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A Global Surge in Tiny Loans Spurs Credit Bubble in a Slum
RAMANAGARAM, India -- A credit crisis is brewing in "microfinance," the business of making the tiniest loans in the world. Microlending fights poverty by helping poor people finance small businesses -- snack stalls, fruit trees, milk-producing buffaloes -- in slums and other places where it’s tough to get a normal loan. But what began as a social experiment to aid the world’s poorest has also shown it can turn a profit. That has attracted private-equity funds and other for...
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Financial exclusion has to end
The inclusive story is still a distant dream. Despite the government drive to reduce the unbankable population, the status is far from rosy. With less than 50% of India’s population operating a bank account
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Business for the people, by the people, of the people
Mahatma Gandhi gave independent India’s leaders a test for their policies. Consider how they will benefit the poorest man, he said. India’s Constitution gave political freedom to all Indians. All, rich and poor, men and women, were given the right to vote: before the US and several European countries had given such rights to their citizens. In the 1990s, new policies brought economic freedoms to Indians that they had been denied earlier: the freedom to start and...
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New Corporate Structure Could Give Social Entrepreneurs New Funding Stream
By Ann Meyer After nearly four decades of running a staffing agency on a shoestring budget, John Plunkett hopes the next business he starts will be a moneymaker thanks to a new law that recognizes for-profit businesses with a strong social bent. The law, After nearly four decades of running a staffing agency on a shoestring budget, John Plunkett hopes the next business he starts will be a moneymaker thanks to a new law that recognizes for-profit businesses with a strong soci...
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Collegiate altruists to converge on UNC
CHAPEL HILL -- Building sustainable gardens in Argentina, constructing chicken coops in Tanzania and building an irrigation system in Bolivia are examples of projects performed by Nourish International, an organization that is hosting its second annual Summer Institute that will take place on the UNC campus from Thursday to Aug. 10. College students from 30 campuses across the country will be traveling to Chapel Hill to attend the Summer Institute, a five-day training conference t...
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Social Entrepreneurs from around the World Come to Santa Clara
Santa Clara University’s Center for Science, Technology, and Society will soon kick off a two-week program as part of its Global Social Benefit Incubator, in which venture capitalists and technology executives trade ideas with social entrepreneurs from around the world. These innovators and entrepreneurs will descend on Silicon Valley August 16-28 for an intensive, two-week residential "boot camp" intended to boost their socially conscious business ventures into the realm of sustain...
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On the Call: P&G CEO Bob McDonald
The Procter & Gamble Co. uses a slogan that its consumer products touch and improve lives. Traditionally, that’s meant with "new and improved" innovations of Tide detergent and Crest toothpaste and other products. But the company is pushing to increase sales in developing countries where per capita incomes are far below U.S. consumers, in a global recession. Bob McDonald, who took over July 1 as CEO, discussed the challenge in P&G’s fourth-quarter earnings conference cal...
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Making Eyeglasses That Let Wearers Change Focus on the Fly
As a promising Caltech graduate student in applied physics, Stephen Kurtin could have taken a job offer from Intel at the dawn of the microelectronics era 40 years ago. Instead he followed the path of a lone inventor, gaining more than 30 patents in fields including word processing software and sound systems, culminating in the pair of glasses resting on his nose, which he believes can free nearly two billion people around the world from bifocals, tr...
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