< “It's about women helping women because it is not going to happen if we wait for the men in these countries to do something. They just get another wife. It's no big deal for them.” [...]
It's hard to see how the Freedom from Fistula Foundation could emulate the commercial success of the orphanage, but Gloag's compassionate capitalism has found a way. While they are in hospital, the women are given a basic education and taught how to sew and use a mobile phone.

“We give each of them a mobile phone and when they leave hospital, they become the phone-booth for their village,” says Gloag. “The first $40 they make, they pay us back for the phone and we buy the next one. Then they make a profit. We basically give them a business.” Gloag sees women as the key to change in Africa.

Women are making a difference indeed and not just in Africa. A women’s cooperative in Paraguay has formed to purchase food in bulk thereby stretching their household budgets as prices rise. Unemployed Bahraini women will be trained to set up small entreprenuerial ventures as fashion designers and seamstresses after numerous textile firms went redundant in the recent past. Meanwhile in Ghana, plans are in place to launch a women run bank for rural farmers, in sub Saharan Africa 80% of the food is grown by women but they have access to only 7% of the assistance and 10% of the land.

Rising costs of fuel and energy are driving mobile service operators to seek sustainable solutions across emerging markets as mobile phones increasingly become a critical part of the regional infrastructure. Ericsson, Motorola and Grameenphone are some of the companies with established pilot programs in countries like Namibia, Bangladesh and Indonesia while individuals like the ‘Mad Austrian’ demonstrate the endurance of their vision in South Africa.

Numbers and growth are an overwhelming part of the conversation around the developing world and emerging markets. Whether its FON founder Martin Varsavsky’s dreams of scaling up his subscriber base in order to create a wireless worldwide web or Alan Moore and Tomi Ahonen’s attempt to put the 3 billion or so mobile users around the world into context, the fact remains that emerging markets like the Middle East and Africa will be the engines of growth in the future.

Expanding into these markets, however, will not be easy as developing nations pose their own challenges as firms like Vodafone and Motorola are discovering. Entreprenuers in Egypt are hampered by culture and lack of capital even as South African’s deal with their nation’s current meltdown. But China seems undaunted as this Fast Company special report seems to say. A snippet to peek at the secret of their apparently undigestable success?

“Let China sleep,” Napoleon famously remarked, “for when she awakes, she will shake the world.” Today, China is not only roused, she is devouring the world for breakfast. In just a few years, it has become the world’s top consumer of timber — as well as zinc (with 30% of global demand), iron and steel (27%), lead (25%), aluminum (23%), and copper (22%), along with nickel, tin, coal, cotton, and rubber. The entire sub-Sahara currently uses one-twentieth the amount of steel China does. And although China is the planet’s second-biggest consumer of oil, behind the United States, it’s gaining fast.

This must be an example of the rise of the rest that Fareed Zakaria talks about in his much acclaimed new book, The Post American world. For as China bans plastic bags to protect her environment, Middle Eastern consumers are enamoured with cutting edge home appliances. Palestinian girls accept mobile phones from prospective male friends and the Ethiopians decide to license their coffee to Starbucks. Even the “dollar a day” limit of the international poverty line has been upgraded to a buck and a quarter. Surely signs of triumph of the entrepreneurial spirit, as articulated in the book “Lessons from the Poor” (synopsis)?

Researcher Carolyn Wei’s literature review found that most studies of cell phones’ influence on youth culture have taken place in the West, while studies elsewhere focus on purely economic uses, so she undertook a study of the role of the mobile phone in facilitating and maintaining romantic relationships in Bangalore, India. Noting this snippet,

“What Carolyn has done it take this really interesting element of youth culture — courtship — and identified how mobile phones interact with those pre-existing patterns of interaction,” Kolko said. “Technology doesn’t trump culture, it doesn’t change culture on its own, but it is a force that pushes against cultural patterns.”

we take you on a whirlwind tour of the role of the mobile phone in courtship among Palestinian teenagers, Bahraini youth, Saudi Arabian romantics as well as Egyptian singles. All is not roses however, as this young Kurdish lady discovered, but still women in conservative cultures try to learn all they can to maintain a life of dignity and respect.

EMweekly (previous editions) is a compilation on Emerging Markets news by Niti Bhan and David Tait (of the Emerging Futures Lab).

EMweekly focuses on a wide ranging selection of news, links and articles as well as analysis and in-depth stories from the developing world. You can read it on Putting People First, or receive the EMweekly via rss or email.

The emerging market news update reflects Experientia’s extended research and experience design capabilities in emerging consumer markets in developing nations such as in Sub Saharan Africa, South and South East Asia etc.

This new offering is founded upon a recent structural collaboration between Experientia and three emerging market specialists — Niti Bhan (based in Singapore), Claude Martin (based in France), and David Tait (based in South Africa) — and an extensive research project in Africa we just completed for a major technology company.