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Embrace Warms Up Premature Babies At the Bottom of the Pyramid
A mother living in a rural village outside of Bangalore, India gives birth to a baby two months prematurely. Her family cannot afford to go to the city hospital in Bangalore, so her husband, who raises silkworms that he warms under lamps, decides to care for the baby in the same way. A few day later, their baby dies. Stopping this tragedy - there are 20 million low birth weight and premature babies born each year - is the primary mission of Embrac...
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When the Shoe Doesn’t Fit: An Investor’s Take on One-for-One Models
There is one model that has grabbed significantly more mainstream attention than the rest: the "one-for-one." TOMS Shoes, the best-known example, gives shoes to the shoeless when you buy a pair for yourself. But as an investor have a new set of concerns about whether and how one-for-one models can become sustainable, scalable organizations.
- Categories
- Impact Assessment, Social Enterprise
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Indian Mobile Initiative Sweeps MIT?s Service Challenge
Thirteen other teams snagged implementation awards to partner with communities on innovative projects overcoming gaps in water/sanitation, agriculture and medical accessibility as part of this year?s MIT IDEAS Competition and the newly launched Global Challenge. This year 45 teams in all competed for $150,000 in awards to fight global challenges.
- Categories
- Agriculture, Technology
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Untying the Knot
Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty. By Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo. PublicAffairs; 336 pages; $26.99. To be published in Britain in June by PublicAffairs; £15.99. Buy from Amazon.com , ...
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Narratives Are Not Enough
Many of you have been tracking the aftermath of the 60 Minutes report about Greg Mortenson?s non-profit, Central Asian Institute (CAI), the allegations of mismanagement and misrepresentations in his book, Three Cups of Tea. It shows how critical it is to collect actual data on how organizations impact poverty. How can we increase transparency?
- Categories
- Impact Assessment
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Serving the Bottom of the Pyramid
Business is brisk for Dheeraj Singh, a small kirana shop owner in Delhi’s Govindpuri area. He stocks a host of brands offered by the Indian fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) companies in categories such as hair oil, shampoo, biscuit, fairness cream and tea, among many others. But he offers most of these products in their smallest pack sizes costing between Rs1 and Rs10. This just works fine for Savitri, a regular customer at the store employed as domestic staff in a flat nearby. She...
- Region
- South Asia
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Going to See ’To Catch A Dollar’? Tell Us What You Think
Tonight - March 31 - and only tonight, the curtain will go up on the documentary, To Catch a Dollar, in movie theaters around the United States. The film documents the travels of Muhammad Yunus as the Nobel Laurate spreads the word on microfinance - not in Bangladesh, India or Asia - but here ... in America.
- Categories
- Uncategorized
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Consumer Goods to Consumer Centricity: Not Easy to Navigate for HUL
It’s lunchtime at the sprawling campus - the walk through inside the corporate nerve centre of India’s largest FMCG Company - the Rs17700 crore turnover (March ended 2010) HUL. The campus is crowded with employees taking their post prandial walk, some using WiFi to work out of their work stations and some milling around the branded food court from the company stable. So there’s Swirl Parlour, Bru Cafes and the latest addition Knorr Food Kiosk. It’s at the Knorr Fo...
- Region
- South Asia
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