After SKS success, More Issues Are on the Horizon
Tuesday, August 31, 2010
It was merely a coincidence that the year after C K Prahalad’s bestseller, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid: Eradicating Poverty through Profits (2004), that Vikram Akula returned to SKS Microfinance, leaving a consultancy job at McKinsey & Company in Chicago that he took a year earlier.
Akula, a Fulbright Scholar researching poverty and a student of arts, had founded SKS Microfinance as a non-profit venture in late 1997 with funding close to $52,000 raised from 357 people. He converted it into a for-profit company in 2005 during his second stint. Success came rather swiftly. In 2006, Akula was named by Time magazine as one of the world’s 100 most influential people.
