One of the biggest problems that low-income people around the world face is the lack of access to capital that might otherwise help them rise out of poverty. Invited to Stanford, actress Natalie Portman turns the spotlight on her work to promote FINCA's International Village Banking Campaign, aiming to bring financial services to one million of the world's lowest-income families through 100,000 Village Banks by 2010.
Using existing microfinance institutions and recent developments in the carbon credit markets on the supply side to facilitate the adoption of clean energy for the very poor.
Dancing Deer Bakery helps most when it keeps its eye on the bottom line.
In parts of Nicaragua, nearly 80 percent of the population goes without electricity, leaving them cut off from critical opportunities for betterment and development. In this audio interview, Kriss Deiglmeier, the Center for Social Innovation executive director, converses with Mathias Craig who created blueEnergy to bring electricity to marginalized communities in this region of the world.
Too little charity actually reaches the needy.
By working closely with the clients and consumers, design thinking allows high-impact solutions to social problems to bubble up from below rather than being imposed from the top.
Fair Trade-certified coffee is growing in sales, but strict certification requirements are resulting in uneven economic advantages for coffee growers and lower quality coffee for consumers.
Despite the hoopla over microfinance, it doesn't cure poverty. But stable jobs do. If societies are serious about helping the poorest of the poor, they should stop investing in microfinance and start supporting large, labor-intensive industries.
Few microfinance institutions articulate what, exactly, their ultimate goals are and how to achieve them. If the goal of microfinance is to alleviate poverty, the authors say, then MFIs should focus on helping their clients build successful enterprises, rather than on making more and bigger loans.
Market solutions to poverty, which include services and products targeting consumers at the “bottom of the pyramid,” portray poor people as creative entrepreneurs and discerning consumers. Yet this rosy view of poverty-stricken people is not only wrong, but also harmful.
