Teachers in Ngarambe, a small village in Tanzania, are celebrating. While last year just one student passed the secondary school exam, this year 11 students succeeded. Behind the dramatic improvement in educational achievement has been the supply of electricity to the village. "The teacher says it is because now they can do their homework and study at night," says Anders Nordstrom, senior project manager at ABB, the Swiss-Swedish engineering group that is running the rural electrification scheme in Tanzania.

The experience of Ngarambe is exactly the sort of result officials at the United Nations Development Programme hope can be repeated throughout the developing world. Through a scheme called Growing Sustainable Business (GSB), the agency is brokering partnerships between companies and non-governmental organisations or local government bodies.