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After SKS success, More Issues Are on the Horizon
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 peop...
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- South Asia
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eBay Founder Steps Up India Philanthropy
Omidyar Network , the philanthropic investing firm of eBay Inc. founder Pierre Omidyar, plans to plough as much as $200 million into India in the next five years. The organization’s target: businesses and non-profits that can make a "social impact" and improve life for people on the lowest economic rungs. The organization has had boots on the ground in India f...
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The Contours of Social Business
I disagree with Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus. This is no small matter. For good reason, Yunus is a living legend among social business types. He pioneered microcredit to the poor at a time when my professor C.K. Prahalad (alas, no longer alive) had not even coined the phrase “bottom of the pyramid”, let alone written the best-selling book about finding fortune there. Yunus belie...
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Danone’s Cheap Trick
Groupe Danone is the world’s largest yogurtmaker and one of the biggest companies in France, with some $21 billion in sales annually. Yet a tiny factory in Bangladesh from which Danone never expects to earn any money is giving the company a profitable lesson in manufacturing for the developing world - and even some tips for business in the West. The factory, which sits in the northern city of Bogra and ma...
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Indian Rickshaws Pull Ahead
Today, "social entrepreneurship" has become an important development to help some of the poorest groups in the world like the rickshaw pullers in India. Colorfully adorned cycle rickshaws have long been a part of India’s landscapes. These hardworking yet environmentally friendly rickshaw operators can navigate busy urban streets and rural country roads with the same ease. But they are all but invisible to their passengers as they barely subsist above the poverty level....
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VCs Plan to Invest $53M in Social Biz Over Six Months
MUMBAI: In the 20-company portfolio of Nexus Venture East, a $320-million venture capital (VC) fund, three businesses stand out. There’s Suminter India Organics, which does contract farming for organic produce; D.light Design, which provides solar lighting solutions; and Sohan Lal Commodity Management, which provides grain warehousing facilities in small towns and villages in 12 states. Nexus refers to them as ’impact investments’ - businesses where the pursuit of...
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Everest Capital Launches ’Frontier’ Hedge Fund
SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) -- Everest Capital, a $2 billion hedge-fund firm run by Marko Dimitrijevic, has launched a new fund focused on so-called frontier markets such as Nigeria, Bangladesh and Pakistan. Everest, which has been investing in emerging markets for roughly 20 years, started trading in the "frontier" markets in 2008. By June, the firm had $90 million allocated to its frontier strategy. The money came from the firm and from...
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Rich I.P.O. Brings Controversy to SKS Microfinance
An Indian company with rich American backers is about to raise up to $350 million in a stock offering closely watched by philanthropists around the world, showing that big profits can be made from small helping-hand loans to poor cowherds and basket weavers. The company, SKS Microfinance, is one of the biggest players in the field known as ...
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- South Asia
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