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Is the Hundred Dollar Laptop a Real Business?
It was reported last week that Nicolas Negoponte and Libya reached an agreement to supply 1.2 million of the $100 computers to Libyan schoolchildren for $250 million. I was intrigued by the agreement, the math for which points up one of the problems with the effort - the computer itself may...
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Zambia Journal: Introducing Guest Blogger Brian McBrearity
I?m happy to introduce NextBillion ally Brian McBrearity as our latest guest blogger. Brian is a reformed Wall Street asset manager ? now he?s working in the SME development and financial services field as he tries to apply his finance background to serve the BOP. He recently accepted a...
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Selling in China
For NextBillion readers interested in China, Knowledge @ Wharton has a special section out this month that will be of interest. Selling in China is the third in a series of reports on the world?s most populous nation; this issue covers a range of topics, including the dichotomy between rich...
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Pakistan Journal: Reaching Rural Households With Technology
I was in Karachi this past weekend, where I addressed a packed seminar, Improving Access to Financial Services: Mobile Money Transfer and Beyond, convened by the Asian Development Bank and the State Bank of Pakistan. If audience enthusiasm is any indication, financial service provision over...
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Private Sector Finance and SME Development
Thanks to a commenter?s suggestion from Munyaradzi Musamba, I checked out a new report from InfoDev about the role of private sector finance in small- and medium-sized enterprise development. The report, Scaling Up Innovation and Entrepreneurship in Developing Countries: The Role of Private...
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Muhammad Yunus Wins Nobel Peace Prize
Muhammad Yunus, who developed the idea of microfinance and later founded the Grameen Bank, is the 2006 winner of the Nobel Peace Prize. It is not his first peace prize. The Wikipedia entry is already updated to reflect today?s news; I suspect the mainstream media will be saturated with...
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Rising Ventures: Berni Labs offers alternatives for Mexico’s low-income farmers
The crop duster crashing and dumping pesticides into the Los Mochis water supply was bad enough. But when a warehouse blaze released toxic agrochemicals into the air, causing respiratory illnesses among farmers and their families in the area, Jorge Berni knew there had to be a better way. ...
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The Role of IT in International Development – Upcoming E-Conference
What role do information technologies play in economic development? We?ve been trying to answer that question ever since the Digital Dividends conference way back in 2002, first as an IT-focused research team and now as Development through Enterprise and NextBillion.net. There are no simple...
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