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Skoll Foundation Adds Eleven Pioneering Organizations to its Global Portfolio of Leading Social Entr
PALO ALTO, Calif.-March 11, 2008-The Skoll Foundation today announced Skoll Awards for Social Entrepreneurship for 11 organizations working around the world in the areas of tolerance and human rights, health, environmental sustainability, peace and security, and economic and social equity. The recipients, who will each receive three-year grants of $1,000,000, join a growing global network of Skoll social entrepreneurs, now numbering 59, who have created innovative, proven solutions? for tackl...
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Small Loans, Significant Impact
NEW YORK -- Se?oras! calls the banker, summoning her borrowers to attention at their first loan-repayment meeting. The small-business borrowers -- day-care providers, clothing sellers, jewelry makers -- crowd into the living room where their children are napping, eating cereal and watching TV. They are part of a nascent lending program created by Muhammad Yunus , a Ba...
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For Good, Measure
Philanthropy?s largest problem these days probably isn?t a lack of big gifts. Over the past few years, new records have been set in the number of individual donations of $100 million or more, and talking with those in the philanthropic community who advise potential donors reveals a sense of widespread anticipation that many billions of dollars, earned during the recent boom in the hedge-fund and private-equity markets, will soon pour into the social sector. At a moment of widespread economic...
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What Microloans Miss
Making loans and fighting poverty are normally two of the least glamorous pursuits around, but put the two together and you have an economic innovation that has become not just popular but downright chic. The innovation???microfinance???involves making small loans to poor entrepreneurs, usually in developing countries. It has been around since the nineteen-seventies, but in the past few years it has seized the imaginations of economists, activists, and bankers alike. The U.N. declared 2005 th...
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CNN Heroes: Peanut Farmers Get a Big Hand from Simple Device
In 2002, Brandis was helping a friend repair a water treatment system in a Mali, Africa, village. There, he encountered a woman whose hands were bleeding from shelling peanuts to support her family -- and this was not uncommon. In Africa alone, women spend 4 billion hours a year shelling peanuts by hand, according to the Peanut Collaborative Research Support Program. A sun-dried peanut is like a little rock. It’s that hard, says Brandis. Cracking t...
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The Consumers of the Future
The so called ?next billion? consumers come from Brazil, China, India, Eastern Europe and even parts of Africa and Asia and represent the largest untapped consumer market in the world. The Boston Consulting Group estimates that these new consumers already spend over a trillion dollars a year although they have barely entered traditional consumer markets yet. The individuals who make up this new consumer market are neither especially affluent nor particularly poor, however most are young and e...
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Tata Plans World’s Largest Wimax Network
The Indian telco plans a system of 3,000 base stations to deliver limited or full broadband service to 110 cities. Tata Communications is planning the world’s largest commercial Wimax rollout, with full coverage in 15 cities across India. The Indian telco has contracted US vendor Telsima to build the network, which it expects to capture 200,000 retail customers in 2009. The network of 3000 base stations will provide limited coverage for enterprises in 110 citi...
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Brands and Creative Capitalism
At the recent annual World Economic Forum, Davos, the redoubtable Bill Gates spoke of ?creative capitalism??an approach where governments, businesses, and nonprofits work together to stretch the reach of market forces so that more people can make a profit, or gain recognition, doing work that eases the world’s inequities. There is an increasing recognition and acceptance of this new and more complex definition of business. And at a different level, it could be the harbinger of a new way o...
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