PSD Blog - World Bank Group

Sweeter than sugar?

Nicholas Negroponte’s longtime MIT colleague Walter Bender has recently left the One Laptop per Child program. Bender was responsible for software and content for "XO" laptops including its innovative Sugar operating system. This all happened amidst OLPC’s move to change its open-source approach as it welcomes Microsoft’s Windows operating system. Bender will now try to further the development of the XOs' Sugar, and get it to run on Linux computers other than XOs.

Bender's departure is the second big executive loss to be added to OLPC's setbacks and reportedly Negroponte wants OLPC to operate more efficiently. An executive-search firm has been trying to hire a chief executive for the group for more than a year – anyone needs a job?

Sustainable banking awards: who's winning what?

The Financial Times and IFC announced shortlists of potential winners for the 2008 Sustainable Banking Awards. The awards recognize financial institutions that have led the way in integating their policies with social, environmental, and corporate governance objectives. Below is a sample the categories and the shortlisted candidates, the full list is available here.

Sustainable Bank of the Year

• Banco Real, Brazil
• Citi, US
• HSBC, UK
• Rabobank, Netherlands
• Standard Chartered, UK

Sustainable Deal of the Year

• BlueOrchard Finance, Switzerland/Morgan Stanley, US (microfinance loans)
• Calyon, France (solar thermal power plants)
• Citi, US (financing for rural housing)
• Glitnir Bank, Iceland (geothermal power generation)
• Merrill Lynch, US (carbon finance to reduce deforestation)

Banking at the Bottom of the Pyramid

• ASA, Bangladesh
• Banco Bradesco, Brazil
• ICICI Group, India
• Opportunity International, UK
• Wizzit, South Africa

Futarchy: buzzword or viable option?

There's been a lot of buzz about prediction markets recently:

• A McKinsey & Co. report on prediction markets quotes James Surowiecki: "I wouldn’t be surprised to see prediction markets used in many more companies than today, not least as a tool to forecast sales. Consumer-facing companies should be particularly interested."
• Knowledge Management gurus Tom Davenport and Dave Snowden jumped into the fray to cool easy enthusiasm.
• An article in the New York Times introduces the concept of futarchy. According to Robin D. Hanson, an economist at George Mason University and a fan of alternative institutions, futarchy is "a form of government enhanced by prediction markets. Voters would decide broad goals of national welfare, but betting in speculative markets would determine the policy steps to achieve those goals."

Is "futarchy" a viable option for enhancing bottom-up participation in setting development policies? So, far, to my knowledge, Globalgiving has been the only entity to experiment with decision markets in a development context. I look forward to learn about the results of its pilot.

PS: After this post was published the Financial Times  published an article with a number of intersting examples of applications of predictions market to the non-profit sector. 

Locally-grown food in the middle of New York City

New York Magazine asked four architects to design whatever they would like for a full city block of space with no clients to worry about. One design offered was a vertical farm, complete with water tanks and each floor would be used for the cultivation of a different crop. Amale Andraos, of Work AC, the firm responsible for the intriguing idea, said in the article that they “are interested in urban farming and the notion of trying to make our cities more sustainable by cutting the miles [food travels].”

Ok, maybe that’s taking sustainable design to an extreme; does anyone have more eco-friendly (and preferably profitable) ideas?

Online microfinance: Kiva vs. MicroPlace

The Microfinance Gateway has just released a good and quick comparison between two major players in microfinance: Kiva and MicroPlace. The Microfinance Gateway piece is a good synopsis of the work these two organizations are doing; it talks about the differences between the two as well as their roots and how to invest in microfinance projects through them. 

Negroponte's competitor: One laptop per rich child

Classmate PC – Intel's low-cost educational laptop – which was initially designed for developing countries is now going to be distributed in Europe and in the United States.

Here's a cost comparison of the low-cost and educational laptops out there:

• Eee PC from Taiwan's Asustek Computer: $399
• XO from One Laptop Per Child Foundation: $188
• Classmate PC from Intel: $350
• Making a profit from a do-good idea: priceless (or is it?).

From growing cassava to funding a university

Beatrice Ayuru introduces herself as a teacher and businesswoman. She is from northern Uganda, a war-ravaged area with much poverty and few schools.

A few years ago, with no business training and no money, Beatrice decided that she would build her own school. "No girl should endure what I had to go through myself," says Beatrice. "Education is the best way to help reduce poverty in my region […] and giving girl children education empowers them. In my village, women are over-dependent on men."

Beatrice started with a small garden of cassava. That earned her a little money which she used to buy wheelbarrows that she subsequently rented out. With that income, she managed to open a canteen. Soon, she had enough savings to start a school. Getting the land was a struggle.

Can the private sector teach development?

Professor William Duggan argues in his book, Strategic Intuition: The Creative Spark in Human Achievement, that disciplines such as psychology, military history, and business strategy may collectively teach strategies that could be used by development agencies in order to ensure success. He discusses this idea in depth on his blog.

Bill Easterly will join Duggan at the Center for Global Development on March 12, for a discussion on how lessons from the private sector may enhance development success.

Innovative thinkers wanted

The 2008 Global Development Marketplace competition's theme is "Sustainable Agriculture for Development."

This competition is an avenue for creative thinkers to turn their ideas for sustainable agriculture in developing countries into reality. The grand prize: $200,0000 in grant funding. Applications are open until March 21, 2008.   

Teaching a new dog an old trick?

Will online social investment markets replicate the flaws of traditional development models, or will they improve their effectiveness? That's the question raised in a new report that provides some empirical evidence to the so far rather anecdotal argument that we are shifting towards a Development 2.0 paradigm.

In theory, start-ups like MyC4 or GiveIndia begin from a clean slate and therefore need not fall in the same traps that hampered the effectiveness of traditional development players.

However, the analysis of 24 online social markets leads the authors to conclude that, whilst they are "relentless innovators" that succeed in attracting a new donor base, their transformative power is hindered by an all too familiar problem to "old" development players – the lack of reliable performance data and a common reporting framework.

Starting a business: help from Harvard Business School

Harvard University's Working Knowledge compiled resources for those thinking about starting up their own business. Topics include legal issues associated with new enterprises, managing resources, product development, and keeping owner control.

As a bonus here's other useful information for entrepreneurs on the ease of doing business across 178 economies.

Putting a price on carbon: time to get hands-on

The recent spate of announcements by financial institutions looking forward to a world with a price on carbon - and their decisions to set a price for carbon in their own calculations on project viability or to adhere to generic principles on carbon which may influence the future shape of their portfolios - are the latest evidence of a world preparing itself for some kind of public policy context to emerge from international negotiations. But perhaps of equal significance is evidence that the risks and opportunities from managing exposure to carbon are seen as real and present, not potential and distant.

To dig down into performance and beyond rhetoric a number of challenges face financial institutions. A carbon price helps one understand risk in a future where carbon carries a price, but how do you decide where to invest in carbon intensive projects and where not?

Internet for all

It is estimated that 1.1 billion people have Internet access world-wide. That still leaves out a large number of potential Internet users, or potential costumers, depending on how one looks at it. That's probably why some entrepreneurs have been tackling the issue of how to close this divide.

One interesting approach was taken by Meraki, a Silicon Valley technology company. It developed cheap and simple network devices that allow ordinary Internet users to set up networks and share costs so that more people can connect. The company, which was named a "Technology Pioneer" at the recent World Economic Forum, has helped extending wireless Internet in about 70 countries.

Have you heard of other creative approaches to this issue?

Too much or too little - the paradox of information for development

"The paradox of the human rights community is that it is an information-processing industry that has limited access to information technology" says Jim Fruchterman, the winner of the Skoll Award for Social Enterpreneurship in 2004 and 2006 and founder of Benetech – an organization that creates technology used by human rights and literacy program workers.

Benetech's own Web site goes on to observe that "human rights groups throughout the world gather massive amounts of violation data. Much of it never reaches its full potential or intended audience."

Isn't the same paradox common to other areas of the development sector, including policy making and private sector development?

Gemloc Program selects PIMCO and Markit

In a new development, the World Bank Group chose PIMCO and Markit for Gemloc Program to increase investment in emerging markets.

The World Bank Group launched the Gemloc Program last October to help emerging market countries attract more investment and develop their local currency bond markets.

Sustainable tourism competition open

Proponents of "geotourism" believe that it benefits local residents in many ways, including economically, since travel businesses strive to use local workforce, products, and services.

A new National Geographic competition aims to raise awareness to ways geotourism may be beneficial to the local communities. Winners will be innovators in geotourism and applications are now open through April 9.

If you are part of a committed organization or governemnt you can also sign the "Geotourism Charter" (p.s.: totally non-binding and unenforceable).

Africa: (self-powered) light at the end of the tunnel

Actor Tom Hanks is better known for his role in Forrest Gump than for his work with self-powered energy. But that might soon change, at least for some people in sub-Saharan Africa, where Hanks is funding a project that will create assorted lights and lanterns to serve an area where less than 15 percent of the population has proper lighting.

These devices work by transforming winding-up motion into electricity and in some cases one minute of winding can generate two hours of lighting. The company making the products cites several applications for its devices including enabling businesses to stay open later and increasing night-time studying hours. They can also power radios, and other devices such as the "One Laptop per Child" laptops.

Maybe with oil prices breaking $100/barrel and having much of our electricity generated from oil, these devices will become commercially viable in the west as well.

Web 2.0 ideas for the World Bank, anyone?

A colleague down the road is collecting ideas for Web 2.0 business models and services that could be adopted by the World Bank Group. Here are some initial thoughts and there's a number of projects well on their way.

So if you have any suggestions or recommendations help brainstorming and leave a comment below. (By the way, if you happen to be a developer, you might want to move from thought to action at the Social Innovation Camp in April).

More cell phones, better grain prices

We already know that cell phone technology has enabled lots of people in remote areas to access bank accounts and government services. But here is a new one: a recent paper creates a model that predicts that cell phones in Niger will lead to a reduction in price dispersion. This would be true since cell phones enable grain traders to perform searches for better prices in areas where it would otherwise be too costly to search.

Interested? Register online for a discussion with the author held by the Center for Global Development in Washington, D.C.

It's all about sharing

Nokia found that over 50 percent of users in India and Pakistan and 30 percent in Vietnam share their phones. Accordingly, the world's largest cell phone maker released two new models optimized for sharing. Among the new features are a cost-tracking application, multiple phone books, and software in 80 languages.

Paying attention to customers in emerging markets has paid off. The Finnish firm has posted record quarterly results: over 77 million units sold in Asia, the Middle East and Africa - almost doubling its sales in Europe and North America (42.3 million).

You know it, when you see it

Social entrepreneurship may be hard to define, but has managed to carve out a space for itself in business thinking.

At Davos, Bill Gates spoke of creative capitalism calling on the private sector to channel market forces to better address the needs of the poor, even if it sounds unreasonable to some.

Critical thinking at the bottom of the pyramid

Can information and communication technologies (ICT) foster critical and entrepreneurial thinking at the bottom of the pyramid? This was one of the key themes that emerged from the GK3 conference last month.

Take for example the One Laptop for Child initiative. Interestingly, the debate did not center around the long-term sustainability of the project, but whether it can help move education systems in emerging markets away from the hierarchical, rule-memorizing approach.

Once you start seeing users of ICT in developing countries as creative contributors, a whole new world of opportunities emerges. Backed by InfoDev, the Equinox project allows teachers, trainers and companies in emerging markets to build and share e-learning curricula.

Cooking at the bottom of the pyramid

The World Health Organization estimates that 1.6 million people die each year from toxic indoor air. The main culprit is carbon monoxide released with smoke as a byproduct of incomplete combustion, when using traditional stoves.

Given that nearly half of the world population and 80 percent of rural households cook with traditional stoves, Environfit - a Colorado-based organization - saw a commercial opportunity and created a line of clean-burning ceramic stoves. Their first target demographics are Indian women. Prices will range from $10 to $200.

Climate policy map

Econsense created an interactive database for all-things climate. Much like our Do-Your-Own-Analysis, it allows to compare and contrast data across countries, in this case, on topics such as greenhouse gas emissions, fuel tax, emissions trading and biofuel production.

A sign of things to come?

Earlier this week IBM and Nokia let go of 31 "eco-patents" and released them to the public. By doing so, the technology giants hope to tap into the wisdom of the crowds. This very web 2.0 move is a sign of their recognition that when it comes to complex issues, such as spurring innovation or identify new business opportunities in the area of clean technologies, the best knowledge may well reside outside their organizational boundaries.

Also recently McKinsey added its voice to the choir of the wikinomics prophets and included "distributing cocreation" and "using consumers as innovators" among the eight emerging trends to watch in business technology. The global consulting firm predicted that "in the US economy alone roughly 12 percent of all labor activity could be transformed by more distributed and networked forms of innovation."

Intuitively, the development sector should be at the avant-garde of the adoption of openness, peering and sharing - the cornerstones of the web 2.0 era. And yet, ironically, the private sector seems to be ahead of the game.

Withdrawing the claws from data: a new year's proposal for the private and development sectors

Now, here's a mash-up that got me really excited. Mapecos provides information on the environmental performance of more than 20,000 industrial facilities across the US. Interestingly, government data on toxic pollution for each facility are displayed side by side with the data provided by the facilities' managers themselves.

PR vs. reality, the malignant might say. The site, however, is designed to move beyond finger-pointing "to provide an even handed view of industrial environmental performance": a "natural experiment" with increasing access to information, as one of its founders put it.

Creating incentives to publish "hidden data" and combining data sets from different sources - it is this type of "natural experiments" that the development (and private) sector needs more of to increase transparency and citizens' empowerment.

Meditation for development?

If meditation is scientifically proven to increase the IQ, should governments interested in promoting socio-economic well-being invest in meditation rather than biotechnology?

This is apparently the type of questions that arise when you start applying futures thinking to development.

Dyslexics make for fine entrepreneurs

Thirty-five percent of entrepreneurs surveyed in a new study self-identified as dyslectic. As it turns out, this common disability can be good for business:

dyslexics were more likely than nondyslexics to delegate authority, to excel in oral communication and problem solving and were twice as likely to own two or more businesses

I say development, you say développement

Maybe it's because I am under the influence of Spoken Here, but one of the key messages coming out of the GK3 conference last week was the increasing importance of promoting local content and language to address the digital divide.

It is well known that out of the 6,000 languages spoken on the planet, only a tiny percentage is represented on the web. Perhaps less intuitive are the factors that preclude multilingual digitization of content.  They range from the problems of recognition of minority languages, the lack of local language computing capacity, through the plethora of internet governing bodies involved in encryption projects, to the lack of interface between linguistic and IT expertise.

History didn't help either. 

New planet in the World Bank universe

Our most requested databases: the Doing Business, Enterprise Surveys, Financial Indicators, Private Investment in Infrastructure Projects and the Privatization Database, can all now be browsed from a one convenient location - the Business Planet.

The filters allow for exploration by topic, region or a country.

A public/private partnership to the moon

The technologies are available, the savings obvious, yet consumers are slow in adopting energy efficient products. Speaking at the Bali Global Business day on the margins of the UN Climate Change conference, a Philips official wondered why two thirds of the world still uses old lighting technologies when switching to existing modern technology would represent a 40% saving in total lighting energy consumption.

The private sector is asking for a public/private partnership where governments implement stronger energy efficiency standards, including labeling, adopt greener public procurement requirements, and grant financial incentives.

In developing countries, investors' appetite for clean technology investment is also growing but private companies are facing additional obstacles: the risk perception, the lack of market research, the need to adapt technologies to the requirements of these markets. Again, a public/private partnership makes sense.

GEF and IFC launched today the Earth Fund which aims to give those businesses keen to invest in environmental technologies in developing countries that extra support they need to take the leap. The most exciting feature of the fund: a prize! The very same company that stimulated with a prize the launch of the first private rocketship in outer space, will manage the Earth Fund's prizes for innovative environmental technology.

Development in 3D

What do a community project in the Philippines and the U.S. Air Force have in common? An appreciation for the power of 3D modeling to visualize and manage information.

The project from the Philippines is based on Participatory 3D Modelling "aimed at facilitating grassroots participation in problem analysis and decision-making." One has to wonder whether providing communities with a chance to see the impact of future projects on their land would engage them.

And this is what the U.S. Air Force is up to, according to The Economist:

Last year Waterstone, a consultancy, assembled the geodata for 13 American air-force bases and wrapped them up in a modified version of NASA's World Wind geobrowser.

New ethanol - nothing corny about it

A solution to the food vs. fuel feud may be finally on the horizon. It comes from a close cousin of traditional ethanol - cellulosic ethanol. Unlike corn ethanol, it is uses feedstock that doesn't have alternative uses such as wheat straw, corn stover, grass, and wood chips. It's also cheap and abundant.

And though earlier this year many feared that cellulosic ethanol won't be able to commercially compete with corn ethanol, more and more companies are already sprouting up.

We are looking for experimental research in entrepreneurship

The 2007 World Bank Entrepreneuship Database finds significant relationships between entrepreneurial activity and the quality of the enabling environment. The bank and the Kauffman Foundation are now jointly offering funding of up to $35,000 for research projects that will study what contributes to greater entrepreneurship and formal sector participation.

Research proposals are due by January 15, 2008. A pre-conference is scheduled for fall 2008 and the main conference for 2009. Detailis are here.

Islamic car

Islamic banking is centered on the concept of sharing risk and one of its major distinguishing features is a ban on interest payments and speculation.

Exploring the differences beyond finance, The Economist has a story on Proton, the Malaysian carmaker, who toys with the idea of manufacturing an "Islamic" car:

As planned, [Proton's] "Islamic" car will feature a compass to indicate the direction of Mecca, a box in which to store a copy of the Koran and a compartment for a headscarf.

Waste: don't just take it away

Born out of a failed methane experiment comes a water-treatment system that uses 90 percent less energy than conventional sewage system and cost 50 percent less to operate. Dean Cameron – the creator of the Biolytix Water – harnessed worms, beetles and billions of microscopic organisms to turn human waste into water suitable for irrigation.

The low cost (a small version for four people could cost $175) and its minimal energy use hold a promise for 2.5 billion people around the world who can't afford proper sanitation. So far there are 3000 biotanks installed in homes and businesses across the Pacific.

One person's trash is other person's fuel

"Everybody is dealing with a byproduct they don't want" says Arnold Klann, the CEO of BlueFire, a California company which uses acid to convert organic material into fuel.

His firm is one of many in a race to perfect the technology to transform not only traditional biomass, but even old tires or human waste, into fuel.

Rickshaw bank - a vehicle for access to finance

Today's Wall Street Journal has a story of Pradip Kumar Sarmah, an entrepreneur, who created a credit program that helps some of India's eight million rickshaw drivers own their vehicles.

Negroponte's laptops: buy two, get one

The two-week exclusive sale of the original low-cost computer in the U.S. and Canada has begun. For $399, one computer will be sent to a child in a developing country and one to the buyer.

Bonus: T-mobile will throw in a full year of free Wi-Fi access.

Does money = happiness?

Legatum Institute - the creator of the intriguing 2007 Prosperity Index, a new measure based on 40 years of available data on material wealth and life satisfaction – joined MIT to build on the idea of bottom-up entrepreneurship and commercialization of new enterprise-based technologies.

The new Center hopes to turn out 30 for-profit companies a year for the next 10 years. The deadline for fellowship applications is January 31, 2008.