I've been following Lenovo for BusinessWeek ever since it announced its purchase of IBM's PC business back in December of 2004. It's a fascinating story: China's first Western-style company attempts to become a powerful global brand. I wrote a bunch...

In the Cairo airport, waiting for a flight back to New York City at the end of my 24-day swing through UAE, Bangladesh, India, Tanzania, and Egypt, it’s impossible not to reflect back on the path I have traveled. The...

Helmy Abouleish, at the wheel of his black Range Rover, swung past the main street of Belbis, the small city that lies across a canal from his company’s 300-acre farm in the desert near Egypt’s Nile River delta. He pointed...

Ever since Bill Gates announced a $47 million grant to TechnoServe at the World Economic Forum in Davos in January, I’ve been wondering what the organization is up to that would warrant such a big check. I had a chance...

Yesterday and today I had my first encounters with Cricetomys Gambianus, aka the African Giant Pouched Rat. Rats used to give me the creeps, so I was stand-offish at first. But these rats grew on me after I saw them...

If there are a million NGOs in India, there must be another million in Africa. Manka’s (see previous posting) mom, Dr.Lucy Nkya, started one called Faraja Trust Fund in 1981. While Faraja (comfort, in Swahili) isn’t very large, with just...

A surprise day of rest, and, lucky me, I land in the New Acropol Hotel in Morogoro, Tanzania. The ride in from the airport in Dar es Salaam makes for a stark contrast with India. Here, drivers wear seatbelts, stay...

It is estimated that there are more than one million non-governmental organizations (NGOs, in NGO parlance) in India. Some of them are run by Western do-gooders, but many are locally made. Most start off earnestly. Taken as a whole, there...

Tralance Addy knows all too well what can happen to people if they run afoul of dirty water. When his company, WaterHealth International, was shooting a promotional video for its water purification system for poor people in rural villages, he...

There was a problem with the Monsoon Wedding Reception post, but it's fixed now. So please check it out....

One of the most critical problems for most of the developing world is the shortage of good drinking water. WaterHealth International, a California-based company, aims to do something about that. It builds and installs water purification systems in rural villages...

What happens when you give a bunch of kids in remote Indian villages digital video cameras and ask them to chronicle their lives and those of their neighbors? Some amazing work. I got a quick peek at a couple of...

The way I found my way to the wedding reception was to tell the auto rickshaw driver that I wanted to go to the Venkatramana Theatre in Kachiguda. Then I looked across the street for Balajirathaniel Sweet House. Nearby, I...

I’ve got a thing about turning points. Somebody thinks or sees things one way, and then something happens and all of a sudden he decides to do something else entirely, or to do some old thing in a new way....

Until three years ago, there was no 911 emergency service in India. Ramalinga Raju, chairman and founder of Satyam Computer, one of the country’s largest IT outsourcing firms, decided to change that. He set up the Emergency Medical Research Institute...

In an effort to head off a potential crisis in the fast-expanding micro-finance industry, its leaders are adopting global truth-in-lending standards and creating a system for comparing loan terms offered by competing lenders. To manage the effort, a new self-monitoring...

I’m a religious omnivore, with interest in Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism, Judaism, Islam, and Voodoo. (My true religion, the one I really believe in, is Progressivism, which I define as living life in a way that improves the lives of humans...

When Gurcharan Das took early retirement as the CEO of Procter & Gamble India at age 50 in 1995, he traveled around India to get in touch with his country. What he found is that the culture was being transformed....

Today was my first day in Hyderabad, India, and it was a full one. I was up at 4 a.m. for a ride about 150 kilometers out in the countryside to visit villages targeted by SKS Microfinance, the fastest-growing micro-credit...

Well, Muhammad Yunus has his Peace Prize, and now a Hollywood movie may be coming close behind. It turned out that a couple of the guests at the Pacific Inn Hotel in Dhaka, where I stayed while reporting about the...