Monday, March 1, 2010 – Friday, March 5, 2010

Ashoka practically invented the social enterprise sector thirty years ago when Bill Drayton had the brilliant idea to identify, recognize, and support social entrepreneurs with system changing solutions for the world’s most urgent problems. Since 1981, Ashoka has elected over 2,500 leading social entrepreneurs as Ashoka Fellows, providing them with living stipends, professional support, and access to a global network of peers in more than 60 countries. The Ashoka Globalizer Fellows 2010, featured this week on Twitter “Social Enterprise of the Day,” are those chosen by Ashoka as those ready to scale up globally. The five chosen at random below are no longer simply pioneering local solutions to local problems, these social entrepreneurs have the capacity and skills to “go global.”

Monday, March 1, 2010
Social Enterprise of the Day – Community Enterprise Solutions, Guatemala

Community Enterprise Solutions (CE Solutions) is a not-for-profit social entrepreneurship innovation incubator and implementation mechanism empowering self-sufficient businesses and educational entrepreneurs to create sustainable impact in developing world communities. CE Solutions changes “obstacles into opportunities” by converting traditional relief solutions into high-impact and locally owned and managed social enterprises and institutions. They have been recognized for developing the MicroConsignment Model as a sustainable, replicable means of delivering health-related goods and services by (women) entrepreneurs in remote Guatemalan and Ecuadorian villages.

Tuesday, March 2, 2010
Social Enterprise of the Day – Centre for Digital Inclusion, Brazil

With the mission to transform lives and strengthen low-income communities by empowering people with information and communication technology, Centre for Digital Inclusion, CDI, has an unusual socio-educational approach to development. CDI Community Centers are technology and learning centers in impoverished communities, established in partnership with existing leading grassroots organizations. The community based organizations provide the infrastructure and CDI provides free computers and software, implements educational methods, trains instructors, and monitors the centers. CDI centers are rooted in Latin America´s most vulnerable regions – from the sprawling urban slums of Rio to the refugee camps in Bogota, as well as in indigenous communities, prisons, juvenile delinquency centers, psychiatric institutions, and hospitals for the physically disabled.

Wednesday,March 3, 2010

Social Enterprise of the Day – Development and Education Program for Daughters and Communities, Thailand

Trafficking of people worldwide is a blatant abuse of human rights with devastating consequences for the millions of individuals, families, and communities affected by this crime. Development and Education Program for Daughters and Communities (DEPDC) is a non-profit community based NGO working in Thailand to prevent trafficking of women and children into the sex or other exploitative child labor industries. It offers free education, vocational training, and accommodation for young girls and boys. As well as providing free permanent shelter and education, DEPDC also runs several other projects and activities aimed at the prevention of trafficking and the provision of child rights – emergency shelters for abused or abandoned children, care and repatriation for girls who have left commercial sex work, education for vulnerable children and teens outside of the formal education system, youth leadership education program to combat trafficking in the Mekong Sub-Region of Thailand, and vocational and human rights training for undocumented migrants and indigenous peoples.

Thursday, March 4, 2010
Social Enterprise of the Day – Wizzit, South Africa

Solving the challenges of affordability, accessibility, and availability, WIZZIT offers a secure and efficient payment mechanism to the unbanked and under-banked people of South Africa. The product Wizzit offers is a low-cost, transactional bank account that uses cell phones to make person-to-person payments, transfers, and pre-paid purchases. Wizzit provides social mobility by empowering people to interact financially and by recognizing individuals as worthy of being active economic citizens.

Friday, March 5, 2010
Social Enterprise of the Day – mPedigree, Ghana

The World Health Organization believes that 25% of the medicines sold around the developing world are inauthentic copies containing little or no active ingredients. Medication like this increases the resistance of pathogens to first-line medication and in many cases causes fatality. mPedigree protects patients and consumers in the developing world from fake medicines through simple access to a cellphone. mPedigree’s text messaging technology allows item-unique coding of medicines to enable consumer verification at the point of purchase for free. Generating fees from drug companies and incorporating the approach into national standards, mPedigree is reducing suffering from counterfeit medicines in Africa.

Are you all set to meet with some of the best and most dynamic social for-profit businesses? Observe how enterprises looking to establish and scale find projectile? And participate in a buzzing confluence of some of the most dedicated and seasoned minds in social business? If yes, then you’re ready for Sankalp 2010! An annual Social Enterprise Awards and Investment Forum, back for the second time, in a new two-day avatar, Sankalp 2010 is scheduled for May 4 and 5, 2010 in Mumbai, India. So block your calendar now!

This year’s event includes online networking, interactive sessions, enterprise showcase stalls, videos, and the challenging Sankalp awards. Connecting social enterprises with investors, Sankalp is sure to be the springboard for social enterprises looking to take off!

This year’s five high-impact sectors:

• Agriculture, Food & Rural Business
• Clean Energy
• Inclusive Education
• Health, Water & Sanitation, and
• Technology for Development

Log on to www.sankalpforum.com today to upload your profile, network with attendees, view enterprise models online, and APPLY for a Sankalp Social Enterprise Award.

Be part of Sankalp 2010 and engage with the New Global Economy!

Are you an Indian social entrepreneur?  If so, we at Beyond Profit would like to request your participation in a survey of Indian social entrepreneurs that will collect your experiences and opinions on social entrepreneurship and social enterprise. Click here to start the survey.

This survey is appropriate for social entrepreneurs working in India. Every qualified person who completes the survey will be entered into a drawing to win a $25 Amazon.com gift certificate. The survey closes on March 12th, 2010.

We are excited to welcome Rishabh Kaul on board as our newest Beyond Profit Guest Blogger. In his first contribution, he interviews Dr. G.N. Rao, a tireless advocate for access to eyecare in India.

I had pretty much made up my mind that I wanted to spend last summer getting to know the developmental sector. Narrowing it down, I chose primary health care and landed myself a four-month stint with the International Center for Advancement in Rural Eyecare (ICARE).

ICARE is the community healthcare arm of its parent organization, the L V Prasad Eye Institute (LVPEI), a World Health Organization Collaborating Center for Prevention of Blindness. ICARE is an integral part of the pyramidal structure of health care that LVPEI follows. ICARE focuses on both geographically removed as well as economically disadvantaged groups.

At the primary eye care level, ICARE provides free consultation to patients (and charges a nominal amount for glasses) and refers them to a secondary center if needed. The only revenue it generates is through the sale of these glasses, which it sells through its “Vision Centers.” The entire pyramidal structure is explained here, also, the cost incurred to provide eye care from the apex to the base per person comes out to US$ 1. They now have about 50 Vision Centers all across Andhra Pradesh, which are linked to the secondary and tertiary centers. (Full Disclosure: At ICARE, I worked on calculating the cost effectiveness of the vision centers as compared to the government primary health center’s dark rooms.)

After my internship, I got an opportunity to pose a few questions to Dr G.N. Rao, who among his many roles, is also the founding director of LVPEI and served as President of the International Agency for the Prevention of Blindness where he led VISION 2020: The Right to Sight, the global initiative to eliminate avoidable blindness by the year 2020.

I have known Dr. Rao for quite some time and what strikes me most about him is how brutally honest and up to the point he is. And while interviewing him, I was reminded of the opening paragraph of Mikhail Kalashnikov’s autobiography: “Perhaps some of you will find my bursts of word fire too long, others may regard them too brief and broken. What matters is if my words hit the target.”

Rishabh Kaul: How sustainable is the LVPEI primary eye care model (i.e. ICARE)?

GN Rao: Of all the vision centers that we have, 70% of them are self sufficient and they help in running the remaining 30% that can’t run all by themselves. So, on the whole, the entire model is quite sustainable. However, these primary (and satellite) eye care centers require linkage to a mentoring organization like LVPEI (referring to LVPEI’s Center of Excellence in Hyderabad). If the government thinks more in terms of sustainability, then our job becomes much easier. Having said this, for us to work in the remotest of areas and especially tribal areas, these programs will need external funding. Continue reading

Understanding the Level of Organizational Development of Social Sector Organizations in India – An Organizational Assessment Survey

Joanne Sprague, from the Centre for Development Finance at IFMR, reports.

Social Sector Organizations: do you ever wonder if all the investment you make in ‘capacity building’ for your organization is worth the cost? Or whether all the paperwork you do really contributes to your development goals? Does it ever confuse you why some organizations get funded for years but don’t seem to have much impact, while others have little infrastructure or funding to speak of but manage to be incredibly effective?

The Strategy Advisory Group at the Centre for Development Finance (CDF), an action research think tank in Chennai, India, wondered the same things. We were curious as to which parts of an organization’s development – infrastructure, governance, M&E, leadership, etc. – really correlate to an organization’s effectiveness.

To better understand this for ourselves, we’ve developed a survey to assess the organizational maturity and effectiveness of development sector organizations in India. We need as many responses as possible to gain a robust set of insights for development organizations. To complete the survey, please visit www.surveymonkey.com/s/CDFsurvey. To read more about the background of the survey and the many rewards for respondents, continue reading below. Continue reading

The debate whether entrepreneurs are born or made has been hot lately. In the first issue of Beyond Profit, we talked to Greg Dees, the “Father of Social Entrepreneurship as an academic subject,” about using academia to develop the talents of social entrepreneurs. Vivek Wadhwa, an entrepreneur turned academic, just wrote a thought provoking piece on TechCrunch on the subject, arguing that entrepreneurs are made, not born. Below, Beyond Profit Guest Blogger Jerryanne Heath gives her two cents on the subject.

Ashoka cites entrepreneurial quality as the one of the most important characteristics of leading social entrepreneurs. To Ashoka, entrepreneurial quality “defines leaders who see opportunities for change and innovation and devote themselves entirely to making that change happen. These leaders often have little interest in anything beyond their mission, and they are willing to spend the next ten to fifteen years making a historical development take place. This total absorption is critical to transforming a new idea into reality…”

So where does this entrepreneurial quality come from? Is it present at birth? For those who may not have an entrepreneurial predisposition, can they acquire this quality through academic or personal experiences? And for social entrepreneurs in particular, what characteristics drive these individuals to affect social change? Can people be taught how to be social entrepreneurs? Continue reading

On March 15, Artemisia and Ashoka’s Changemakers will launch a global search for initiatives that help build the field of social business.  They’re looking for models that demonstrate how social business initiatives can thrive and scale up their impact on quality of life.

I’d like to nominate one successful model: Indego Africa, a social enterprise built upon the belief that Africans living in poverty can overcome their circumstance by taking full advantage of market opportunities and upgrading their job skills to improve their long-term earning prospects.  Indego Africa connects women’s cooperatives in Rwanda with export markets for their handicrafts and then reinvests 100% of profits from sales toward business skills training programs. Empowerment is achieved through a combination of skills, confidence, and access to information.

Indego Africa has improved the lives of more than 150 women and their 600 dependents (approximately) since 2006.  Their social impact includes: (i) ~ 336% increase in the number of women earning more than US$ 1 a day; (ii) ~ 96% increase in the number of families eating at least twice in a day; (iii) ~ 42% reduction in the number of women with no permanent residence and 26% increase in the number of households with beds for all residents.* Continue reading

Monday, February 22, 2010 – Friday, February 26, 2010

NASSCOM , the premier trade body and the “Chamber of Commerce” for the IT – BPO industry in India, recently organized the India Leadership Forum 2010 in Mumbai on February 9 to 11, 2010. At the forum, the NASSCOM Foundation, the social arm of the body established to leverage information and communication technologies (ICT) to empower and transform the lives of the underserved, awarded enterprises with their NASSCOM Social Innovator Honors . This week, on Twitter “Social Enterprise of the Day,” we featured five of these organizations that are using ICT to leverage technology for social change.

Monday, February 22, 2010

Social Enterprise of the Day – Save the Baby Girl

An initiative of the district of Kolhapur in Maharashtra, Save the Baby Girl is an initiative whose mission is to save the girl child and to effectively execute and implement various government healthcare schemes. Taking notice of the rapidly declining female birth rate in the area, the government administration developed the website to link all sonography centers in order to stop sex selective abortion of females. The sonography centers are linked together on this website, making all information available to the administration on a daily basis.

Tuesday, February 23, 2010

Social Enterprise of the Day – Geodesic

True to their tagline “Building a global community without barriers”, Geodesic won the NASSCOM Social Innnovator Honor for GeoAmida, the world’s first integrated mobile computer. GeoAmida, “the perfect last mile solution to reach the unreached,” enables service providers to biometrically identify customers, deliver multiple services remotely and securely, and function reliably in the remotest parts of the world. The GeoAmida platform enables the government, financial institutions, NGOs, and enterprises to offer and deliver sophisticated services to their remotest customers, opening up new markets and creating fresh opportunities.

Wednesday, February 24, 2010

Social Enterprise of the Day – IRIS Business Services Pvt. Ltd.

IRIS Business Services Pvt. Ltd. is a strategic provider of information and research solutions to global customers through leading edge technology, people, and processes. IRIS won the NASSCOM Social Innovator Honour for creating an internet based voting mechanism through which children in the schools of Mumbai could vote for the candidate of their choice from among those standing for elections. IRIS succeeded in generating interest and debate among the students through the process that mimicked real life. The interschool voting competition with prizes for highest voter turnout and certificates for all “responsible voting citizens” generated much enthusiasm and response among the students and led to them encouraging their parents to vote. The solution was available in both English and Marathi.

Thursday, February 25, 2010

Social Enterprise of the Day – ekgaon Technologies Pvt Ltd.

ekgaon Technologies Pvt. Ltd. designs and develops technologies and information systems to meet the needs of developing communities. A strong believer in the ideals of community and collaboration, the company seeks to use and develop free and open source software conforming to open standards whenever possible. They won the NASSCOM Social Innovator Honor for developing a mobile phone-based monitoring system for tracking delivery of social welfare program entitlements to rural poor called “Monitoring Entitlements for Rural Communities” (MERComs). MERComs’ service framework provides a way to efficiently aggregate monthly update of data in real-time from paper-based records of the beneficiaries in the field using mobile phones. MERComs’s Management Information System is modular, expandable, and localized (in English, Hindi, Oriya)  and is used by NGOs to create a system ensuring compliance of service delivery, reducing corruption, and working towards building a system for a real-time access to services to beneficiaries with 100% transparency.

Friday, February 25, 2010

Social Enterprise of the Day – HMRI

Health Management and Research Institute (HMRI) is a nonprofit organization working towards improved access and quality of healthcare services for all. They won the Honor for their unique means of reaching at-risk rural populations – HMRI’s 24×7 health helpline – 104 Advice. This health contact center offers non-emergency medical advice, information, and counseling services on the toll free ‘104′ number. Assisted by pre-formatted algorithms and disease summaries, callers are matched with appropriately qualified health workers (including medical specialty experts) who provide advice/counseling or make preliminary diagnoses and referrals for further treatment.

The “missing middle:” most investors have heard of it, most social entrepreneurs don’t want to be stuck in it. If you want to start an informal micro-enterprise, then it is usually possible to secure micro-credit, while banks will back well-established medium-to-large companies. But in between lies an entire segment of entrepreneurs who are faced with a terrible problem: virtually no financial services serve their segment. Madeleine Anderson, CEO of Equity for Africa, explores this problem and suggests innovative solutions.

Most investors looking to go “beyond profit” have heard of the missing middle. The term was originally used to describe a gap between very large and very small companies in low income countries, with small and medium enterprises (SMEs) contributing a much lower proportion of GDP and employment than in high-income countries.

Over time, the term has shifted to mean the financing gap between microfinance and very large commercial investments. There is very poor access to finance for the companies in between, constraining SME growth and possibly causing this SME gap.

In response, a new industry of SME fund managers has begun to emerge in Sub-Saharan Africa. Grofin is the undisputed leader, but there are a number of new entrants to the market as the concept has become increasingly mainstream. These organizations use a private equity (PE) model to invest in small numbers of SMEs with the potential to become internationally competitive, with the best of them also providing extensive capacity building from separate grant funds. They attract the very best of African talent, bringing highly skilled workers back from the diaspora to manage the investments.

Data from a 2007 SEAF report1 has shown the huge impact SME investments can have, not just for the people who are employed by the growing businesses, but also everyone in the value chain, right down to the smallest farmer. This presents an exciting opportunity for social investors, or Impact Investors, as they are now often called. There is a clear market failure, and investors may be able to have it all: making a reasonable return, while achieving development goals. Continue reading

Social enterprises are all over India – my adopted home, on and off, for the past three and a half years. But not many people know social enterprises exist because they are not very good at publicizing their work. A bigger problem, perhaps, is that maybe even they don’t always know they exist. As we see time and time again in our conversations, entrepreneurs creating social impact do not always identify themselves as social entrepreneurs.

But this is changing, partly due to the fact that conferences are popping up all over the globe that either focus solely on social entrepreneurship or have sessions/tracks devoted to it. But to my mind, America is still the center of the social enterprise movement. Social enterprise is booming in America, springing to life in San Francisco, New York, Boulder, and Austin.

And Austin, Texas, is where you can find us as a Media Partner for RISE 2010 – a Relationship & Information Series for Entrepreneurs – taking place from March 1 – 5.

In its fourth year, RISE is an annual conference series dedicated to providing a free forum for entrepreneurs to connect and exchange ideas that inspire the entrepreneurial spirit. It is truly for, by, and about entrepreneurs (and expected to draw more than 2,500 entrepreneurs to participate in more than 150 sessions).

Inspired by SXSW, RISE takes place in concurrent sessions created and produced by local entrepreneurs in venues around Greater Austin Intimate. Sessions are free, independently organized, peer-led, limited to 25 participants, and represent a range of topics of interest to entrepreneurs of all sizes in all industries. Lindsay Clinton, our Managing Editor, will be hosting a session on Tuesday morning (March 2) as part of the Social Entrepreneurship track.

Highlights of the 2010 conference:

• Keynotes by Red McCombs and Blake Mycoskie, founder of TOMS Shoes
• RISE high – Annual business plan competition for area high school students
• RISE Fast Pitch – Early-stage entrepreneurs deliver 60-second pitches to a panel of venture capitalists, angel investors and experienced executives and entrepreneurs
• RISE 2010 will be carbon neutral thanks to Sponsor Green Mountain Energy

We can’t wait!