(FORTUNE Magazine) – Credit Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina with nerve. Even as her company's sales growth stalls and its stock rests near its 52-week low, she's thinking of more than just short-term fixes.

In a recent interview in her Palo Alto office, Fiorina detailed a massive program she's launching to sell products to the poor of the Third World. It's the most prominent example of a newly emergent trend some are calling B2-4B--as in "business to four billion." "Smart people are not confined to the developed world," she says. "Any company that doesn't figure out a way to get connected with these people will not tap huge potential."

This is sure to be manna for skeptics. After all, Fiorina's potential customers often make less in a year than the price of an HP laptop. But this is the most visionary step I've ever seen a large tech company take. Fiorina is pressing her company to move in on the ground floor of what could one day be a huge market and creating an entire new business unit to oversee the project. Executives--both in and out of the tech world--should keep an eye on this experiment.

Fiorina has dubbed her program World e-Inclusion, and it works something like this. Over the next year, HP and its partners will sell, lease, or donate $1 billion in products and services to governments, development agencies, and nonprofit groups in countries like Bangladesh and Senegal. Since more than half of the Third World earns its primary income from farming, one early focus will be systems for making small farms more efficient. HP thinks villagers will pay for products and services that connect them with local markets, alerting them to the best prices and times to buy or sell crops or animals. Instead of just airlifting in PCs, HP is creating simple low-power or solar-powered devices that will connect to the Net wirelessly or via satellite. Says Jim Moore, a technology consultant in Cambridge, Mass., who chairs the initiative's advisory board: "It's just like in the U.S.--using the Web to collapse supply chains and put people at the ends in touch with each other."

The company's not just building "green" machines. It's also working closely with longtime experts in micro-credit, like Bangladesh's Grameen Bank, to find better ways of financing small entrepreneurs. Some nonprofits have seen excellent results lending as little as $25 to Third World entrepreneurs, without relying much on technology. HP hopes to develop networked tools that will make this lending more efficient. The company is also working on a Net-based program that allows individual investors to grant and monitor microloans of their own. Imagine how satisfying it would feel to loan $200 to help start a bicycle repair shop in Congo, especially if you also beat the rate on a CD at your local bank. Now imagine how profitable it would be for HP to take a cut of millions of such loans.

Many will find this concept idiotic or at best pointless. Some opponents of globalization may find it patronizing. But I see HP, with operations already in 120 countries and a long tradition of community engagement, as a laudable pioneer. At last, a so-called global corporation is facing up to what much of the world really is: a place of abject poverty. And the company is engaging this problem without sacrificing profits as it learns.

While HP will donate technology to get projects under way, executives insist that World e-Inclusion is not primarily philanthropy. "There's a big difference between creating a sustainable business model around products and services that raise the standard of living, and aid or philanthropy money pouring in on an ongoing basis," says Fiorina. "In the former, you can make money. In the latter, you make none." Corporate strategy expert C.K. Prahalad sees such Third World efforts as increasingly necessary for all multinationals. "Because of HP," he says, "it now becomes a legitimate subject of senior management discussion."

Evidence already exists that such projects--at least on a smaller scale--can be profitable. GrameenPhone, working with Grameen Bank, extends credit to individuals in rural towns who want to become cell-phone entrepreneurs. These business people carry wireless phones around their villages and get paid by the call. The average monthly bill on these phones, now in 2,800 Bangladeshi villages, comes to about $100. That's three times the calling of a typical urban customer, generating considerably higher profit for GrameenPhone. Says Debra Dunn, HP's vice president for strategy: "People will pay for services that increase their income and productivity."

And the underlying rule of tech pricing--that things get better, faster, and cheaper--is on HP's side. Global satellite systems offering wireless broadband Internet access will soon be operational, for instance, with prices likely to drop rapidly. Speech-recognition software, critical for reaching the illiterate in the Third World, is improving. And while digital tools may be expensive to develop, they're generally inexpensive to reproduce, making them well suited for gigantic markets.

Fiorina says e-Inclusion is an example of "doing well by doing good." She worries about what may happen if companies like hers don't take an inclusive approach: "Systems in disequilibrium will find equilibrium over time," she says. "If we don't help the system come to a different economic equilibrium, things will begin to happen that we don't care for." In other words, if Third World living standards don't rise, she sees the potential for massive social, environmental, and economic disruption. Fiorina also expects e-Inclusion to improve HP's brand image and market position in developing countries.

The language they're speaking at HP is unlike any I've encountered in 17 years at FORTUNE. "I describe Hewlett-Packard as a winning e-company with a shining soul," Fiorina says. Treacly talk, sure. But if that's what it takes to justify trying to make money while making the world better, my ears are wide open.

DAVID KIRKPATRICK is FORTUNE's senior editor, Internet and technology.