Special Initiatives www.ParaMiPueblo.com - Status; concept on-line and awaiting funding Every year immigrants worldwide send $275 billion in remittances to their families back in their home towns. For Latin America the figure is $60 billion. Besides spending a large percentage (6 - 9%) on commissions, the immigrants would prefer to maintain control so that their "good-for-nothing brother-in-law doesn't drink the funds away". ParaMiPueblo ("For My Home Town") is an on-line marketplace with offerings of thousands of local SMEs in "pueblos" and neighborhoods all over Latin America. It is based on PEOPLink's OpenEntry, e-commerce platform that enables any enterprise anywhere to create and maintain their own e-commerce catalog with credit card payment via www.PayPal.com. OpenEntry also makes it easy to aggregate many individual catalogs into powerful "metamarkets" (such as www.ParaMiPueblo.com ) searchable on the Oracle database. Immigrants in the US can browse www.ParaMiPueblo.com and search the selections of the SMEs in their home communities and then make purchases with a US based credit card. If they don't have a credit card, they can purchase a prepaid card. Best of all, because the goods/services are delivered locally by the SMEs, www.ParaMiPueblo.com does not require dealing with the logistical complications & risks of customs & shipping. www.ParaMiPueblo.com also has an interesting micro-credit component. Immigrants (with presumably higher incomes) can make instant loans to their relatives back home by advancing the purchases. Even if they have to use credit card debt, the interest rates charged in the US are far lower than those charged by local banks or micro-credit organizations and no additional administrative procedures need to be set up. According to the August 2007 issue of Business 2.0 Magazine, with
the lead article on "The 29 Best Business Ideas in the World", the
#2 idea describes a model pretty much like www.ParaMiPueblo.com, noting that:
"Muhammad Was a Merchant" - Status; early conceptual stage, needs development Young Muslim men are angry at the US and the Western world for complicated reasons. They feel that technology and globalization are working against them. Moreover their limited employment prospects only heighten their frustration and raise the appeal of dramatically destructive acts. One way to address these conflicts, at least partially, is by promoting job creation in the IT sector for alienated youth in Muslim societies. The free e-commerce for one million SMEs worldwide initiative (http://Free.OpenEntry.com) can replicate OpenEntry's success in Nepal documented by UNDP (http://sdnhq.undp.org/e-comm) generating 4000 jobs in which, "a relatively inexperienced group of young IT professionals could, with the proper tools, create employment for themselves while providing e-commerce services to local SMMEs." First OpenEntry can easily be translated into Arabic, Farsi, Pashto, and others because it is designed with Unicode and the instruction set is in a convenient table. Then PEOPLink will seek partners with deep roots in Muslim societies to enlist the youth and train them. The national chambers of commerce and other business networks can organize the demand for web catalogs created by the youth. This initiative offers the IT industry a chance to generate sorely needed good will among Muslim societies and might even contribute toward their opening up and becoming more democratic. Besides income and employment possibilities, references to The Prophet's original profession and the early mathematical advances by Arab scholars might well inspire hope in a generation of young men who currently feel they have limited prospects. Just as many inner city youth in the US spend countless hours on the basketball courts pursuing their (statistically improbable) dream of an NBA career, all it would take is for a small but significant percentage of disaffected Muslim youth to get good paying IT jobs for the prestige and allure of Jihad to begin fading. |
| published with OpenEntry |