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NextThought Monday: How Can I Pay My Loans If I Can’t Afford an Onion?
Sure, one might argue that growing debts and high interest rates have lead to suicides in India and rising default rates. Perhaps you may even conclude that greed finally got the better of the MFIs. But when I visited Andhra Pradesh and almost couldn’t afford a watermelon, I gained a whole new perspective on the MFI crisis.
- Categories
- Finance
- Tags
- lending, microfinance
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Detroit: Emerging from the Ground Up
A couple of weeks ago, I attended a unique social enterprise conference, Revitalization and Business. Its focus was not on a continent, a region, or a nation in need. Rather, it focused on one single American city-Detroit, Michigan, where small projects and individuals are making powerful waves from the ground up.
- Categories
- Impact Assessment, Social Enterprise
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Aftershocks of Egypt and Social Enterprise’s Role
Throughout the Muslim world, echoes of the Egyptian chant "Leave, Leave, Leave" fall on far-from-deaf ears. The simple fact that pumping fists in Tunisia preceded pitchforks in Egypt is a harbinger of the aftershocks to come. The burden is on enterprise to ensure that when the dust does finally settle, those very US dollars start to flow freely.
- Categories
- Education, Social Enterprise
- Tags
- governance
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Improving Development, One Failure at a Time
The development community needs to learn to better manage failure and stop sweeping it under the rug. On Jan. 14, Engineers Without Borders Canada with Peace Dividend Trust launched a website to challenge development organizations worldwide. Admittingfailure.com is a platform for individuals to submit mistakes they?ve encountered in their work.
- Categories
- Social Enterprise
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NextThought Monday: Friending Egypt, the True Value of Social Media
Blotted out in Egypt as an organizing tool by demonstrators and singled out at Davos for its social innovation prowess, Facebook was at the apex of two worlds last week. The uprising shows how quickly social media can fuel protests while exposing income inequality. But social media’s ability to build new enterprises is just finding its footing.
- Categories
- Technology
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Brazil’s Flourishing ’LAN’ Houses Supplying More Than Internet Connections
Brazil hosts over 100,000 publicly sponsored Internet access centers, or LAN (Local Area Network) Houses. The phenomenon started in affluent areas of S?o Paulo in the 1990s and now extend into poor isolated regions. These centers represent to 45% of all Internet access in Brazil, and connect 30 million Brazilians, mainly in low-income communities.
- Categories
- Technology, Telecommunications
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Participative Innovation: The Transition to a New Model of Social Capitalism
Today, we have a much more complex inter-sector reality. It isn’t unusual to find businesses that act as NGOs, private banks that give donations, development banks that set interest rates above market prices and NGOs implementing profitable projects. One wonders if the sectors are overlapping one another or if they have simply become obsolete.
- Categories
- Impact Assessment, Social Enterprise
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NextThought Monday: Why Africa is Open for Business
When I asked a group of Business School students if they’d be interested in doing business in Africa, very few raised their hands. Those who did thought their prospects were limited to NGOs or microfinance. But in the last decade, better governance and debt crisis resolution, among other factors, are radically improving the business climate.
- Categories
- Education
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