For the uninitiated, Kony 2012 is an online campaign started by an US-based non-profit group, Invisible Children. The project uses a 30-minute slick, professionally made, documentary style video urging people to be a part of the campaign to capture the Ugandan warlord Joseph Kony, who primarily uses children as a weapon of war. The video [...]

“Necessity is the mother of Invention.” Many of us are familiar with this quote. Basically it describes how innovations we see today aimed to solve a problem or need of before. We admire the resourcefulness of the entrepreneur — the creative problem-solver — who is able to identify such a need and provide a solution [...]

Ritvvij Parrikh is a Product Manager for Samhita. Technology can help one’s organization operate more efficiently, empower one’s team to do more and reduce costs. Yet the mass proliferation of technology in the Indian social sector is at best restricted. Most of the investments that have made are confined to simple read only solutions like [...]

I was reading my friend Hans Taparia’s (Hans is a founder of Tasty Bite) blog today and he wrote about the power of public-private partnerships in driving innovation. In his most recent post, Hans said, driven by innovation, social ventures that are successful start attracting attention from constituents to policy institutes to the media.  Increasingly, governments [...]

In the most recent issue of Beyond Profit’s online newsletter Radar, the issue of the importance of scale is posed. I enjoyed the quick read especially with the willingness to engage corporations in achieving true scale. One of my complaints regarding the concept of scale in social entrepreneurship is the fact that we often have [...]

The Indira Gandhi National Open University(IGNOU) has launched a portal called Flexi-Learn in an effort to offer education over internet free of cost. The launched portal is not yet complete, with only a handful of courses in  Library and Information Science, agriculture and Law available for access. The other courses soon to be available for access [...]

Over the course of this academic year, I intend to work alongside D-Tree and Dimagi on developing a sustainable deployment and scale-up model for CommCare, a mobile-based scheduling, monitoring, and referral application for community health workers (CHWs).  Through its “Safe Pregnancy” module, CommCare aims to routinize antenatal care by providing CHWs and their supervisors the [...]

Question: Which manufactured consumer product has the deepest market penetration in rural India? Answer: Matches In fact, 97% of rural households purchase matches on a monthly basis. Matches are a unique product because of their high, constant demand and low price point. Their ubiquitous presence provides fascinating insights into India’s rural distribution networks, and offer [...]

A few kilometers past Charminar, the heart of the old city of Hyderabad, Andhra Pradesh, an auto rickshaw stops in front of a quiet, non-descript gate. Across the road is the Falaknuma Palace, in the process of getting a major face-lift. Upon knocking, we walk into a compound housing a workshop for rescued victims of [...]

Editor’s Note: The following post is a collaboration between Adrienne Villani, a member of the Beyond Profit Editorial Team, and Semil Shah, a Principal at India Strategy Consulting, a boutique services firm that advises small and medium enterprises and global universities on how to approach India strategically. You can follow Semil on Twitter at @semilshah. [...]