I met with Ambassador Luis Alberto Moreno in the fall of 2005, just before he became president of the IDB. He told me he liked the work we were doing on microfinance and remittances at the MIF, and invited my ideas on taking the bank in other new directions. I told him I’d recently attended two conferences on social entrepreneurship organized by the World Resources Institute, and had been greatly impressed by the enthusiasm and insight of the attendees. They were typically young people who were already involved in business ventures in Latin America, and I hadn’t often seen this kind of presence at other international development events. So, I suggested to Amb. Moreno that the IDB might launch a special initiative in this growing field.
This led to an IDB conference called Building Opportunities for the Majority in June, 2006. An IDB team worked hard over the intervening months to plan the conference and the initiative that would grow out of it. One important task was coming up with a name for the new project. The word “majority” was chosen because in Latin America, the poor are not a narrow special interest group – they are the majority of the population. As for “opportunities” – well, I often say that the poor don’t lack intelligence and initiative, what they lack is money and opportunity. Opportunities for the Majority is not about giving handouts or creating new government programs. It’s about giving a chance to people who haven’t been offered many chances in life.
We had some terrific speakers at the conference, including Roman Catholic Cardinal Oscar Rodriguez of Honduras, who drove home the social importance of the work we planned to do, and one of Latin America’s most successful businessmen, Mexican telecom mogul Carlos Slim. We also had a fascinating and wide-ranging dialogue between President Moreno and former U.S. president Bill Clinton, whose Clinton Global Initiative is a great example of what can be done when the resources of the private sector and the potential of the base of the pyramid come together.
I’m very excited about the work Opportunities for the Majority is now doing, because not only are they finding new ways to reach underserved populations in Latin America and the Caribbean, they are also opening up the work of the IDB to include those enthusiastic entrepreneurs I met at those World Resources Institute conferences. I hope MajorityMarkets.org will help that work continue to grow and reach new audiences.
Donald Terry was manager of the Multilateral Investment Fund from its inception in 1993 until June, 2008. He is currently teaching at Boston University Law School and consulting on remittances to Africa with various international organizations.
