC, will hold a two-day workshop in Sao Paolo on strategies to enable NGOs to more effectively advocate for better healthcare policies from the government. The “NGOs and Public Policies” workshop, on April 28-29, will bring in faculty from the University of Michigan, practitioners from WDI’s NGO Alliance in Central and Eastern Europe, and Brazilian experts. Together they will provide practical information for 50 healthcare-related NGOs from Brazil.

Ted London, director of WDI’s Base of the Pyramid research initiative, and U-M graduate student Molly Christiansen have won top honors in a prestigious international case writing competition. London and Christiansen, who will receive master’s degrees in business and public health later this month, took first place in the 2008 oikos Sustainability Case Writing Competition. Their case, “Scojo Foundation: A vision for growth at the Base of the Pyramid,” beat out a field of 26 competitors from Asia, Australia, Europe and North America.

There is one opening remaining for WDI’s Global Impact Internship program. The deadline to apply is Wednesday, April 17. TechnoServe, Inc., a not for profit organization founded in 1968, has a $4.4 million grant from the Inter-American Development Bank's Multilateral Investment Fund (MIF). The funding will enable TechnoServe to run business plan competitions in Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru and Venezuela, specifically targeting small and medium enterprise (SME) creation to supply products and services for the economic base of the pyramid, or “majority” population.

Nineteen senior HR managers from Central and Eastern Europe will participate in a WDI workshop that focuses on the particular challenges of competing in and from emerging economies. Workshop participants include representatives from Oracle, IBM, Procter & Gamble, and Raiffeisen International Bank.

Economic growth and business development in the Middle East will be the topics of the WDI Speaker Series on April 8. Fadi Ghandour, founder and CEO of Jordan-based Aramex International, and Alonzo L. Fulgham, chief operating officer at the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), will be the guest speakers. The event begins at 5 p.m. in Room W2760 in Wyly Hall. A reception will follow.

Students interested in a career in international development, especially at the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), are encouraged to attend a career information session hosted by Alonzo L. Fulgham, chief operating officer at USAID. The hour-long session will be held at 10 a.m. on Tuesday, April 8 in WDI’s Seminar Room, first floor of Wyly Hall. Those interested in attending should RSVP to Makiko Omitsu, projects administrator at WDI, at momitsu@bus.umich.edu by noon Monday, April 7.

WDI’s sustainability plan for the Marketing Education and Research Center (MERC) development project at the International Academy of Business (IAB) in Almaty, Kazakhstan was launched on March 3. A sustainable MERC can now carry out its vision of serving as a bridge between academia and the business community in Kazakhstan.

Dr. Munir Rusan and Dr. Mohammad Bataineh of the Jordan University of Science and Technology (JUST) recently completed a visit to WDI and one of its partner institutions, Cornell University. WDI has a three-year agreement with Higher Education for Development to implement the Jordanian Education for Water and Environmental Leadership – or JEWEL project. It was designed by WDI with the objective of empowering leadership and decision-making.

Fifteen managers will participate in WDI’s Big Picture Marketing executive education program beginning on March 24 in Istanbul, Turkey. The two-day program is an integrated framework that emphasizes the dynamic nature of marketing by presenting key marketing topics as a set of interrelated modules as opposed to separate “chapters” representing topics independently.

Ten Multidisciplinary Action Project (MAPs) teams sponsored by WDI have spread out across the country and around the world to conduct their work. The projects, in conjunction with the Ross School of Business, allow MBA students to work full-time with international organizations to create new business models, research new directions, and strategize for the future. 

The William Davidson Institute has announced a new partnership with The Goldman Sachs Group, Inc. to bring business education to Rwandan women who have traditionally been denied opportunities in schooling and business. On March 5 the global banking firm kicked off a new initiative called 10,000 Women. It will provide 10,000 women, predominantly in developing and emerging markets around the world, with a business education. WDI is one of a select group of leading institutions and business schools partnering with Goldman Sachs.

Also, read about WDI's role in the program in this Washington Post article and Ann Arbor News article.

Peter Marquera, the president and CEO of the leading global BPO services provider SPi , will be the next guest at the WDI Global Impact Speaker Series at 4:30 p.m. on Wednesday, March 5 in Room W2740 of Wyly Hall. A reception will follow.

The application deadline for WDI’s 2008 Global Impact Internship program is 5 p.m. on Monday, March 3. A list of partner organizations and descriptions of summer projects are now available on the WDI website. Click here to review the projects.

Ted London, WDI Senior Research Fellow and Director of the Institute’s BoP Research Initiative, is mentioned in a blog on the NextBillion.net website hosted by the World Resources Institute. The post, by Derek Newberry, is about whether corporations will use a powerful PR machine to claim great work at the base of the pyramid without really achieving any results. Newberry cites London’s pathbreaking work on measuring impact at the BoP.

A list of partner organizations and descriptions of summer projects for WDI’s 2008 Global Impact Internship program are now available on the WDI website. Click here to review the projects. The application deadline for these initiative-driven internships is 5 p.m. on Monday, March 3.