News
U.S. Group Reaches Deal to Provide Laptops to All Libyan Schoolchildren 
By John Markoff, The New York Times, October 11, 2006
The government of Libya reached an agreement on Tuesday with One Laptop Per Child, a nonprofit United States group developing an inexpensive, educational laptop computer, with the goal of supplying machines to all 1.2 million Libyan schoolchildren by June 2008.
>> More Details | created on: 10/13/2006
Gates Foundation Awards $1.5 Million to Grameen Foundation
Grameen Foundation USA, August 29, 2006
Grameen Foundation, a leading global microfinance organization, today announced it has received a $1.5 million grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to support its work worldwide. The three-year grant will support Grameen Foundation’s strategic plan to reach five million additional new families, ensure that 50 percent of them permanently escape poverty within five years of becoming a microfinance client, and champion innovations that transform the microfinance industry. The unrestricted grant is GF’s third largest grant in support of this five-year plan launched in 2004.
>> More Details | created on: 09/08/2006
Group Pressures U.S. to Help End Global Poverty
By Evelyn Iritani, Los Angeles Times, June 15, 2006
SEATTLE — Alarmed by America's sagging image and the growing disparity in global wealth, a group of prominent Seattle business leaders is trying to educate, cajole and, if necessary, shame America into helping the poorest of the world's poor.
>> More Details | created on: 06/27/2006
Acumen Fund Initiative Will Develop 'Entrepreneurial Bench' in Fight against Global Poverty
Yahoo News, May 24, 2006
NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--May 24, 2006--Acumen Fund, a leading innovator in the creation of sustainable, scalable solutions addressing poverty in the developing world, announced the inaugural class of Acumen Fund Fellows today in New York City. After an intensive three-month selection process that spanned the globe and drew hundreds of applicants from over fifty countries, Acumen Fund has chosen eight extraordinary individuals to be part of the first cohort of the groundbreaking Acumen Fund Fellows Program. The fellowship includes eight weeks of rigorous training, a nine-month field assignment with an Acumen investment, and another month spent debriefing at Acumen Fund headquarters in New York City.
>> More Details | created on: 05/31/2006
A Moneymaking Water Pump
By Ross Perlin, Time Magazine, May 21, 2006
To Martin Fisher, 48, and Nick Moon, 51, a simple pump could be the solution to poverty for millions of Africans. They're the co-founders of KickStart, a San Francisco--based nonprofit that encourages rural entrepreneurship by providing tools that Africa's poor can afford. Since the group was founded in Nairobi in 1991 under the name ApproTEC, it has developed a machine to make building blocks, a press that extracts cooking oil from seeds, a hay baler and a series of hand-operated micro-irrigation pumps. Their latest, the MoneyMaker Hip Pump, retails in Africa for $34.
>> More Details | created on: 05/23/2006
ICICI Bank Targets 250 MFI's
By Sunita Jyoti, The Financial Express, April 14, 2006
Besides retail, ICICI Bank, the second-largest commercial bank, has aggressively doubled its rural microfinance and agri-business
loan portfolio over a period of nine months. The outstanding in group's total rural microfinance and agri-business portfolio has increased to Rs 10,000 crore compared to Rs 5,200 crore last year.
>> More Details | created on: 04/17/2006
Six Trends Will Drive Sustainable Development, According to PricewaterhouseCoopers
PricewaterhouseCoopers, April 10, 2006
Sustainable development will steadily advance over the next 10 years, with six major trends influencing industry world-wide, according to a new PricewaterhouseCoopers' report, "Corporate Responsibility: Strategy, Management and Value." The challenge of creating strategies that meet immediate needs without sacrificing the needs of future generations will be driven by the growing influence of: global market forces; revisions in corporate governance; high speed innovation; large scale globalisation; evolving societal requirements and communication, the report says.
>> More Details | created on: 04/11/2006
ICRISAT to collaborate with CII and Coca Cola Foundation on watershed development
Moneycontrol.com, April 3, 2006
ICRISAT & Coca-Cola Foundation Collaboration for Backward Areas Development through Strategic Intervention in Watershed Development The International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT), Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) and the Coca-Cola Foundation will collaborate for sustainable and equitable management of Rural Water Resources Infrastructure and other Natural Resources Management (NRM).
>> More Details | created on: 04/07/2006
Sales Effort Gives India's Rural Poor an Opportunity
By John Lancaster, Washington Post, April 2, 2006
This article discusses a Hindustan Lever initiative that enlists about 20,000 poor and mostly illiterate women to sell products.
>> More Details | created on: 04/07/2006
Nonprofits Pursue Private Investors
By Clay Holtzman , Puget Sound Business Journal, April 2, 2006
Redmond-based Unitus Inc. recently completed a $9 million initial close on a $20 million private equity fund meant to buy stock in its microfinance partners. The new money will provide additional resources for the nonprofit's eight microfinance partners, which are located abroad and backed by Unitus-facilitated grants and loans.
>> More Details | created on: 04/07/2006
Building Wealth by the Penny
By John Lancaster, Washington Post, March 14, 2006
With its open sewers and mud-walled homes, this impoverished farming village of 2,200 in southern India did not look like fertile territory for an entrepreneur. But Srilatha Kadem was undeterred. Oblivious to the midday heat, she marched briskly along the unpaved streets, her cloth bag filled with soaps and shampoos and her heart with vaulting ambition.
>> More Details | created on: 03/14/2006
Grameen teams up with Groupe Danone to set up food plant 
By Reaz Ahmad, The Daily Star, March 13, 2006
Microcredit guru Prof Muhammad Yunus launches a joint venture food enterprise in collaboration with one of the world's major food producers -- Groupe Danone.
>> More Details | created on: 03/22/2006
Give Africans the Blackberry -- and they will do the Job
By Dan Latendre, The Record, March 11, 2006
What do computers, cellphones and BlackBerrys have to do with eradicating extreme poverty in Africa? Quite a bit as it turns out.
>> More Details | created on: 03/17/2006
Keya Sarkar: Micro finance awards tell a story
By Keya Sarkar, Business Standard, February 28, 2006
India is taking small steps as a nation to address the lack of access to financial instruments of nearly 600 million people, but also the mainstream financial sector has suddenly discovered a new asset class.
>> More Details | created on: 02/28/2006
The tin-can antenna: A boon for third world
By Elisabetta Povoledo , International Herald Tribune, February 28, 2006
A physics research institute here is using a low-cost but effective tool to bolster communications in developing countries: the tin-can antenna.
>> More Details | created on: 02/28/2006
New infoDev Report on m-Commerce
By InfoDev, February 24, 2006
The proliferation of mobile communications in developing countries has the potential to bring a wide range of financial services to an entirely new customer base. This report explores the use of mobile phones to expand financial services in the Philippines.
>> More Details | created on: 02/28/2006
The Birth of Philanthrocapitalism
By The Economist, February 23, 2006
RELATIVE to the corporate environment, we are in the 1870s. But philanthropy will increasingly come to resemble the capitalist economy, predicts Uday Khemka, a young Indian philanthropist and a director of the SUN Group investment company owned by his family.
>> More Details | created on: 02/28/2006
The Business of Giving
By The Economist, February 23, 2006
Philanthropy is flourishing as the number of super-rich people keeps growing. But the new donors are becoming much more businesslike about the way their money is used, says Matthew Bishop.
>> More Details | created on: 02/28/2006
MTN's CSR Initiative Wins GSM Association Award
Africa News, February 17, 2006
>> More Details | created on: 02/17/2006
The Profit of Creativity
Global Envision, February 11, 2006
Thousands of rural innovations exist in rural India, and if nurtured and enabled as microenterprises, they can contribute in a significant way to the reduction of poverty.
>> More Details | created on: 03/01/2006
Google's Big BOP Bet? Bringing Wi-Fi to Africa
By John Paul, World Resources Institute, February 9, 2006
Google
announced this week that it has selected Abuja, Nigeria as one of about seven African cities the company will fully connect with a wireless network.
>> More Details | created on: 02/17/2006
All They Need is a Fair Chance to Compete
By Heather Stewart , The Observer, January 22, 2006
Hilary Benn tells Heather Stewart that, far from being the enemy, the global private sector is the one certain way that poverty can be made history.
>> More Details | created on: 01/23/2006
Putting Paid to Poverty
By Al Hammond & Bill Kramer, January 17, 2006
"Putting Paid to Poverty" provides a hopeful scenario for the development of the 'base of the pyramid' over the next ten years.
>> More Details | created on: 02/17/2006
A New Way to Do Well by Doing Good
By Rachel Emma Silverman, Wall Street Journal, January 5, 2006
Making tiny loans to poor entrepreneurs in developing countries has long been a popular charitable cause, but it is now gaining traction as an investment.
>> More Details | created on: 02/07/2006
OSS CEO Announces Global Campaign to Deliver Intelligence to the Poor, Lifting the Bottom of the Pyramid - the Poor - With Information
Yahoo Finance, December 14, 2005
>> More Details | created on: 01/04/2006
A Proposition to Eradicate Poverty
By Jesse Moore, November 11, 2005
This article takes an in depth look at the pros and cons of eradicating poverty through profit. The author notes we need to rebuke the idea that we are playing a zero-sum game and embrace the possibility that growth and poverty reduction, done right, are mutually reinforcing pursuits.
>> More Details | created on: 12/21/2005
Founder of Ebay sets up Dollars 100m microfinance aid fund
Financial Express, November 4, 2005
The Dollars 100m (Euros 84m, Pounds 56m) fund, which will be run for profit by endowment managers at Tufts University in the US, marks a growing trend among a new generation of philanthropic entrepreneurs and technology billionaires to seek market-based solutions to global poverty rather than rely solely on traditional charities.
>> View Article | created on: 11/18/2005
For the Poor, Help from MBAs
By Francesca DiMeglio , Business Week Online, August 1, 2005
This article discusses how many MBAs are bringing microfinancing, business development—and eventually a consumer economy—to many impoverished Third World areas.
>> More Details | created on: 01/05/2006
Calling an End to Poverty: Mobile Phones and Development
By The Economist, July 7, 2005
Discusses how mobile phone firms have found a way to help the poor help themselves.
>> More Details | created on: 11/23/2005
What it's Like to Live on $1 a Day
The Christian Science Monitor, July 6, 2005
Discusses the day to day reality of living in poverty in Malawi.
>> More Details | created on: 11/23/2005
Pennies from the poor add up to fortune
By David Ignatius, The Korea Herald, July 1, 2005
>> More Details | created on: 01/03/2006
Trickle-Up Economics
By David Armstrong & Naazneen Karmali, Forbes.com, June 20, 2005
How low-tech, low-cost designs are helping the poorest farmers on Earth grow their way out of poverty.
>> View Article | created on: 11/18/2005
Selling to the Poor: There is a Surprisingly Lucrative Market in Targeting Low-Income Consumers
By Kay Johnson & Xa Nhon, Time Magazine, April 25, 2005
Identifies the lucrative market in targeting low income consumers.
>> View Article | created on: 11/18/2005
MIT Team Seeks to Seed Developing World with $100 Laptops
By Mark Jewell, The Detroit News, April 4, 2005
Addresses MIT's efforts to bridge the digital divide by bringing laptops to children in the developing world.
>> View Article | created on: 11/18/2005
Senegalese Villagers are Learning to Use their Natural & Cultural Heritage to Make a Living
World Business Council for Sustainable Development, January 1, 2005
It is in partnership with the Nicolas Hulot Foundation (NHF), and the Ademe, the French agency for the environment and energy efficiency, that EDF has begun to engage in projects where local communities in developing countries take responsibility for the protection of their natural and cultural heritage, and turn it into an opportunity for growth.
>> View Article | created on: 11/18/2005
PEOPLink and CatGen: Empowering a Global Network of Artisans
By Nia Ujamaa, Digital Divide Network, December 1, 2004
Discusses the success of PEOPLink and CatGen in empowering a global network of local artisans.
>> View Article | created on: 11/18/2005
The Global Compact: A Business Perspective
International Chamber of Commerce, July 1, 2004
A look at the Global Compact as businesses begins to take more of a role in International Development.
>> View Article | created on: 11/18/2005
Deutsche Bank: microcredit development fund
Deutsche Bank Microcredit Fund, May 1, 2004
The Deutsche Bank Microcredit Fund was conceived as a vehicle to combine the interest, abilities, reach, and resources of Deutsche Bank and its Private Bank clients to support the long-term sustainability of microcredit institutions.
>> View Article | created on: 11/18/2005
Local Entrepreneurial Skills & Sustainability in Rwanda's Community Internet Centers
DOT-COMments e-newsletter, 2004
Addresses how local entrepreneurial skills are leading to sustainable growth in Rwanda’s Community Internet Centers.
>> View Article | created on: 11/18/2005
Global Community Investment
Business for Social Responsibility, December 1, 2003
As companies expand their operations globally, deriving ever-larger shares of their revenues and profits from international operations, they are finding business value from expanding their community involvement activities internationally as well.
>> View Article | created on: 11/18/2005
Sonae: Delta Cafés socially responsible coffee
World Business Council on Sustainble Development, September 26, 2003
Delta has since successfully developed a “socially responsible” coffee brand, Delta Timor, creating competitive communities at the beginning of the supply chain, in the plantations of East Timor, and establishing a “solidarity market” for the brand among Portuguese consumers.
>> View Article | created on: 11/18/2005
The Corporate Key: Using Big Business to Fight Global Poverty
By George C. Lodge, Foreign Affairs, July 1, 2002
The authors analyze a new approach to global development addressing a global corporate alliance that brings business know-how and profit motive into play.
>> View Article | created on: 11/18/2005
Shanty Town Seamstresses Fuel the Fashion Industry
By Shannon Walbran, Changemakers.net, June 1, 2002
The article addresses the success of the Coopa-Roca sewing cooperative in bringing many women out of poverty.
>> View Article | created on: 11/18/2005
Balancing Sustainability with Service to the Poorest of the Poor
By Sharda Naidoo, Changemakers.net, May 1, 2002
Discusses Small Enterprise Foundation (SEF) in South Africa which is one of the world's most financially successful and efficient microfinance programs, having reached a level of sustainability critical to the viability of microfinance lending.
>> View Article | created on: 11/18/2005
Beating Doubts, Droughts & Debt: Re-shaping the Economic Landscape
By Shannon Walbran, Changemakers.net, May 1, 2002
Discusses the success of Orgape in alleviating poverty by providing financial services to low income people in Brazil.
>> View Article | created on: 11/18/2005
Let's Focus on the Digital Dividend
By C.K. Prahalad, European Business Forum, 2002
Disucusses the idea that in the new economy, where access to knowledge is critical for economic success, the increasing importance of the internet will further accentuate the differences between the rich and the poor.
>> View Article | created on: 11/18/2005
Information Communications Technology for Development
UNDP Evaluation Office, September 1, 2001
Addresses Information Communication technology as a key player in development.
>> View Article | created on: 11/18/2005
Information and Communication Technologies and Poverty
By Charles Kenny, World Bank, July 1, 2001
This article address the importance of "Digitally enabled Development" as one of the keys to third world development.
>> View Article | created on: 11/18/2005
Strategic Innovation: Hindustan Lever Ltd
By Rekha Balu, Fast Company, June 1, 2001
Highlights Hindustan Lever's success through soap marketing and distribution at the BOP.
>> View Article | created on: 11/18/2005
Revolution in a Coffee Cup: Waking the Sleeping Consumer Giant
By Kris Herbst, Changemakers.net, April 1, 2001
Dicusses how Trans-fair USA has worked with the Coffee Industry to help developing country coffee producers to build self-reliance, dignity, and control over their communities, while promoting sustainable production.
>> View Article | created on: 11/18/2005
Bottom Up, Digitally Enabled Development, A Vision
By Allen Hammond & Elizabeth Jenkins, iMP Magazine, February 1, 2001
The authors address the importance of "Digitally enabled Development" as one of the keys to third world development.
>> View Article | created on: 11/18/2005
Improving Health, Fighting Poverty: The Role of Information and Communication Technology (ICT)
The Exchange, 2001
Addresses the power of technology in alleviating poverty but the risk of marginalizing the poor through this process.
>> View Article | created on: 11/18/2005
Academic Research
Is Private Education Good for the Poor?