Published April 13, the 2007 Global Monitoring Report on the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) assesses the contributions of developing countries, developed countries, and international financial institutions toward meeting universally agreed development commitments. Fourth in a series of annual reports leading up to 2015, this year's report reviews key developments of the past year, emerging priorities, and an assessment of performance drawing on numerous indicators.

A step by step guide to how you can be part of the energy [r]evolution. Full of interesting facts, educational graphics, and practical steps people can take to reduce their climate change pollution.

We can – and must – cut CO2 emissions by 50 percent by the year 2050. The industrial countries will have to cut theirs by as much as 80 percent. If we do this, we can keep the rise in global temperature below the 2 degrees Celsius mark. Scientists agree that this is essential if we are to prevent the climate from getting completely out of control.

Nearly half of the planet's population subsists on $2 a day or less. What role should business play as the world confronts what may be the most explosive socioeconomic challenge of the new century?

(HBS)

Rivers on every continent are drying out, threatening severe water shortages, according to a new WWF report.

The report, World's Top Rivers at Risk, released ahead of World Water Day (22 March), lists the top ten rivers that are fast dying as a result of climate change, pollution and dams.

“All the rivers in the report symbolize the current freshwater crisis, which we have been signalling for years," says WWF Global Freshwater Programme Director Jamie Pittock.

"Poor planning and inadequate protection of natural areas mean we can no longer assume that water will flow forever. Like the climate change crisis, which now has the attention of business and government, we want leaders to take notice of the emergency facing freshwater now not later.”

Five of the ten rivers listed in the report are in Asia alone. They are the Yangtze, Mekong, Salween, Ganges and Indus. Europe’s Danube, the Americas’ La Plata and Rio Grande/Rio Bravo, Africa’s Nile-Lake Victoria and Australia’s Murray-Darling also make the list.

China in 2007 is the world’s largest technocracy: a country ruled by scientists and engineers who believe in the power of technology to deliver social and economic progress. Right now, the country is at an early stage in the most ambitious programme of research investment since John F Kennedy embarked on the race to the moon. But statistics fail to capture the raw power of the changes that are under way, and the potential for Chinese science and innovation to head in new and surprising directions.

Is China on track to become the world’s next science superpower? At the same time as it benefits from this dizzying momentum, China faces economic, social and environmental challenges on an unprecedented scale. To overcome these, investment in the hardware of innovation will need to be accompanied by a stronger focus on the ‘software’ of creativity, ethics and research cultures. And China’s drive for ‘independent innovation’ will need to go hand-in-hand with more open and plural forms of ‘cosmopolitan innovation’.

With the world facing a water crisis, it is becoming increasingly clear that businesses can play an important role in developing approaches that reduce consumption and improve distribution of this precious resource.

The private sector is a major user of water in its supply chains and it needs to manage its own footprint effectively, in order to ensure that its impact becomes part of the wider solution rather than the problem. Access to water is critical to sustainability of local communities, as well as to the fulfilment of the Millennium Development Goals.

But as countries and communities become water stressed through climate change, poor conservation and management of water resources, public concern over water scarcity is growing rapidly. Experts believe that if water is not better managed, conflicts over supply are likely to increase.

To coincide with World Water Day the Financial Times, in association with IBLF, has produced a special report on Business and Water, examining how businesses can help tackle the global water crisis. Read the report at www.ft.com/reports/water2007

Four billion people who live in relative poverty have purchasing power representing a $5 trillion market, according to a new report released today by IFC, the private sector arm of the World Bank Group, and World Resources Institute.

The report, The Next 4 Billion: Market Size and Business Strategy at the Base of the Pyramid, for the first time measures the size of markets at the base of the economic pyramid using income and expenditure data from household surveys. The analysis is complemented by an overview of business strategies from successful enterprises operating in these markets.

Accurate data on market potential provides a foundation for private sector engagement that can drive down what the report calls the "BOP penalty," where poorer people often encounter goods and services that are more expensive, of low quality, or difficult or impossible to access. The report seeks to help businesses think more creatively about new business models that meet the needs of these underserved markets.

According to the report, base of the pyramid markets are often rural, underserved, and dominated by the informal economy, and as a result are relatively inefficient and uncompetitive. As greater numbers of formal firms compete to redress the BOP penalty, the poor experience a direct increase in quality of life. As the report describes through business case studies and data, the penetration of mobile telephony into these markets is a classic example of how competition can drive such improvements.

"The report backs up the calls for broader business engagement with the base of the pyramid, stressing the need for the private sector to play a greater role in development," said Michael Klein, World Bank/IFC Vice President for Financial and Private Sector Development and IFC Chief Economist. "The report also highlights the need for governments to pick up the pace of reforms to the operating and regulatory environment, so that it becomes easier to do business," he added.

In its geographic analysis, The Next 4 Billion finds that the Asian BOP market (including the Middle East) is by far the largest, with 2.86 billion people and a total income of $3.47 trillion, constituting 83% of the region's total population and 42% of the its aggregate purchasing power.

Eastern Europe's $458 billion BOP market includes 254 million people, 64% of the region's population, with 36% of aggregate purchasing power.

In Latin America the BOP market of $509 billion includes 360 million people, representing 70% of the region's population but only 28% of aggregate purchasing power, a smaller share than in other developing regions.

In Africa, the BOP market is $429 billion, but it represents 71% of aggregate purchasing power in this region. The African BOP includes 486 million people-95% of the region's surveyed population.

The report also characterizes the base of the pyramid markets by sector. Sector markets for 4 billion consumers range from those that are relatively small, such as water ($20 billion) and information and communication technologies ($51 billion), to medium-scale markets such as health ($158 billion), transportation ($179 billion), housing ($332 billion), and energy ($433 billion), to truly large markets, such as food ($2,895 billion).

"This report shows how critical it is to focus on the BOP in all its dimensions," said Jonathan Lash, president of the World Resources Institute. "The BOP wins when brought into the formal economy. Businesses win when they pay attention to the needs of the BOP markets. The world wins when environmental sustainability, transparency, and equity are as deeply embedded in BOP growth strategies as the drive for profits. This report lights the path to sustainable business engagement with the BOP."

The empirical profile of the base of the pyramid in the analysis substantially extends previous analyses by C.K. Prahalad, Stuart Hart and other experts by offering a detailed economic portrait of BOP markets. Data are given by income segment, urban/rural location, economic sector, country and region.

Some striking patterns emerge from the data. More than half of BOP health care spending, for example, is for pharmaceuticals. As incomes rise, the share of household spending for food declines, while the share of spending for transportation and for phone and Internet access rises sharply. Access to electricity is universal in Eastern Europe and high for most BOP households in Asia and the Latin America region, but quite low for Africa. For all regions except Eastern Europe, firewood is the dominant cooking fuel for the lower-income segments in the BOP, while propane or other modern fuels dominate higher BOP income segments and urban areas.

Bangladeshi villagers sharing cell phones helped build what is now a thriving company with more than $200 million in annual profits. But what is the lesson for the rest of the world? This is a question author Nicholas P. Sullivan addresses in his tale of a new kind of entrepreneur, Iqbal Quadir, the visionary and catalyst behind the creation of GrameenPhone in Bangladesh.

GrameenPhone—a partnership between Norway’s Telenor and Grameen Bank, co-winner of the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize—defines a new approach to building business opportunities in the developing world. You Can Hear Me Now offers a compelling account of what Sullivan calls the external combustion engine —a combination of forces that is sparking economic growth and lifting people out of poverty in countries long dominated by aid-dependent governments. The “engine” comprises three forces: information technology, imported by native entrepreneurs trained in the west, backed by foreign investors.

GrameenPhone’s successful effort to provide universal telephony in a country that had virtually no phones, using microloans generated by Muhammad Yunus, co-winner of the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize, confirms the power of bottom-up development, which is creating millions of income opportunities for the rural poor and billions of dollars in national income. With similar success stories in other poor countries—such as those of Celtel, MTN, and Vodacom in sub-Saharan africa, and of Globe Telecom and Smart Communications in the Philippines—cell phones are spreading like wildfire across the South and are helping to bridge the digital divide. You Can Hear Me Now describes an inclusive capitalism that engages and enables many of the three billion people living on $1 a day, at the base of the economic pyramid.

Openness and free information sharing amongst scientists are supposed to be core norms of the scientific community. However, many studies have shown that these norms are not universally followed. Lack of openness and transparency means that scientific problem solving is constrained to a few scientists who work in secret and who typically fail to leverage the entire accumulation of scientific knowledge available. We present evidence of the efficacy of problem solving when disclosing problem information. The method's application to 166 discrete scientific problems from the research laboratories of 26 firms is illustrated. Problems were disclosed to over 80,000 independent scientists from over 150 countries. We show that disclosure of problem information to a large group of outside solvers is an effective means of solving scientific problems. The approach solved one-third of a sample of problems that large and well-known R&D-intensive firms had been unsuccessful in solving internally. Problem-solving success was found to be associated with the ability to attract specialized solvers with range of diverse scientific interests. Furthermore, successful solvers solved problems at the boundary or outside of their fields of expertise, indicating a transfer of knowledge from one field to others.
HBS Working Paper Number: 07-050

The private sector can create new opportunities for business expansion and help progress towards the Millennium Development Goals by tackling the malnutrition crisis, according to a new report by IBLF, The Conference Board and Harvard University, with support from the World Bank Institute and the Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition.

Malnutrition is one of the world's most serious health problems and, according to the World Bank, investments in proven technologies and interventions to tackle malnutrition potentially offer very high economic returns.

However the international community and governments in most developing countries have failed to tackle nutrition over the past few decades.

The new report, Business as a Partner in Overcoming Malnutrition: An Agenda for Action, focuses on the role of the private sector as a key partner in this challenge.

The report has four clear messages:

1. Tackling nutrition should be a much higher priority for leaders everywhere
2. Proven solutions already exist and need to be replicated and scaled
3. The private sector can be a valuable partner
4. Institutional innovations and partnerships are crucial

The report finds that there is a clear business case for acting to tackle malnutrition. Fortified foods provide new opportunities for value addition, and economies of scale will lower prices and reach new customers. In addition, raising product quality will stimulate competition and trade.

The report draws examples from companies including Cargill, Sodexho and Unilever to demonstrate how the malnutrition crisis can be tackled. The benefits of collective action, through initiatives such as The Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition, are also discussed as a mechanism for companies to leverage their individual contributions, share lessons and increase their impact.