What is Internet Bar (IBO)?
Internet Bar's (IBO) mission is to use the Internet to promote legal and economic justice for all people. To increase access to legal justice, Internet Bar will help develop and refine the content, structure, and delivery of the emerging online “e-justice” system. What is the e-justice system? Recognizing that much of the world’s population lacks access to the Internet, Internet Bar also seeks to apply its expertise and assets directly in developing regions of the world in order to increase Internet access.
What is Micro-Commerce?
The global economy has recently seen the amazing potential of microfinance for the developing world. Well-known examples of successful micro-finance initiatives include the Grameen Bank micro-credit banking system in Bangladesh, for which it received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006, and Kiva.org’s international peer-to-peer micro-lending platform. At the same time, rapid advances in Internet technology and access have lead to the growth of online commercial transactions, or e-commerce, through websites such as eBay, Paypal, Amazon.com and others. Micro-commerce is an emerging field that blends aspects of e-commerce with microfinance. Specifically, this involves utilizing micro-finance platforms to provide local entrepreneurs in the developing world with access to the capital they need to sell their products and services in an online market place.
Internet Bar’s Micro-Commerce Justice Initiative
Internet Bar is attempting to unite the above trends by developing the Micro-Commerce Justice Initiative. Its goal is to bring sustainable microfinance, social justice and e-commerce to the developing world by establishing online business opportunities and direct transactions with the markets of industrialized nations. In this way, Internet Bar will help local entrepreneurs link into the global e-commerce network, which will in turn help alleviate poverty and increase basic human rights, including economic rights.
Internet Bar believes that the vast communication and commercial power of the Internet and e-commerce brings unprecedented opportunities for income generation to the developing world. However, IBO also understands that the success of technology-based initiatives in developing regions depends upon education, understanding national and international laws, resources, and markets. For these reasons, IBO seeks to partner with local, regional, national and international groups to develop detailed plans for each region. IBO also seeks the input of local stakeholders, national and regional economic and political leaders, and international monetary aid and financial development groups.
Through its Micro-Commerce Justice Initiative, IBO plays the vitally important roles of bringing necessary skills and experience together to focus on local micro-commerce development projects and creating business models under which those projects can be executed. In the role of project coordinator, IBO brings international expertise together with local and regional knowledge to bridge gaps between vision and results. In addition to the functions and factors of business development, often there are cultural, social and political matters to contend with as well. IBO’s goal is to bridge those gaps by including and honoring local and regional values while at the same time working to transcend those structures that restrict development and opportunity. To accomplish this, the IBO team conducts project feasibility studies, local engagement exercises and business plan creation. IBO also works directly to bring vital technology, logistics and marketing companies and systems together for specific projects.
The Tufts Institute for Global Leadership and the
2008 Micro-Commerce Student Project
The mission of the Institute for Global Leadership (IGL) is to “prepare new generations of critical thinkers for effective and principled leadership, ready to act as global citizens in addressing the world’s most pressing problems.” In keeping with this mission, the IGL and IBO seek to challenge Tufts students and the visiting international student delegations at the 2008 EPIIC “Global Poverty and Inequality” Symposium to link theory and practice in a poverty alleviation effort.
To introduce an exciting, new aspect of microfinance and to encourage interaction among the international delegations prior to and after the EPIIC Symposium, the IGL and InternetBar.org (IBO) are presenting students with a challenge and an opportunity. To complement the broad view of global poverty provided by the Symposium speakers, students are invited to participate in a project that will require them to think through the specifics of how to develop and manage a social enterprise project in a developing country.
The objective of the project is to find innovative ways to link people and businesses from the developing world in a trustworthy, online virtual marketplace using the Internet. This concept called “micro-commerce,” a mix of e-commerce and micro-finance, is intended to help small-scale entrepreneurs from resource-poor areas of the world expand the efficiency and scope of their businesses as well as gain access to consumer populations in more developed regions.
