Credible Future - Can Micro Loans Make a Macro Difference?

Credit: Emilio Manjón

DEVELOPMENT-GUATEMALA: Fair Trade Begins to Bear Fruit

By IPS Correspondents
The living and working conditions of thousands of small farmers in Guatemala have seen much improvement since they joined the "fair trade" system, which sets new rules for the game in an otherwise difficult global market.

MIGRATION-BOLIVIA: How to Harness Growing Remittances

By IPS Correspondents
Like footballers in Argentina, emigrants start out young, Abdón Linares likes to say about his home province in central Bolivia, where the economy has come to depend heavily on expatriate remittances.

ENVIRONMENT: "Green Nobel" for Fighting Extractive Industries, Defending Wildlife

By Eli Clifton
The common denominator of all six winners of this year's Goldman Prize, often referred to as the "Green Nobel", is their effectiveness in fighting big fights to protect the environment despite their relative anonymity.

TRADE-AFRICA: Microfinance Tackles AIDS Head On

By IPS Correspondents
With two-thirds of the world's HIV/AIDS victims living in sub-Saharan Africa, sickness and death is too often a part of doing business in the region. But now microfinance institutions have found ways to reduce financial risk while attacking new infections.

DEVELOPMENT: Eat the Right Chocolate to Fight Poverty

By IPS Correspondents
When schoolchildren in Rome tuck into a banana or a chocolate bar, they are making a real difference to families in poor countries.

TRADE-KENYA: Shopping With a Clean Conscience

By Stephanie Nieuwoudt
It is early morning and the Undugu Fair Trade Shop, tucked away in a suburban shopping centre in Nairobi, is bustling. Apart from the few locals, there are the usual tourists, recognizable from their safari outfits: khaki shirts and trousers and the obligatory hat worn even when indoors.

JAPAN: Fair Trade Concept Starts to Sell

By Suvendrini Kakuchi
When Sonoko Iwasa, started her tiny shop selling ‘fair trade’ goods in Mitaka, a decade ago, she was in for a long struggle to survive in a wealthy, traditional neighbourhood which had little understanding of global issues, let alone marginalised communities in the developing South.

TECHNOLOGY-AFRICA: A Rural-Urban Digital Divide Challenges Women

By IPS Correspondents
Janet Malika owes her success to the little gadget that is her cell phone. Formerly a struggling food hawker in the Kenyan capital of Nairobi, she has become a cafeteria owner since acquiring the device about five years ago, and using it to conduct business.

COTE D’IVOIRE: Rural Women in Need of a Helping Hand

By IPS Correspondents
From morning, Thérèse Allangba starts checking on members of the Cooperative of Women Farmers of Marahoué (Coopérative des femmes exploitantes agricoles de la Marahoué, COOFEEAMA), based in Bouaflé, capital of the Ivorian region of Marahoué. These women work in teams of five to supply leading markets with food.

MIGRATION-PORTUGAL: Starting a New Life With Microcredit

By Mario de Queiroz
Starting one's own business on borrowed money is no easy task in Portugal for an unemployed or retired person, or one lacking advanced professional qualifications, even if the loan is small and payable in instalments.

DEVELOPMENT-BENIN: A Blow Against Poverty

By IPS Correspondents
Benin is hoping that a five-year, multi-million-dollar grant from the United States under the auspices of the Millennium Challenge Account (MCA) will finance development projects to reduce poverty, notably through resolving land ownership and credit problems.

DEVELOPMENT: Microcredit Not Just For “Poor” Countries

By Enrique Gili
In a conservative industry focused on the bottom line, Patti Mason doesn't sound like your ordinary bank president. The former airline accountant turned banker is animated while discussing the merits of commerce as a form of economic empowerment.

DEVELOPMENT: Microcredit Summit Hopes to Kickstart MDGs

By Haider Rizvi
Hundreds of financial experts and activists are due to gather in the Canadian city of Halifax next weekend to explore new ways of helping the world's rural poor with small business loans.

ASIA: Workers’ Remittances as Development Funds?

By Marwaan Macan-Markar
Migrant rights activists are eyeing a regional conference starting here Monday to secure more protection for the frequently victimised overseas labour force. It comes as governments here, as elsewhere, are warming up to convert the millions being sent home by migrant workers for local development programmes.

CHINA: For Microcredit to Work Gov’t Must Butt Out – Yunus

By IPS Correspondents
Celebrating the success of microfinance as an antidote to poverty has raised some uncomfortable questions here over China's reluctance to allow civil society a bigger role in addressing tough social issues.

DEVELOPMENT-AFRICA: Few “Positions Vacant” for the Young

By IPS Correspondents
A billion young people aged 15 to 24 unemployed, 85 percent of them in developing countries - with several hundred million more expected to enter the job market by the end of the decade: grim statistics indeed. However, a recent conference offered some ideas as to how they could be addressed.

DEVELOPMENT: Remittances Do More Than Investments

By Sanjay Suri
The British are not investing a great deal in the developing world, but remittances from Britain are emerging as a growing counter to poverty, a new survey shows.

COLOMBIA: Displaced Women Build New Lives, Brick by Brick

By IPS Correspondents
"The City of Women", in the northern Colombian municipality of Turbaco, 11 kilometres from the fortified walls of this tourist resort city, bears no resemblance to Federico Fellini's 1980 film by the same name, or to the similarly dubbed Buenos Aires neighbourhood of Puerto Madero, where almost all the streets and public spaces are named for famous women.

VENEZUELA: Gov’t Distributes Petrodollars Through Booming Cooperative Movement

By Humberto Márquez
Cooperatives in Venezuela, which are mushrooming at a rate of over 100 a day, have become a mechanism through which the government is distributing windfall oil profits to the people.

EGYPT: Journalists Challenge New Press Law

By Adam Morrow
Many journalists and opposition leaders are opposing a new law approved by parliament this week. They say the law fails to protect editors and reporters from imprisonment for so-called press violations.

BOLIVIA: Ambitious Development Plan Bound by Status Quo

By Franz Chávez
The development targets set by President Evo Morales - which aim to reduce extreme poverty 7.5 percent by the end of his term in 2011 - may miss their mark, say experts.
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