My Beauty Best Teacher

Aneel G. Karnani counters(PDF) C. K Prahalad's assertion about a fortune at the bottom of the pyramid:

We argue for the need to view the poor primarily as producers, not as consumers. Rather than emphasizing selling to the poor, we should emphasize buying from the poor. By far the best way to alleviate poverty is to raise the income of the poor. Even though the BOP proposition conceptually focuses on the poor as consumers, it sometimes cites examples of successful organizations that treat the poor primarily as
producers... In discussing solutions to poverty, it is useful to conceptually separate the role of the poor as consumers and producers...The poor often sell their products and services into inefficient markets and do not capture the full value of their output. Any attempt to improve the efficiency of these markets will raise the income of the poor.

Aneel Karnani chimes in on the debate regarding the insufficiency of Microfinance:

My analysis of the macroeconomic data suggests that although microcredit yields some noneconomic benefits, it does not significantly alleviate poverty. Indeed, in some instances microcredit makes life at the bottom of the pyramid worse. Contrary to the hype about microcredit, the best way to eradicate poverty is to create jobs and to increase worker productivity.
To understand why creating jobs, not offering microcredit, is the better solution to alleviating poverty, consider these two alternative scenarios: (1) A microfinancier lends $200 to each of 500 women so that each can buy a sewing machine and set up her own sewing microenterprise, or (2) a traditional financier lends $100,000 to one savvy entrepreneur and helps her set up a garment manufacturing business that employs 500 people. In the first case, the women must make enough money to pay off their usually high-interest loans while competing with each other in exactly the same market niche. Meanwhile the garment manufacturing business can exploit economies of scale and use modern manufacturing processes and organizational techniques to enrich not only its owners, but also its workers. As these scenarios illustrate, a surer way to ending poverty is to create jobs and to increase worker productivity, rather than investing in microfinance...[continue reading]

Jen Brea points us to a post covering a lawsuit aimed at francophone kleptocrats
From NextBillion Aneel Karnani writes about "romanticising poverty".
Marguerite Barankitse wins a prize for her work with child victims of ethnic strife via African Loft
Friends of Ethiopia highlights a video on Amharic and Tigrigna. Are they the first written languages of commerce?