items sorted by publication date
2006
C K Prahalad asks Indian businesses to look at new frontiers 
domain-b.com, December 20, 2006
How best can Indian business grow and keep up with future challenges? Prof C K Prahalad, Harvey C Fruehauf professor of business administration and professor of corporate strategy and international business, University of Michigan business school answered this at a special session of the 5th manufacturing summit organised by CII in Mumbai on 19 and 20 December.
>> More Details | created on: 01/26/2007
Mexican insurers go for 'microinsurance' 
Business Week, December 14, 2006
Just as Mexico's microfinance lenders have carved out a lucrative niche making tiny loans to some of the country's smallest entrepreneurs, a handful of insurers are proving that it can be profitable to sell life insurance to the country's working poor and lower-middle class.
"The issue isn't that the population doesn't have the economic capacity, disposable income, or an insurance culture, rather we as insurance companies need to adapt to their means," said Alfredo Honsberg, chief executive of insurance company Seguros Azteca, in an interview.
>> More Details | created on: 01/12/2007
The "Next Big Thing" for Global Business
By Peter F. Schaefer, TCS Daily, December 6, 2006
Exactly a century ago, Cemex became the first Mexican cement producer. In 2000, Cemex became the largest cement producer in the world beating out France's Lafarge and Switzerland's Holcim. Although the Cemex market profile has changed over the last hundred years, its early success came from their ability to serve micro-markets -- selling a bag at a time to poor folks.
In a micro-market like this, a homeowner who lacks a title to his house and property (an "informal" homeowner) but has a bit of extra cash, might buy a single bag of cement and a dozen cement blocks and use it to add a few square feet to a house wall. Finishing the house often takes years, but in the end he has a real house. And like 55% of all American wealth, this is where he saves -- he lives in his savings "account."
>> More Details | created on: 12/07/2006
Citi plans thumbprint ATMs for India poor
Financial Times, December 1, 2006
Citigroup is rolling out a network of biometric automatic cash machines aimed at illiterate Indian slum dwellers, using the latest technology to woo the country's millions of "unbanked" poor.
The machines will recognise account holders' thumbprints, eliminating the need for a personal identification number, and will have colour-coded screen instructions and voiceovers to help guide them through transactions.
>> More Details | created on: 12/07/2006
For $150, Third-World Laptop Stirs Big Debate
By JOHN MARKOFF, The New York Times, November 30, 2006
When computer industry executives heard about a plan to build a $100 laptop for the developing world’s children, they generally ridiculed the idea. How could you build such a computer, they asked, when screens alone cost about $100?
>> More Details | created on: 12/01/2006
Loans, empowerment training net slow gains among SAfrican women
Yahoo News, November 29, 2006
An innovative attempt to measure the effects of microlending and gender empowerment among poor women in Africa suggests the benefits are tangible but need time to take root.
>> More Details | created on: 12/01/2006
Nokia And Motorola Ready To Rumble In Emerging Markets
By Reinhardt Krause , Yahoo News, November 28, 2006
With mobile phone shipments expected to slow next year, Nokia and Motorola are set to slug it out in emerging markets with low-cost, ultraslim phones.
>> More Details | created on: 12/01/2006
Bharti Airtel, Wal-Mart sign tie-up deal
Inside Bay Area, November 27, 2006
Indian telecommunications company Bharti Airtel has signed a tie-up deal with Wal-Mart to open a chain of retail stores across the country, Sunil B. Mittal, Bharti Airtel's chief executive officer, said Monday.
Mittal declined to divulge the financial details of the deal, but said it would be a huge investment involving hundreds of stores in India.
>> More Details | created on: 12/01/2006
Micro-loans empower women entrepreneurs
By Doris Dumlao, Philippine Daily Inquirer, November 26, 2006
TWO women—a former factory worker who now runs a thriving peanut butter business and a handicraft manufacturer who once worked as a household helper to put herself through school—have earned top honors for setting up microfinance businesses that unshackled their families from poverty while creating jobs in their communities.
>> More Details | created on: 12/07/2006
GrameenPhone: A solution to rural connectivity
By Neelima Mahajan, India Business, November 23, 2006
Iqbal Quadir found his exposure to Wall Street fascinating. One particular phenomenon caught his eye: People were buying unglamorous companies cheap, investing in them and selling them high. The process helped the companies, the consumers and made these investors rich.
"Much like an underappreciated company, I had an unglamorous country,"says Quadir, talking of his homeland Bangladesh.
And that unglamorous country had an unlikely "asset"— a vast population of poor people. Which is why, in 1993 Quadir, a Wharton grad, chucked his top-dollar job as an investment banker to piece together a company that would try to solve Bangladesh's communications problems, utilising its people. Bringing cellular connectivity all over Bangladesh was an ambitious idea.
>> More Details | created on: 12/01/2006
Internet Extends Reach Of Bangladeshi Villagers
By Kevin Sullivan, The Washington Post, November 22, 2006
Cellphone-Linked Computers Help Break Rural Isolation.
>> More Details | created on: 12/01/2006
Microvending in Kenya
By Kitty Felde, Marketplace - American Public Media, November 21, 2006
Microlending is when small amounts of money are loaned to budding entrepreneurs. MicroVENDING is when small business owners sell tiny amounts of their product. This idea is taking off in the impoverished African nation of Kenya. From the Marketplace Entreprenuership Desk, Kitty Felde reports.
>> More Details | created on: 11/21/2006
In Mexico, Banco Wal-Mart
Business Week, November 20, 2006
For years, Wal-Mart has tried to get into banking in the U.S. But so far it has come up empty-handed as everyone from rival banks to unions rose up in opposition. South of the border, though, the world's biggest retailer may soon receive a banking license, paving the way for Wal-Mart Stores Inc. to offer checking and savings accounts, loans, credit cards, and more across its network of 863 outlets in 130 Mexican cities.
>> More Details | created on: 11/21/2006
Chasing the 'base of the pyramid'
By Marc Gunther, Fortune Magazine, November 15, 2006
Veteran cleaning-product firm SC Johnson seeds startups in the poorest parts of Africa. Socially responsible? Yes, but also good business, reports Fortune's Marc Gunther.
>> More Details | created on: 11/21/2006
Big banks follow Nobel winner's lead in lending to the poor
By Justin Cole, WBCSD, November 14, 2006
Robert Annibale clearly enjoys his role as a globe-trotting senior banker for US giant Citigroup, but his clients are unusual because they have no credit histories, scant savings and are often illiterate.
Major international banks have traditionally shunned the world's poorest people, but bankers like Annibale are suddenly waking up to the potential of this huge untapped market.
"It's really in many ways about the expansion of access to financial services to all stratas of people. There are hundreds and hundreds of millions of people who are very economically active and don't have basic bank services," Annibale, Citigroup's global director for microfinance, told AFP in an interview.
>> More Details | created on: 11/21/2006
Vikram Akula, Founder & CEO of SKS Microfinance
CNN.com, November 13, 2006
Vikram Akula is on an economic mission: to empower India's poor.
His drive to fight poverty led to the birth of the Hyderabad-based SKS in 1998. It is a microfinance company that lends small amounts of money, typically $100, to impoverished women.
The cash is used to buy everything from animals to irons so clients can start their own homegrown ventures. SKS started out as non-profit but later changed its status and is now one of the fastest growing microlenders in the world.
With role models like Mohammad Yunus of Grameen Bank, who recently won the Nobel Peace Prize for his microfinance work, Akula is in good company. CNN's Andrew Stevens asked the former management consultant why he made this career choice.
>> More Details | created on: 11/21/2006
Easy Money
By Claire Cain Miller, Forbes.com, November 13, 2006
Microcredit is booming in India, but the loans don't often pull people out of poverty.
>> More Details | created on: 11/14/2006
City scents new market in cash sent home by migrants
By Gabriel Rozenberg, The Times, November 13, 2006
City institutions are joining a new gold rush to cash in on the biggest stream of money that is flowing into developing countries.
The global market in sending money home has doubled in the past five years, with cash sent home by hundreds of millions of low-paid economic migrants outstripping multinational investment and government aid.
>> More Details | created on: 11/14/2006
Philanthropy's New Prototype
By James Surowiecki, Technology Review, November 13, 2006
The cofounder of MIT's Media Lab, Nicholas Negroponte, wants to make $100 laptops available to poor children throughout the world. The next few months will be critical in determining whether the One Laptop per Child project succeeds.
>> More Details | created on: 01/26/2007
Invest in tiny loans' huge payoff
By Patricia Arias, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, November 13, 2006
Today's anti-poverty advocates might suggest the following 21st century twist on an ancient truism about fighting poverty: "Give a woman a fish, and she eats for a day. Give her a small loan to buy the fishing rod and tackle, and she eats for a lifetime --- and feeds her children, too." This updated version of an old parable captures the wisdom of microcredit, now widely recognized as a viable tool for helping the world's poor to help themselves.
>> More Details | created on: 11/14/2006
Acumen's New Model for Third-World Aid
By Jessi Hempel , Business Week, November 10, 2006
By joining designers' innovative solutions with finance from capital markets, the Acumen Fund aims to effect permanent change.
>> More Details | created on: 11/14/2006
Farmers’ small loans cultivate knowledge
By Amy Yee, Financial Times, November 10, 2006
Eight years ago, 30-year-old Siddama and her husband made Rs25 a day as agricultural workers in a village in the southern Indian state of Andhra Pradesh. The couple’s 12-year-old son was pushed into bonded agricultural labour because of heavy loans taken out by the family after a drought-hit crop failed.
But through a loan of Rs1,000 from SKS, a Hyderabad-based microfinance company, Siddama was able to pay off her debts and start selling vegetables. She repaid the loan within a year and borrowed Rs3,000 to lease fruit trees, then Rs4,000 to buy a fishing net the following year.
>> More Details | created on: 11/14/2006
ICICI Seeks 25 Million Rural Clients to Lift Growth
By Sumit Sharma and Cherian Thomas, Bloomberg, November 8, 2006
ICICI Bank Ltd., India's biggest by market value, plans to lend to 25 million rural clients in five years to sustain record loan growth as the government curbs credit to customers in the cities.
The bank will use branches, franchises, telephone kiosks and automated teller machines to lift its rural customer base eightfold, Deputy Managing Director Chanda Kochhar said in an interview in Hyderabad, southern India. Mumbai-based ICICI aims to screen borrowers and approve loans of as little as $100 at sites located every 10 kilometers (6 miles) across India.
>> More Details | created on: 11/10/2006
Micro health insurance hedges risk for India's poorest
By Caitlin Cox, Yahoo News, November 8, 2006
Nandakumar Rajeshirke was suspicious of health insurance when he first heard about the idea three years ago. He had trouble understanding why it made sense to gamble on an unforeseen illness or accident when there was no guarantee he would ever see any money in return.
But his insurance provider, a network of nongovernmental organizations called UpLift India Association, had already earned his trust by supplying him with reliable microcredit to fund his stone carving business in the city of Pune. Mr. Rajeshirke decided to buy coverage for his whole family at 50 rupees ($1.10) per person annually and renewed the plan for several years in a row.
>> More Details | created on: 11/10/2006
Tech Firms Woo 'Next Billion Users'
By Jason Dean and Peter Wonacott, The Wall Street Journal, November 3, 2006
Big technology companies, their established markets maturing, increasingly see their future in a huge but seemingly unlikely pool of potential customers: poor, rural residents of the world's developing countries.
That is what brought Craig Barrett, chairman of Intel Corp., to Shijingwei, a farming hamlet in southern China's Guangdong province, this week. On a warm autumn day, Mr. Barrett sat in a dusty, one-story cement building for a demonstration of the community's first Internet-connected personal computer -- donated by the U.S. semiconductor giant in August. A village official, Huang Yongqing, showed how residents can use the computer to check previously hard-to-find market prices for sugar cane and fruit and adjust their crop mixes accordingly to maximize their profits.
>> More Details | created on: 11/10/2006
Wiring Development
By Editorial, The New York Times, November 2, 2006
The Inter-American Development Bank announced last month that Latin American migrants working in the United States will send a record $45 billion to their families back home this year. At that level, remittances represent the largest and most direct poverty reduction program in the region, topping by far the amounts of foreign aid provided by the United States.
>> More Details | created on: 11/02/2006
Microcredit campaigners claim success in helping world's poorest