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How Can Development Finance Institutions Help Unleash Brazil's Investment Potential in Infrastructure?
How Can Development Finance Institutions Help Unleash Brazil's Investment Potential in Infrastructure?

To unleash investments, Brazil’s billionaire infrastructure gap needs more than one strategic player providing innovative solutions.

Why Our Region Needs More Gender Bonds
Why Our Region Needs More Gender Bonds

Latin America is not yet late to join the nascent gender bond market. The timing is just right. These bonds also empower women economically and socially without sacrificing profitability.

Five considerations for understanding the importance of the manufacturing sector
Five considerations for understanding the importance of the manufacturing sector

I landed on Monday, September 3rd, 2018, at the Port-au-Prince international airport in Haiti, completing a milestone that had begun on June 16th, 2004, in my native Costa Rica: visiting each of the 26 borrowing member countries of the IDB Group, promoting the development of Latin America and the Caribbean.

How cattle ranchers can profit from planting trees
How cattle ranchers can profit from planting trees

In agriculture it’s not often that you find a relatively simple way to increase production by up to 20%. Planting trees turns out to be one such way for cattle farmers. Cows like shade and grow much faster if they graze on pastures dotted with trees. Studies show that combining livestock herding and forestry on the same stretch of land can lead to an 8% to 20% increase in dairy and meat production in the Southern Cone region.

Overcoming stereotypes could save your business
Overcoming stereotypes could save your business

By Susan Olsen, Lead Specialist, Opportunities for the Majority, IDB Difficulty accessing financing, poor infrastructure and incapacity to scale are cited as reasons why businesses that target the (BOP) fail. Yet, an unwillingness to overcome base of the pyramid stereotypes could easily be the most important explanation as to why some BoP-focused companies aren’t successful. Shattering stereotypes before starting an inclusive business model was the basis for a provocative panel that took place during the Inter-American Development Bank’s BASE III Forum in Mexico City.

Don’t let base of the pyramid millennials catch your company off guard
Don’t let base of the pyramid millennials catch your company off guard

Hardly a day passes without a new article on how businesses are analyzing the needs, wants and spending trends of millennials. In the US alone, millennials (or Generation Y), those born between 1980 and 2000, represent 30 percent of the population. By 2025 they will be 75 percent of the workforce of this country. The impact that millennials are starting to have on the global economy, the environment, and politics is enormous. But “millennial mania” is dominated by studies, research and marketing efforts that focus on affluent individuals. Meanwhile, in Latin America and the Caribbean a market of 77 million low-income or base of the pyramid millennials goes almost unnoticed.