News
Gates Foundation Provides $15.4 Million to Opportunity International To Help Build Microfinance Banks in Five African Nations 
PR Newswire, February 20, 2007
Opportunity International, one of the world's largest microfinance organizations, today announced it has received a $5.4 million grant and a $10 million loan from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The $15.4 million of capital will fund start-up microfinance banks to serve the poor in Rwanda, Uganda, Kenya and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), as well as expansion of its banking operations in Ghana. Opportunity International operates banks or financial institutions in 28 countries and is the world's largest microfinance bank organization serving the very poor.
>> More Details | created on: 02/23/2007
INCONHSA: Affordable housing in Honduras 
WBCSD, February 15, 2007
The Central American country of Honduras needs to build 600,000 houses to meet current demand and must construct 40,000 new houses a year to keep up with its growing population. Yet the country’s per capita GDP is US$ 2,900, and there is little credit available; so few Hondurans can afford to build or buy a home.
The Honduran firm INCONHSA recognized the challenge and turned it into a business opportunity by figuring out how to build affordable detached homes for about US$ 9,500 per unit in a development that includes paved roads, electricity, water and sanitation.
>> More Details | created on: 02/23/2007
Pakistan approves strategy to expand microfinance outreach to 3 mln households
Associated Press of Pakistan, February 14, 2007
Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz has approved the strategy to expand microfinance outreach from one million to three million households by 2010.He was chairing a meeting here Wednesday to review the strategy prepared by State Bank of Pakistan (SBP) to increase the coverage of microfinance sector in Pakistan.
>> More Details | created on: 02/16/2007
Reaching out Aureos makes $400m bet on Africa
By Barney Jopson , Financial Times, January 22, 2007
Aureos Capital, one of the most experienced private equity groups in Africa, is aiming to raise $400m for a ground-breaking bet on the potential of smaller companies to build businesses spanning the continent, writes Barney Jopson in London.
The group, domiciled in Mauritius, is among a handful of emerging market specialists active in Africa and already runs three funds, dedicated to east, west and southern Africa, which total $140m.
>> More Details | created on: 02/02/2007
Working home and away
BBC News, January 16, 2007
A new report published by the World Bank says migrant workers sending money home has become the biggest source of foreign income in some poor European countries.
>> More Details | created on: 01/19/2007
From Matatu to the Masai via mobile
By Paul Mason , BBC News, January 8, 2007
Newsnight correspondent Paul Mason travels through Kenya using a map of the country's mobile phone networks as his guide.
>> More Details | created on: 01/19/2007
India's Huge Market for Cheap Phones
By Nandini Lakshman, Business Week, January 8, 2007
It's one of the world's hottest mobile phone markets, but Nokia, Motorola, and Samsung must deliver cool handsets at very thin profit margins.
>> More Details | created on: 01/12/2007
India poised for pharmaceutical boom
By Mark Sappenfield, The Christian Science Monitor, January 2, 2007
For decades, India's drugmakers have been the pharmacy for the world's destitute, finding ways to copy the best medicines at the lowest prices. By some estimates, India's generic medicines treat half the AIDS patients in the developing world.
Yet this picture has begun to change since India decided to comply with global patent standards last year. Now as never before, Indian pharmaceutical companies are looking to expand business in rich countries, which, critics say, will come at the expense of the world's poor. The intent is to follow the footsteps of India's information-technology (IT) sector, which parlayed lower costs and improved innovation into India's greatest modern success story.
>> More Details | created on: 01/12/2007
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
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
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
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
Credit will cut rural poverty in India
By Amy Yee , Financial Times, October 31, 2006
Microfinance in India, -currently focused on small loans for the rural poor, is growing fast enough to make an impact over the next -decade, according to a new report.
However, the sector must focus on transparency and governance, training local partners, and developing a more diverse menu of services, says the report, released yesterday at a microfinance conference in New Delhi.
>> More Details | created on: 11/10/2006
Microcredit not working in China, new initiative needed
People's daily online, October 27, 2006
Statistics shows that only 27.3 of China's rural households have benefited from microcredits provided by rural credit cooperatives. The total value of microcredit loans distributed by over 100 microcredit institutions is merely one billion yuan.
>> More Details | created on: 10/27/2006
Kenya's 'Lord of the Ringtones' carves empire in African cell phone
WBCSD, October 22, 2006
In a warehouse on the outskirts of Nairobi, the "Lord of the Ringtones" holds sway over a growing cell phone service empire amid an African explosion in mobile technology. With 14 employees and a clever Middle Earth-inspired slogan, Ken Njoroge's two-year-old Cellulant firm has seized on the phenomenal surge in cell phone use and a ballooning desire for people to customize their handsets with distinctive rings.
"Mobile phones are getting more and more sophisticated," says the 31-year-old "lord," as Cellulant employees in oversized headphones, upship song snippets and ditties to customers for 82 cents (65 euro cents) a ringtone. "We've just found an untapped niche," Njoroge told AFP.
>> More Details | created on: 11/02/2006
African Governments Asked to Plough Back Cell Phone Taxes
By Kimathi Njoka, allAfrica, October 21, 2006
Telecommunications experts say mobile networks have the capacity to provide coverage to 90 per cent of the world's population by 2010.
But this could happen only if governments spend all the tax collections from telecoms industry on improving the mobile infrastructure. Speaking in Cape Town yesterday, experts urged Governments to complement mobile operators towards achieving this goal instead of watering down their efforts through ill-advised policies of subsidising rollouts of fixed-networks.
>> More Details | created on: 10/27/2006
Migrant remittances from the United States to Latin America to reach $45 billion in 2006, says IDB
IDB, October 18, 2006
New study estimates 12.6 million immigrants are sending home more money more frequently
>> More Details | created on: 10/20/2006
Latin America remittances support investments
By Richard Lapper , Financial Times, October 18, 2006
Latin Americans working in the United States are sending back more money to their families and investing increasing amounts in homes and small businesses, according to a study commissioned by the Inter-American Development Bank.
>> More Details | created on: 10/20/2006
For India's Traditional Fishermen, Cellphones Deliver a Sea Change
By Kevin Sullivan, Washington Post, October 15, 2006
Babu Rajan pointed off the starboard bow and shouted: "There! There!" In choppy, gray seas four miles from shore near India's tropical southern tip, Rajan spotted the tinselly sparkle of a school of sardines. He ordered his three dozen crewmen to quickly drop their five-ton net overboard.
>> More Details | created on: 10/20/2006
Microfinance Institutions Reach Crucial Agreement with Government in Andhra Pradesh, India
MicroCapital, October 11, 2006
In a broad reaching agreement, Microfinance Institutions (MFIs) operating in Andhra Pradesh, India have reached an agreement with the state government on MFI interest rates, product portfolio, inter-MFI competition, credit disbursement and loan recovery methodologies. An agreement pertaining to a smaller jurisdiction – the Krishna district of Andhra Pradesh was earlier reported on MicroCapital.
As per the terms of the agreement, MFIs have agreed to an interest rate ceiling of 15%. They have agreed to desist from providing multiple credit to an existing borrower and recover loans at a pace compatible with the borrower’s income level. MFIs are also to remain strictly within the micro-credit domain, avoiding micro-insurance products.
>> More Details | created on: 10/13/2006
Exploring business solutions for development in Latin America