This upcoming March 26th – 28th, 2009, the Tufts Fletcher School will be holding a conference entitled, “Microfinance from Below: The Power of Savings and Savings Groups in Frontier Economies.” Registration is free. More details follow below: The Center for Emerging Market Enterprises (CEME) at The Fletcher School, Tufts University—with support from Oxfam America and [...]

Day 2 The second day started off by getting down to business immediately. Madhav Chavan of Pratham was the first speaker and his mandate was to enlighten the gathering on “How to scale up an organization?”. It really was a treat listening to him. During the course of his talk, he touched upon many other [...]

I had the opportunity to attend the International Conference on Social Entrepreneurship in India on the 4th and 5th of December. In this post I will try to narrate my experience at the conference. In the posts following this one, I will talk about people and organizations I got in touch with, and most importantly [...]

Calling all gram panchayats in Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka – Google.org‘s Inform and Empower Initiative wants to know the top five panchayats in each of these two states that are using innovation and good governance. According to the Google.org blog, The prize will be awarded in one of six areas: education, health and nutrition, water [...]

More details about the conference, which took place Dec 4-5 in Chennai, are coming from Aishwarya. Stay tuned!

This winter, through the gracious support of the Social Equity Venture Fund (S.E.VEN), I will be working in Cairo, Egypt with Click Diagnostics, a mobile tele-health social enterprise venture that recently won the $100K Entrepreneurship Competition hosted yearly at MIT. As mentioned in previous posts relating to cellphones and development, mobile technology seems to be [...]

The Clothes Bank is a network for collections, sorting, and distribution of clothes in different phases. The collection phase include house-to-house collections and installation of Cloth Drop Boxes in convenient public places including malls and banks. The Foundation also plans to involve a larger network of volunteers, including school-children in its collection drives. Clothes will [...]

WaterHealth International, a private company and Acumen Fund investee, was covered in last week’s online BusinessWeek, which also includes a video featuring the founder, Tralance Addy (tipped from Acumen Fund’s blog).  The company aims to “provide sustainable access to clean, safe water to all, including the poorest communities. ” Their work in India includes over [...]

Moneycontrol.com reports the launch of India’s first peer to peer microlending site, RangDe.org.  The site explains the driver behind an online forum for microloans: Rang De is a unique platform for individuals to become Social Investors and connect with borrowers of microcredit by lending small sums of money. Unique features of Rang De are: Mission [...]

Earlier this year, ThinkChange India covered the signing of MoU between TATA Sons, UC Berkeley and Cambridge University to provide opportunities for the students from these universities to take part in Tata International Social Entrepreneurship Scheme (TISES). The primary objective of TISES is to provide international students with a chance to work in community initiative [...]