From the Guest Editors Poverty and Profits in the Information Age

Since the 2004 publication of C. K. Prahalad’s remarkably inouential The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid: Eradicating Poverty Through Proats, the term “BoP” has become commonplace among development practitioners and corporations. This work argued that, rather than relying upon inefacient governments to provide the poor (i.e., the BoP) with necessary goods and services, the for-proat sector, and especially multinational companies, could play a central role in creating demand and supplying low-cost goods (Prahalad, 2004). “The BoP” entered development discourse and practice at about the same time that information and communication technologies for development, or ICTD, rose to prominence as a key tool of poverty alleviation (Prahalad & Hammond, 2001). By the turn of the millennium, corporations and other private actors had joined the poverty alleviation “business”— not as a by-product of their operations, but as an explicit part of it.