Tag Archives: micro-finance

Jacqueline Novogratz – Legatum Lecture at MIT

We are a connected world said Jacqueline as she described the story of her blue sweater, also the title of her recently published book. Once discarded by her at Goodwill, it turned up 25 years later in Rwanda where she found it on a boy in the countryside.

Speaking at the Legatum Center’s Lecture series at MIT, she described the innovative work of Acumen fund and how it helps build social solutions through its venture philanthropy.

She prefaced her talk by some of her observations from her work helping to build enterprises around the world that she undertook since her time in Rwanda.

  • Dignity is more important than wealth for the human spirit.
  • Traditional models of charity won’t solve problems of poverty.
  • Markets can’t solve poverty. 100 Million people went back into poverty last year and that is what happens when you only rely on market forces to solve these problems.
  • What is needed is patient capital that will address these problems

Continue reading

Two social visionaries from India

We were pleased to have Vibha Krishnamurthy and Ashish Karamchandani visit us in Boston on Sunday.

Vibha Krishnamurthy is the founder of Ummeed, (http://www.ummeed.org ) a first-of-its kind center addressing the needs of the estimated 35 million children in India with developmental disabilities. After completing her fellowship at Boston Children’s Hospital, Vibha moved back to Bombay determined to bring world class care to disabled children in India. She founded Ummeed in 2001 and it now supports over 1000 patient visits a week. Ummeed provides early diagnosis of development disabilities followed by in-house professional, medical and therapeutic care. It allows families to continue proper care and therapy at home by providing training and education programs for parents. For her tireless efforts to bring care to the disadvantaged, Vibha was named an Ashoka Fellow in 2007. http://www.ashoka.org/fellow/4900

Vibha’s husband, Ashish Karamchandani is a visionary in his own right. Ashish returned to India to head Monitor’s Indian consulting office where he spearheaded an effort within Monitor to address the challenges of global poverty with market based solutions. He was successful in starting a new area of research within Monitor, Monitor Inclusive Markets, (http://www.mim.monitor.com) that he now leads. The group has brought scientific and business approaches to providing market-based solutions and has initiated financially-sustainable enterprises to address the needs of the bottom 60% of the income pyramid in India. Their work has identified housing as one of the key areas where market based solutions can alter the social and economic landscape of the country. Ashish has recently published a comprehensive report “Emerging Markets, Emerging Models,” based on their solid fact-based research. Continue reading

Interview on Social Entrepreneurship

I was recently interviewed by New England’s largest e-magazine for South Asians, lokvani.com about my views on social entrepreneurship. You can find the full interview at their site here.

“The passage of the Edward Kennedy Serve America Act this week marks the coming of age of Social Entrepreneurship (SE)” says Raj Melville, who is one of the co-founders of the TIE-SE SIG. He talked to Lokvani about this concept which combines for-profit and non-profit work by entrepreneurs to address a social issue in a sustainable and scalable manner. It has now become the new buzz word. (from Lokvani.com)

Gates Foundation gets into Microsavings

The Gates Foundation has made some major investments in the area of finance over the past few years. Now, based on their findings and experiments, they are making a big push into the area of micro-savings. Traditionally rural finance has focused on providing micro-credit services to the poor. Only recently have some of the micro-finance organizations started extending their services to include savings and insurance. In most cases the issue has been local regulations and banking controls.

In a recent article in the Wall Street Journal – Giving a Lot for Saving a Little – the author points out several issues why savings schemes for the rural poor have not taken off. Among the issues identified:

  • Strict regulations on entities that hold deposits
  • Lack of remote branches that allow easy access to money
  • Too costly for traditional banks to provide services for the size of accounts Continue reading

Prof. Yunus continues to speak on Social Business

Prof. Yunus continued to speak about his vision of creating social businesses to help address some of the pressing issues facing us. He was hosted by the MIT-Bangladesh Students’ Association and Bhin-Golardho – a Bangla-centric group – during his visit to Boston.

He challenged the youth to start social businesses by saying. “I would like to say that while we at Grameen have done a few things, there are many causes that are waiting for you to take up”

You can read Ranjani Saigal’s write-up of his visit here on Lokvani