Villgro, an incubator of social enterprises, has launched Wantrapreneur 2011, a social business plan competition as part of Unconvention 2011, India’s premier Innovation & Social Entrepreneurship conference.  Wantrapreneur 2011 aims to identify social enterprises that have a potential to transform rural lives. Enterprises in the start-up and early growth stages, across categories such as agriculture, [...]

The Villgro Fellowship is a one year program that builds social leaders. The program has been established by Villgro in lines with its mission of empowering rural development by identifying and incubating innovative social enterprises. In the last 3 years, 14 Villgro Fellows have brought sustainable change in the lives of the rural poor. Vision: [...]

Villgro is a social enterprise incubator based in India that enables rural development by identifying and incubating innovations that use market based models to impac thousands of rural households. We actively promote social entrepreneurship and work with different stakeholders to create and support an eco-system that empowers social entrepreneurs by means of a host of services [...]

TC-I Guest Blogger Tracy Williams lives in Hyderabad where she is working with the Naandi Foundation to launch a new social enterprise connecting smallholder coffee producers with global markets. Prior to taking the India plunge, Tracy worked at the policy team at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and on US economic policy issues with [...]

Villgro (formerly known as Rural Innovations Network) is hosting the “UNCONVENTION - Where Path Breakers Meet Path Makers” in Chennai on December 10-12, 2009.  As we wrote about before, a business plan competition called Wantrapreneur was held to select finalists, who will present one final time before the awards are announced. Besides the business plan competition and awards, the [...]

We at TC-I write about many topics from clean energy to women’s reproductive health. The space of social entrepreneurship and innovation is one that touches every aspect of one’s life. Notwithstanding we are a victim of our own sources and so our posts inevitably focus on those topics that are most commonly covered by them, [...]

This post is directly from the organization that is the subject of the post. Dreamcatchers Foundation is uniquely positioned as an incubator for developing and nurturing programs that provide the opportunity for a transformative experience for young people that serves as a turning point in their lives. The Leadership Institute and the Community Youth Institute [...]

The Global Social Venture Competition, a MBA social venture competition that partners several different universities around the world, wrapped up this past weekend at UC Berkeley Haas Business School.   The GSVC is one of the most competitive gatherings in the social enterprise world, bringing together business plans that look at both profit and social impact.  [...]

Lakshmi Krishnan of the Centre for Micro Finance, IFMR writes to us about a new opening in the organization.   This is particularly exciting for anyone interested in microfinance, research, and traveling throughout India.  Several classmates in graduate school had worked with IFMR and came away with good experiences after participating in breakthrough research. IFMR [...]

I read Atanu Dey’s take on Innovation and Entrepreneurship in India in response to a question put forward by Sramana Mitra on her blog Why is the entrepreneurial ecosystem in India not coming together as well as it needs to? Atanu makes a strong pitch for leveraging existing solutions for development, reasoning that India has not [...]