By Aishwarya Lakshmi Ratan Over the past two decades, two of the Government of India’s flagship programmes to enable rural development have been the National Rural Livelihoods Mission and Project (NRLM/NRLP) and the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act and Scheme (NREGA/NREGS), both of which enable rural income generation through local institutional structures and […]

By Surili Sheth and Michael Walton This paper explores a classic development problem: the “missing middle” between top-down action by the formal government and private sectors and the activities of grassroots organizations. It focuses on one aspect of this – the challenges faced by grassroots and community-based organizations in scaling up, specifically scaling up enterprise […]

By Isabel Guerrero and Michael Walton This article outlines an analytic framework around the scaling up of small organizations at the Base of the Pyramid. This includes small-scale, informal firms, grassroots organizations working for the poor as well as social entrepreneurs looking to provide social goods. There are different ways of scaling up: (1) through […]

By Isabel Guerrero & Sandra Naranjo This article was originally published in Spanish in Semana Económica. View the original The pace of technological innovation is accelerating geometrically and it seems that we are rapidly reaching the world of the Jetsons. Cars that do not need drivers, robots that obey our orders and turn on the music […]

By Larry Cooley & Isabel Guerrero At one end of the “supply chain”, support for innovation enjoys robust funding, strong institutions, and widespread success witnessed in the proliferation of innovation hubs and grand challenges. At the other end of the chain, markets and governments have structures and funding models that allow them to deliver goods […]