Category Archives: Education

Beyond Microfinance: Opportunities for Change

Another Track in the upcoming ForSE 2008: Forum for Social Entrepreneurs

Beyond Microfinance: Opportunities for Change

Microfinance, as demonstrated by Nobel Laureate Mohammad Yunus, provides disadvantaged entrepreneurs with small loans to run their businesses and eventually help lift them out of poverty. This has become a wide spread phenomenon all over the world encouraging millions of families out of poverty.

What’s next? There is a huge business opportunity for both, investment in the MFIs and providing other business services to these micro-enterprises at the bottom of the pyramid.

While commercial banks are satisfying the demand for capital to the MFIs , the social entrepreneurs with social business ideas will hopefully fill the gap by providing services to the poor entrepreneurs to run and scale their businesses successfully. Prof. Yunus’ has exemplified this concept of a social business with a collaborative effort with Dannon in Bangladesh, that brings low cost nutritious meals to the poor while employing local farmers and citizens. This is a win-win situation where the commercial banks, MFIs, social businesses and the aspiring entrepreneurs all profit!

Adapting to Climate Change

We have over 80 people registered already for ForSE 2008: Forum for Social Entrepreneurs. Click here to register as we are going to quickly reach the limit of our 180 discounted admissions.

Here is the description of another one of the six tracks

Adapting to Climate Change

Rising global temperatures and erratic local weather patterns are of growing concern all around the world. Scientists worldwide have confirmed the reality of climate change and the impact of humans in increasing Greenhouse Gases (GHG) in the atmosphere. International treaties such as the ‘Kyoto Protocol’, state adopted legislations and activities at the local level are focused on acting to mitigate the effects of global warming. By changing policies, processes and habits, these actions may help the general public to gradually reduce the emission of GHGs and thus curb the severity of the impending climate change.

While it is important to mitigate climate change and its impact, positive results will be seen only after several decades. In the meantime, climate change and a rise in global temperatures will continue to occur, with changes in weather, ecology and environment impacting our daily lives on earth. Therefore it is important to adopt two strategies – mitigation and adaptation to climate change.

Several entrepreneurial spirits have taken up the challenge and established a creative response to the dilemma of high energy prices, high demand and low supplies concurring with global warming. This track will present an expert panel that will discuss strategies for adaptation to climate change and how social and business entrepreneurs are supporting this effort.

Agenda details for ForSE 2008

ForSE 2008, Forum for Social Entrepreneurs, has a number of interesting features and topics this year.

We will start the day with a plenary session consisting of a Keynote Panel discussion led by Nishith Acharya, Executive Director, Deshpande Foundation. He will be joined with Naveen Jha, Director of Programs, Deshpande Center for Social Entrepreneurship and Meenakshi Verma Agrawal, Program Officer, Global Exchange Programs, Deshpande Foundation and leading Deshpande Fellows.

After the plenary session, the Forum will break into multiple tracks to maximize interaction between attendees. Within each track we will have: Continue reading

ForSE 2008 signups off to a great start

We finally opened registration for ForSE 2008:Forum for Social Entrepreneurs on Wednesday, September 10th. The response has been terrific!! We had over 60 people register within 48 hours. This is shaping up to be a great gathering of like minded people interested in social entrepreneurship.

Last year we had hoped to have 150 attendees, instead over 250 signed up and we had to shut down registration. At the rate we are going, it looks like we will quickly reach the registration limit for this year’s Forum also.

We have tried to keep ForSE very affordable for our attendees, many of whom are students or starting non-profits and social entrepreneurs. The registration fee for attendees is nominal ($20 for students /$35 for affiliates of BU and TIE /$/75 for all others) for a full day conference including meals. However these discounted fees will only be available for the first 180 registrants. If you are interested in attending I would encourage you to register soon. The fees will go up substantially after we have 180 attendees signed up.

To help encourage dialog and discussion among the conference attendees and to build a community around social entrepreneurship, we have added an interesting attendee email feature on our conference website. Registrants who opt in are listed on the “Participants page“. Attendees can contact others thru a blind email system to discuss issues, tracks themes or other conference topics prior to and after the conference. At no point is your email displayed to others on the website. When someone contacts you, the system forwards you their message with their email contact and it is up to you to choose to respond to the message. We hope this gets people talking to each other before we meet.

Registration Opens for ForSE 2008-Forum for Social Entrepreneurs

In 2007, I helped found an annual conference on Social Entrepreneurship in partnership with Boston University and the Deshpande Foundation called the Forum for Social Entrepreneurship or ForSE for short. ForSE brings together social innovators with leading business professionals, investors, donors, government officials, academics, and students to facilitate the sharing of new technology and business ideas along with hard-earned management learnings to foster informed discussion and action on new social venture concepts. Continue reading