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Viewpoint: Don’t write off India’s payments banks
The withdrawal of three licencees should not be read as a doomsday omen for the idea and underlying rationale. It is too early to write off a well-intentioned idea that puts change and innovation before incumbency. Rather, these withdrawals should be seen as signaling the need for introspection and course-correction to adapt to the fast-changing, competitive landscape of India’s banking and payments sector.
- Categories
- Uncategorized
- Region
- South Asia
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U.S. Tech Giants Flock to Africa to Compete for Digital’s “Final Frontier”
Not so long ago, Big Business saw Africa as a charity case. Much of the investment by multinational corporations across the continent was geared more toward burnishing corporate sustainability programs—building schools, planting trees, offering occasional internships—than gearing up for future growth.
Today the picture has changed radically. In the past few years, U.S. technology companies have begun to invest heavily in Africa.- Categories
- Investing, Technology
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Tata Trusts Inks Pact With The/Nudge Foundation
Tata Trusts and The/Nudge Foundation, a Bangalore-based non-profit working on poverty alleviation at scale on Tuesday inked a pact which will help the foundation to innovate on their flagship 'Programme in Life Management' in their Gurukuls, build the team needed to scale pan-India and gear up for a growth target of 7X in 2016-17.
- Categories
- Uncategorized
- Region
- South Asia
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An Indian Farmer’s Son Is Now Worth More Than $300 Million After His Health Care Firm’s IPO
By his own admission, Arokiaswamy Velumani was born at the bottom of the pyramid. The son of a landless farmer from the nondescript village of Appanickenpatti Padur in Tamil Nadu, Velumani saw through school and college on subsidised funding from the government.
- Categories
- Health Care
- Region
- South Asia
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NexThought Monday – Seeking Scale: The Unexplored Power of Standardized Tools and Customized Implementation
Ted London has been working in the base of the pyramid domain since 1989. During that time, he's engaged with many hundreds of entrepreneurs and business leaders seeking to develop and launch enterprises in BoP markets. He's seen several success and many failures. It lead him to develop the Partnership Ecosystem Framework, a tool that helps prepare the enterprise for building the cross-organizational collaborations needed for sustainability at scale.
- Categories
- Education, Impact Assessment
- Tags
- Base of the Pyramid, scale
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Connectivity for the Bottom Billion: A Call for Collective Action
In the developed world, we take the universal availability of the Internet largely for granted. That connectivity in turn creates tremendous opportunities and benefits for individuals and businesses alike. What we often forget is that less than half of the world’s population has access to the Internet. Most of the 4 billion people who live in an unconnected world live in developing countries in Africa and South Asia. The problem is particularly acute for the billion people with the lowest incomes, who tend to live in rural areas of developing countries where there is little or no infrastructure to provide connectivity. This lack of access to connectivity leaves billions cut off from the Internet and thus the ability to use it to improve their lives and economic situations.
- Categories
- Technology
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How Kenyans Are Embracing Mobile Technology to Access Healthcare
It is estimated that more than half of Kenya’s population earning less than $2.50 (£1.73) per day has access to mobile phones. Kenya’s remarkable growth in mobile technology has led to a digital revolution that can address one of the country’s biggest development priorities – access to universal health coverage.
- Categories
- Health Care
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
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Want to Serve the World’s Poorest Citizens? Take Your Company Public in India
For the last 15 years or so, there has been lots of hype about “business models” that will alleviate global poverty while turning a profit. It was a premise derived from the success of the microfinance industry in providing credit to some of the poorest people in the world, who, contrary to conventional wisdom, had a higher repayment rate than the typical borrower. As the late Dr. CK Prahalad hypothesized in his landmark book, “The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid”, there are several strategies that organizations fighting global poverty need to master – and that those capabilities are in abundance in the private sector. They are better at marketing. They are better at R&D and understanding price points. And they are good at partnerships when it serves their purposes. The public and non-profit sectors, alternatively, are generally not very good at any of these things.
- Categories
- Uncategorized
- Region
- South Asia
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