Summary
Recently, businesses have begun to focus on providing market solutions for the world's poor. This article will present an alternative but complementary micro-level perspective of consumers, small business owners or entrepreneurs, and marketplace behaviors. This perspective aims to understand and enable the subsistence marketplaces of the world to move toward becoming sustainable marketplaces -- a critical goal for business and humanity. Following a brief discussion of the state of the art in business approaches to poverty alleviation, this article will present the rationale for the sustainable marketplaces perspective, outline research, educational, and social initiatives that have emerged from taking this perspective, and discuss implications for businesses that aim to take leadership in poverty alleviation. The authors conducted research in India to explore a complementary sociological perspective in marketplaces characterized by widespread poverty. A key finding was the existence of pervasive and highly social one-on-one relationships among interdependent consumers and sellers.
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From Subsistence Marketplaces to Sustainable Marketplaces: A Bottom-Up Perspective On the Role of Business in Poverty Alleviation
The efficacy - and appropriateness - of monetizing the poor may be questionable for some. Reality and research, however, suggest that enabling the poor to make the economic and psychic step up from merely subsisting has transformative benefits. These authors have conducted extensive research on how helping the poor make the move up ought to be done and how the benefits of such a move underpin change that lasts.
The world today is divided into "have's" and "have not's." Recently however, businesses have begun to focus on providing market solutions for the world's poor. There is now a significant movement in business practice and research toward monetizing these potential markets, as chronicled in the Base-of-the-Pyramid literature (Prahalad, 2005). This article will present an alternative but complementary micro-level perspective of consumers, small business owners or entrepreneurs, and marketplace behaviors. This perspective aims to understand and enable the subsistence marketplaces (Viswanathan and Rosa, 2007) of the world to move toward becoming sustainable marketplaces - a critical goal for business and humanity. Following a brief discussion of the state of the art in business approaches to poverty alleviation, this article will present the rationale for the sustainable marketplaces perspective, outline research, educational, and social initiatives that have emerged from taking this perspective, and discuss implications for businesses that aim to take leadership in poverty alleviation.The Base of the Pyramid (BoP) approachEmerging research is beginning to bring to light business innovations aimed at the poorer citizens of the world ...See the full content of this document
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