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see also:  informal economy

B.O.P. marketing

Per Prahalad:

There is an invisible market waiting at the bottom of the world economic pyramid - a market of 5 billion people who live on less than $2 a day. They are invisible to most large companies because few executives can conceive of a market among people that poor. Businesspeople think that the poor cannot afford their products and services, and also assume, naively, that the poor have no use for advanced and emerging technology. In fact, selling to the poor is a uniquely powerful way to achieve breakthroughs in products and management practices: The bottom of the economic pyramid is a sandbox for innovation. Some rules of the game for selling to poor are: 1. The poor cannot be Wal-Martized. 2. Being poor does not mean being irresponsible. 3. The poor hunger for technology

Why is Economic Development important?

facts:  4 billion out of 6 billion people on the planet are poor.  50% of them (2 billion people) live on less than $1 a day.   Moving these people up the economic pyramid is not just a moral issue, but its also an economic one.  There is a massive potential market of consumers waiting to be tapped.  See our discussion on economic development for more....

Recommended Reading

1.  Hernando de Soto: "The other path":  Hernando De Soto describes the forces that keep people dependent on underground economies: the bureaucratic barriers to legal property ownership and the lack of legal structures that recognize and encourage ownership of assets. It is exactly these forces, de Soto argues, that prevent houses, land, and machines from functioning as capital does in the West--as assets that can be leveraged to create more capital. Under the Fujimori government, de Soto's Institute for Liberty and Democracy wrote dozens of laws to promote property rights and bring people out of the informal economy and into the legitimate one. The result was not only an economic boon for Peru but also the defeat of the Shining Path, the terrorist movement and black-market force that was then threatening to take over the Peruvian government. In a new preface, de Soto relates his work to the present moment, making the connection between the Shining Path in the 1980's and the Taliban today.

2. CK Prahalad: "fortune at the bottom of the pyramid"; 

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