Doodh Bhandar (DB), a plan focused on revolutionizing milk production in rural India, has reached the finals of the Harvard Business School (HBS) Business Plan Contest in the Social Enterprise track. Cattle are one of the most important assets for rural families in India and an improvement in their productivity will have a significant socio-economic [...]

Editors’ note: The ThinkChange India staff is committed to providing our readers with first-hand insights from groundbreaking changemakers. Readers will be able to see other conversations under our TC-I Changemakers and Change-Agent tags. This week, Vinay sat down (over the phone) with Dheeraj Batra of Innosight Ventures, a unique venture capital firm that employs the [...]

This year, I’m helping to run the Harvard International Development Conference (IDC) at the Harvard Kennedy School.  It promises to be an exciting event, with panel topics ranging from the role of mobile technology as a means of alleviating poverty to private sector-led, entrepreuneurial models for development.  If you intend on attending the conference, please [...]

Looking for interesting conferences to attend over the course of the next two months? Well, look no further! Below are three upcoming conferences that we recommend you attend – The Harvard Business School Social Enterprise Conference (March 1, 2009), The Harvard Business School India Business Conference (March 15, 2009), and the Harvard Kennedy School International [...]

TCI had mentioned the StartingBloc fellowship earlier, and this past weekend, I had the opportunity to attend the Greater Boston institute at MIT Sloan and Tufts Fletcher School.  To provide some background on StartingBloc, the organization holds three institutes in Boston, New York and London, whose goal is to bring together a cadre of 150 young leaders with a passion for social innovation. [...]

iDiscoveri is a social enterprise working towards ushering in change in society by reviving education in India. It is doing this by working at different levels of the education system. It is looking out Business Development Professionals. Read more about it below. iDiscoveri – a social enterprise with a mission to renew education in India -  [...]

The Center for Innovative Financial Design (CIFD), housed inside IFMR, Chennai is dedicated to Designing financial products to bridge the gap between the financial needs and the financial access of the rural poor. The Center Centre creates and tests novel financial products that improve financial access for the poor and works in close partnership with the newly formed [...]

Editor’s Note: Aparna Dalal works with the Financial Access Initiative, a research consortium between New York University, Harvard, Yale, and Innovations for Poverty Action. FAI is focused on finding answers to how financial services can better meet the needs of poor households. FAI aims to provide rigorous research on the impacts of financial access and [...]

Recently, I attended a talk by Acumen Fund Fellow and Harvard Kennedy School alumna, Catherine Casey, who worked in Kenya with the Sustainable Healthcare Foundation, a micro-franchise healthcare and drug distribution chain based in Nairobi, Kenya. The Acumen Fund fellowship is a relatively new program, with a vast array of opportunities in India. Just this [...]

Want to be part of a group of emerging leaders and learn about the latest innovations in corporate social responsibility and social entrepreneurship? Apply to StartingBloc! StartingBloc’s mission begins by training tomorrow’s most promising young leaders with a new mindset towards value creation. Each year, working with an admission committee composed of MBA admissions directors, [...]