About the authors

Allen L. Hammond is Vice President for Innovation and Special Projects at the World Resources Institute. His responsibilities include institute-wide leadership in Internet strategy and digital technologies and development of new initiatives. Dr. Hammond is also Director of WRI\'s Development Through Enterprise project and works on private sector development strategies with foundations, development agencies, and a number of major corporations. He is the author of Which World?: Scenarios for the 21st Century, a book focused on long-term sustainability issues and published by Island Press in May 1998. Dr. Hammond holds degrees from Stanford University and Harvard University in engineering and applied mathematics.

William J. Kramer is Deputy Director of the Development Through Enterprise project. Bill founded The Knowledge Initiative, Inc., a non-profit organization working on issues of knowledge and development. His work in the non-profit arena follows a 30-year career as an entrepreneur in the book industry and in other arenas. He founded, and remains president of, Kramerbooks & Afterwords, the original bookstore/café, in Washington, D.C. He was more recently a principal in several companies that served colleges and universities with web-based applications for campuses, including e-procurement, digital printing and publishing, and course management tools. As a consultant, Bill has worked with global companies, NGOs, and think tanks. Bill is the author of a guidebook to Washington, DC, has presented numerous addresses and papers at professional conferences over the years.

Robert S. Katz is a Research Analyst with the Development Through Enterprise project. Rob researches, conducts training, and writes about "base of the pyramid" business approaches to poverty. He is the co-founder and editor of www.NextBillion.net, a web site and blog about enterprise and development. He has consulted with a number of Fortune 500 corporations on BOP strategy, and has done scenario work for institutions such as the XPRIZE Foundation and the Institute for the Future, among others. Rob is also an active contributor to Worldchanging: Another World Is Here, an online magazine/blog and offline book about tools, models, and ideas to build a better future. He holds a B.A. in Political Economy from Georgetown University.

Julia T. Tran is a Research Analyst with the Development Through Enterprise project. Her primary areas of interest include private sector healthcare delivery in low-income markets, and business strategies that address both environmental and economic development imperatives. She is a contributor to the NextBillion.net website, editor of the What Works series of business case studies published by DTE, and program coordinator of DTE\'s activities. Prior to joining WRI in 2005, she worked in software training at IBM as an education coordinator. She is a graduate of the University of California, Berkeley, in English Literature.

Courtland Walker is a Research Assistant with the Development Through Enterprise project. As a principal analyst of household survey data for The Next 4 Billion report, he has studied market structure and sector specific spending patterns in low-income, "base of the pyramid," populations. He contributed original analysis to the Market of the Majority report prepared for the Inter-American Development Bank\'s " Opportunity for the Majority" initiative and assisted in standardization of national household survey datasets as part of the World Bank\'s International Comparison Program. He is also a contributor to NextBillion.net. Courtland earned a B.A. in Economics from Harvard College.

Acknowledgments

This report owes its existence to many people and institutions, but the underlying research project would not have happened without the early, enthusiastic, and sustained support of Donald F. Terry, manager of the Multilateral Investment Fund of the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB). Through Don and other IDB colleagues, the IDB made a substantive contribution to the development of this report.

Luis Alberto Moreno, president of the IDB, provided important leadership. Under his guidance the IDB, through its Opportunity for the Majority initiative, became the first major international financial institution to incorporate a focus on the base of the economic pyramid (BOP) into new program strategies. We gratefully acknowledge the IDB for making this research a cornerstone of its "Building Opportunity for the Majority" conference in June 2006, where preliminary research results for Latin America and the Caribbean were first publicly presented.

The International Finance Corporation (IFC) stepped in to provide the major funding and to collaborate in the research. Michael Klein, vice president for financial and private sector development jointly for the World Bank and IFC as well as chief economist, IFC, immediately recognized its potential, agreed to a partnership, and became the project’s chief advocate. We are grateful to IFC not only for its financial support but also for its substantive engagement with the project, including access to data, help with developing the methodology, and thoughtful advice in shaping the editorial content. Penelope Brook and Facundo Martin have been our caring and efficient task managers at IFC, making the partnership a uniquely effective one.

The research data structures are derived from the work of Branko Milanovic, lead economist with the World Bank’s Research Department, and Olivier Dupriez, senior statistician and economist with the World Bank’s Development Data Group. We are indebted to both for their gracious permission to use their research, much of which has not been previously published. They provided keen insights into the data and guidance on how best to understand and present them.

We would also like to thank the following people for their research assistance:

IFC: Tefera Bekele and Gouthami Padam

IDB: Julio Guzman, Pavel Luengas-Sierra, Jose Antonia Mejia, Karen Mokate, and Jorge Ugaz

We appreciate and acknowledge the advice of the following reviewers:

WRI: Alex Acs, Jennie Hommel, David Jhirad, Christian Layke, Smita Nakhooda, Daniel Prager, Clayton Rigdon, and Fred Wellington

IFC/World Bank: Alex Preker, Christine Zhen-Wei Quiang, Dilip Ratha, and Mark Williams

External: Robert Annibale (Citigroup), Louis Boorstin (Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation), Christine Eibs Singer (E+Co), Jeffery Galinovsky (Intel), Kurt Hoffman (Shell Foundation), Beth Jenkins (John F. Kennedy School of Government), Christopher Jennings (IDB), Alain Mathys (Suez), Dominic Montagu (University of California, Berkeley), Jane Nelson (John F. Kennedy School of Government), C. K. Prahalad (University of Michigan), James Wells (Wellspring Consulting), Christopher West (Shell Foundation), and David Wheeler (York University)

For general advice we would like to thank:

IDB: Ana-Mita Betancourt, Suzanne Duryea, Nohra Rey de Marulanda, and Daniel Shepherd

IFC/World Bank: Doug Barnes, Kathleen Beegle, Paolo Belli, Robert Buckley, Marinela Dado, Vivien Foster, Jed Friedman, Elena Gagieva-Petrova, Matthew Gamser, Nadine Shamounki Ghannam, Iva Ilieva Hamel, April Harding, Martin Holtmann, Ada Karina Izaguirre, R. Mukami Kariuki, Elizabeth Littlefield, Alain Locussol, Emmett Moriarty, Vincent Palmade, Andrea Ryan-Rizvi, Prem Sangraula, Katherine Scott, Suzanne Smith, Kees van der Meer, and Patricia Veevers-Carter.

External: Brian Richardson (Wizzit)

Design: Gerry Quinn and Lloyd Greenberg, Quinn Design, Washington, DC

Copyediting: Alison Strong