Kiva Needs Businesses to Fund

This holiday season, if you are looking to make a contribution, find a micro-entrepreneur to fund through Kiva. Kiva brings together microlenders with microentrepreneurs at 0% interest. MFI’s can access this debt capital to finance businesses in their portfolio. Watch this video. Or if you need someone really persuasive explain the concept to you, listen

Read Full Article »

Jagriti Yatra

Kaustav Bhattacharya sends this open letter: Ten years ago a young gentleman by the name of Shashank Tripathi set out to organize a train journey around India for 200 gifted students to commemorate 50 years of India’s independence and visit the change makers who were defining and shaping India.

In The Shadows Of Iraq: Qubad Talabani (Part 6)

Political stability must be viewed as a precursor to economic development. How else do you explain the success of microfinance in places such as India, Mexico, South America, and its failure (for the most part) in Africa (aside from limited success in places such as Kenya – which is a rather stable government for the

Read Full Article »

BOP Market Size: $1.3 Trillion (WRI)

In International Dollar, the number, actually is $5 Trillion, which breaks down as follows. The BOP market in Asia (including the Middle East) is by far the largest: 2.86 billion people in 19 countries, with an aggregate income of $3.47 trillion. The BOP market in these countries represents 83% of the region’s population and 42%

Read Full Article »

Venture Capital for MicroFinance: Chris Brookfield (Part 8)

To conclude the interview, I ask about Africa. The general political instability has created an environment which makes it difficult for microfinance investments. However, you have to wonder if some socio-economic stability would not provide increased political stability? A vicious cycle exists, but can it not be concerted into more of a virtuous cycle? SM:

Read Full Article »

Venture Capital for MicroFinance: Chris Brookfield (Part 6)

Microfinance opportunities are growing throughout the world. The availability of data to support the microfinance trend is available from various sources. Depending on the location of the MFI, the cost of delivering the loan can be very low. SM: Can you cite that type of data? That is exactly the type of data you need,

Read Full Article »

BOP Shared Mobile Access (WRI)

Another innovative business model—shared access, in which an entrepreneur with a phone provides pay-per-use access to a community—has extended the social and economic impact of mobile phones beyond the subscriber base. In South Africa more than half the traffic on Vodacom’s mobile network in 2004 came not from its 8 million subscribers but from 4,400

Read Full Article »

BOP Markets: Mobile Telephony (Excerpt from the WRI Report)

Perhaps the strongest and most dramatic BOP success story is mobile telephony. Between 2000 and 2005 the number of mobile subscribers in developing countries grew more than fivefold—to nearly 1.4 billion. Growth was rapid in all regions, but fastest in sub-Saharan Africa—Nigeria’s subscriber base grew from 370,000 to 16.8 million in just four years (World

Read Full Article »