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ALTRUSHARE SECURITIES is a brokerage firm, engaged in the sort of things you might expect of a Wall Street outfit, like buying and selling stock, and providing research on companies. Unlike its peers, however, the firm is majority-owned by two charities that each control about one-third of it. So is it a for-profit business? Or a nonprofit fund-raising machine? In fact, like hundreds of new businesses starting up around the country, it is both. Altrushare is an example of the em...
“Businesses Try to Make Money and Save the World”News
There has been a general tendency to romanticize village life as a return to our roots. What is noticeable, though, is that most people who romanticize village life in India tend to live in cities?in India, or elsewhere. They also seem incapable of noticing the irony implicit in this romanticization, since their forefathers, too, were once villagers ?who migrated to cities for good reason. There was no greater proponent of villages than Mohandas Gandhi, who had been educated in London...
Can India Afford its Villages?Blog Post
When I recently attended The Second Annual Conference on Public Policy and Management at the Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore, I had not imagined that it will be difficult to summarize it in a blog post. Discussed at the conference - current thinking on the proposed National Rural...
Roadblocks to Financial InclusionBlog Post
Ironically enough, I found myself reading this article in the New York Times on an New Jersey Transit express train this morning.? The irony is that I was on my way to a meeting with the Acumen Fund, talking about ways WRI and Acumen might work together. ? Why ironic (cue Alanis...
Entrepreneurs Hope to Make it to “The Show”News
It became a model for Thomas S. Lyons, a professor of entrepreneurship at Baruch College?s Zicklin School of Business in New York, and Gregg A. Lichtenstein, a business consultant in Margate, N.J., who were searching for ways to develop entrepreneurial talent. ?We kept coming back to baseball?s farm system,? Professor Lyons said. ?It is one of the best talent-generating systems in the world.? The pair had an ambitious goal: to build a system in underserved and overlooked regions of ...
Entrepreneurs Can Earn Their Stripes in the Minor Leagues, TooBlog Post
Jane Nelson, who wears many hats (IBLF, Kennedy School, Brookings), spoke yesterday at a meeting of the Global Poverty Roundtable at the GlobalWorks Foundation here in Washington. Jane offered a wide-ranging, yet concise summary of all of the ways business can engage in development. Jane said ...
Jane Nelson on Business’ Role in DevelopmentBlog Post
I attended an all-day workshop at the IFC yesterday on their Grassroots Business Initiative (GBI). A half dozen of the Initiative’s enterprises from Africa, Asia, and Latin America, and 30 or so GBI partners also attended, along with their program staff. The meeting was conducted under...
Grassroots Business Initiative Grows TallBlog Post
In my old age I?ve come to understand that points of ideological contention can be very eye-opening. My friend Akwasi and I considered each other relatively liberal, like-minded urbanites until we had the ?gender role? conversation. Yes, that one ?the quintessential Mars/Venus debate....
Women at the BOP
