Ordinary citizens (usually in the developed world) make a small loan to one of Kiva's vetted entrepreneurs (usually also ordinary people, this time in the developing world). We're talking about as little as $25, a similar amount to an average charitable donation. The transaction is facilitated by PayPal, which forgoes its usual fees.

Those individual $25 loans are combined into a larger sum (as of 31 August, the average loan made is $469.95) and that sum sent to a microfinance institution "on the ground", who pass on the money and general help and advice to the entrepreneur.

The loans made through Kiva now exceed $41 million, from 331,372 lenders. Oh, and the repayment rate is an impressive 98.48%. The only catch is that you don't get interest, at present, anyway.

It should be borne in mind that microfinance is not perfect - see the work of Milford Bateman, among others - but there can be little doubt that it is often has a highly positive impact, on the individual level at least. Kiva.org is a very exciting project and makes for a more tangible, targeted and perhaps more useful way for concerned citizens in the West to help encourage international development. It will appeal especially to those who prefer the "bootstraps" approach to poverty-alleviation.

Organized By: E-Cell IIT-Kharagpur

Key dates:
The online submission starts- September 15,2008.
First round submission deadline- 25 October 2008 .
Final round submission deadline- 31 December 2008 .
Final results- 18 January 2009.

For whom:
The contest is open to all Indian Citizens. Plans that have got Startup registered cannot participate. More.

Eclairez 2008-09 is a Social Entrepreneurship Challenge directed towards the empowerment of the poor citizens. This event upholds the spirit of Social Entrepreneurship by creating a platform where students, NGOs, incubators, social entrepreneurs, venture-capitalists and corporations share their ideas or views related to Social Entrepreneurship. The event includes mentorship program, field visits which spans over years. The competitors will propose a business plan which will be fine tuned by Venture Capitalist, Social Entrepreneurship before the venture takes on a full scale.

Complete event details can be obtained here.

For Details Contact:
Subhendu Panigrahi
Coordinator
+91 (99325) 74332
subhendu.panigrahi@gmail.com

Gaurav Khare
Student Manager
+91 (99325) 71917
gaurav1.iitkgp@gmail.com

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Muhammad Yunus is often referred to as "The world's banker to the poor". He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize Winner for year 2006. He is the Founder and Director of Grameen Bank, is a founding and current board member of Grameen Foundation. His life's work has been to prove that the poor are credit-worthy. His Grameen Bank system has provided financial assistance to as many as 7 million poor people and has continued its reputation in doing so. The major beneficiaries of the system were Women. This Banking system is mostly concentrated in Bangladesh one of the poor nations of the world.

The idea of Grameen Banking system was first visualized by Muhammad Yunus in year 1976 while he was a Professor of Economics at Chittagong University. "Micro-Finance" was the key-driving point for this Banking System. He was the key conceptualizer of the "Micro-Finance" system and perfect Implementer. Even the poorest of the poor can get loans from this banking system even in the absence of the collateral to gurantee the loan. The main thrust of this Banking Systme is to eradicate poverty and improve the Standards of Living.

The important characteristics of this Business Model are firstly the high recovery rate of up to about 99%, secondly provision of loans even in the absence of collaterals but under the guarantee of group thirdly the requirement of the borrowers to save a part of income to help them from getting under the clutches of poverty and Money Lenders and finally the scaling of bank to the rural level which is a big hurdle to a typical urban-oriented bank

The success of the Grameen Banking System can be assessed by the number of branches which it has grown which is about 1000 and the number of borrowers which comes to about 6.5 million borrowers. This micro-credit Business Model is being followed in as many as 100 countries including the developed and the developing Economies. Due to the success atttributed by Leading Economists in the world to the micro-credit system, the leading developed countries have also adopted this concept.

According to Muhammad Yunus firstly Social Entrepreneurship happens to be key for eradicating poverty and providing Economic Development where in both the Entrepreneur and the society are benefitted, secondly Capitalism should be projected in a manner where in economic, social, Political dimensions are embodied in it, creation of Social Stock Market happens to be important feature for increasing the network among the Social Entrepreneurs of the world.

The Tata Trusts control 65.8 per cent of the shares of Tata Sons, the holding company of the Group. The combined development-related expenditure of the Trusts and the companies amount to around four per cent of the Group's net profit, its website said.

These philanthropic trusts have created national institutions in science & technology, medical research, social studies and the performing arts.

Previous coverage on the Tata's CSR Efforts:

1. Discover your inner Social Entrepreneur on the Train
2. India’s CSR Leaders: How much can they really change?
3. A New Software that Keeps Politicians As Honest as Possible
4. Tata – Heart of Gold or Steel?

In short, Remarkd (launching this week) integrates the $700 billion marketplace eCommerce services of buying and selling online, with powerful social networking tools of communication and sharing. Kind of like "Ebay with a cause", but I'm fairly sure they are not allowed to say that.

In my non-technical lingo, that means you buy and sell online and the seller donates a percentage of the proceeds to a cause of choice. Learn more at www.Remarkd.com. And don't forget to choose The Center for Global Leadership as your cause now...

Some quick facts from Remarkd...

• 2007 Giving USA statistics highlight a $295B giving market, with the online giving segment at $10B and growing at 50%.
• "Social networking" is a very fast growing phenomenon with 1 billion members on community sites worldwide, including more than 50% of American Internet users.
• Social networking users represent the fastest growing segment of the giving population.

Very cool stuff. Peace out - Martin Fox with the Center for Global Leadership and The Higher Road Initiative.

Our goal as a team is to focus on social entrepreneurship, harnessing our creative spirit, to make the biggest social impact we can. Hopefully we will be a witness to others that EVERYONE CAN MAKE A DIFFERENCE IN OUR WORLD FOR THE BETTER!

On the other hand, the Bangalore based Narayana Hrudayalaya has been in the forefront of providing quality cardiovascular care for the poor - adopting a Aravind like model of charging the rich and subsidizing the poor. Now the hospital is experimenting with a new idea - collaborating with State Bank of India to offer loan product on a pilot basis for poor heart patients undergiong cardiac treatment [via Economic Times].

"The SBI Hrudaya Suraksha scheme is being launched as a pilot project to evaluate the concept of offering loan on easy interest terms for those below poverty line - earning less than $2 a day - who need urgent cardiac intervention," SBI chairman and managing director OP Bhat said on the occasion.

Narayana Hrudayalaya founder Devi Shetty said the loan amount (Rs.50,000) would meet about 80 per cent of the total cost (Rs.65,000) for a heart surgery of poor cardiac patients to be identified and subsidised by the hospital. The average cost of a heart surgery at Shetty's health cities is about Rs.100,000

Interestingly, the loan product was launched by Nobel Laureate Mohammad Yunus during his recent visit to Bangalore.

Rather, I suggest a universal PREVENTIVE CARE plan that guarantees every citizen will be afforded a personal regimen of preventive care treatment. Preventive care has a whole host of benefits, not least of which is reducing the ultimate cost of health care by eliminating high-cost failures before they happen. Preventive care is essential to providing individuals with the regular health guidance they need to make more accountable health choices and achieve early identification of potentially dangerous conditions. A national preventive care program could also push individuals to augment the national preventive care program with private emergency care insurance that could more accurately reflect the costs of riskier health choices - further encouraging individuals to recognize the high cost of smoking, overeating, and other dangerous health habits.

One doctor from the University of Virginia's hospital recently briefed MBA students at the Darden Graduate School of Business about her concept for starting a preventive clinic for women. She struggled to put together a financial model that supported ongoing operations due to the expensive nature of the medical professionals required to staff such a clinic and the unreliability of patients making and keeping appointments. As she pointed out, it is often the individuals at the highest risk that are least likely to seek preventive care. But she spoke convincingly about the need for addressing obesity-related illnesses like diabetes and heart conditions and providing care in an environment targeted at the needs of a specific group - in this case, women. In order to make her dream come true and support the development of a nationally-guaranteed preventive care program, I recommend the federal government specify programs of preventive care at guaranteed rates that can be financed through the existing employee insurance benefit channels and individual insurance plans with federal incentives to spur the creation of a preventive medicine industry.

My national preventive care plan calls for funding a new vocation of PMDs - preventive medicine doctors - that are trained more heavily than nurses but less so than surgeons and other MD specialists. Such preventive care specialists would function much more like counselors or, as I prefer, "health coaches" than surgeons, providing individual care and guidance through a regular pattern of interaction and accountability. Earning potential could likely mirror the moderate educational requirements - more than nurses, less than emergency room MDs, further enabling a lower cost of health care in this country.

This would spur the creation of new jobs, new educational positions, and innovative new business models as preventive health clinics begin operations. States would be empowered (as they are currently) to license practitioners and regulate the industry. The United States would continue its position of leadership in medicine as it explores the most effective means of preventive care, offering an example to other nations of how to care for the individual without commandeering services by the state.

Since this is not a nationalization of all health care risks but only the transfer of use-it-or-lose-it basic preventive care, this should amount to a financial risk sharing instrument between the federal government, which would indicate essential standards for qualified preventive care, and private health insurance which would continue to underwrite the risk for additional emergency care. The private insurance companies would gain regular checkup information through preventive care visits, allowing the insurance companies to more accurately price the risk of a patient's future care.

I'm no expert in health care but I've come to believe in the sensibility of federal guidelines for preventive care and financing to create the industry of practitioners, so I'd be curious to hear your thoughts on this idea of universal preventive care guaranteed for citizens.

The first of them, Shai Agassi, I originally heard about in an Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders podcast (do try them out - they're amazing!) and was quite impressed by his way of speaking about how he attempts to solve global warming. He doesn't think small and nimble - no he believes in a full out, complete shift in paradigm. He says that the only viable solution to solve a problem of this complexity.

Then we have Mohammed Yunus, Nobel peace price winner, who started almost infinitely small - with one $27 dollar loan - which he then followed up with another and another and so on. He solved a small, manageable problem and continued on to the next logical step. There wasn't a grand plan to fix poverty, it was just a plan to help a group of women.

Both took quite different approaches - but who's right? You might say, this is all depending on the type of the problem - and even though I'd agree in principle, in practice I don't see humans acting this way. It seems to me that most people I meet, including myself, seems to prefer to find grand scale solutions.

In Silicon Valley in 98-99 it was all about the grand plans, in Silicon Valley 08-09 it's all about the small and scalable. Solving poverty was long the realm of large NGOs and government bodies, today social entrepreneurship is all the rage. When to apply what strategy?

My guess would be a combination of the two, I'll be back in 20 years when I figured it out.

The latest phase of our campaign to normalise condom use in India the BBC World Service Trust has just launched a mobile phone ringtone campaign to promote the use of condoms.

The ringtone campaign is part of a wider mass media campaign by BBC World Service Trust to prevent transmission of HIV in India and highlight safe sex practices. The project is funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

While TV, Radio and Print are used widely for socially-relevant messaging, this is probably the first time the cellphone ringtones are being used as a medium for creating awareness on a social issue. This is clearly a smart move, given that as of June 2008, a stunning 25% of India's population had access to a cellphone.

Check out the video below. You can also download the ringtone here.

The name clearly conveys the objective of the initiative - innovating in design to gain advantage in terms of cost - which in turn helps the product being available to a larger chunk of the population. Their mission is

To treat the poor as customers, not as charity recipients. We believe in listening to the needs the poor tell us about, not assuming we know best. We believe in products and services designed for specific cultural contexts, not just Western hand-me-downs. And we believe that careful attention to design can create innovative-and extremely affordable-solutions to the problems of the other 90%.

Exactly the same idea as espoused by BoP approach. The center believes it is high time that we start designing and creating products and services for less fortunate chunk of the society.

An interesting project being undertaken is Embrace - an infant incubator that costs around USD 25. The project also won the 2008 Echoing Green Fellowship. Needless to say in a country like India, where medical facilities, especiall at the rural level, leave much to be desired, innovations like these will help India correct the currenly skewed social indicators. They are currently preparing for clinical trials in - you guessed it right - India :)

Read more about product here. Also do read about other ongoing projects under Entreprenurial Design for Extreme Affordability.

I am taking a great new class with Phil Auerswald called simply, Social Entrepreneurship. Like most classes in Mason's School of Public Policy, there is a great diversity of students (by areas of interest, age, nationality, etc.) and it highlights the great pull that the idea of social entrepreneurship has to many people. (the notion of creating self-sustaining entities that provide social value)

Our first week was spent discussing the concept of social value and how it compares to producer and consumer value. (Phil is an economist by training) We discussed some interesting cases of social entrepreneurs and commercial entrepreneurs and wondered whether social entrepreneurs can/will ever have the impact that commercial entrepreneurs do have.

Obviously, this debate is not really important as different times, places, and societies will need the social value created by both types of entrepreneurs. Moreover, there may be places where only social entrepreneurs can tread. A great case to familiarize yourself with that of Aravind Eye Hospitals in India. This social venture was created after an Indian eye doc retired in 1976. It has cured blindness in over 2 million poor Indians since then!

I will share more thoughts and learnings on social entrepreneurship as we go forward, but my gut is that this activity has gone on forever, however something in our global socio-economic system (including the massive wealth created in the Western Democracies) has made these types of activities more the norm. (check out How to Change the World by David Bornstein to learn more about the growth of this sector).

Also, Phil shared a link via email about the 5th Annual Global Social Entrepreneurship Competition run out of the University of Washington Foster School of Business. Check it out. Deadline to apply is November 12, 2008.

India needs people who are passionate about working towards social causes – for the "upliftment" of the underprivileged sections of the society or for fighting social evils or for dousing communal fires … there is no end to goals that can be achieved. These people should ideally have the skills and the spirit of an entrepreneur as that will be necessary to successfully create social wealth in the country.

There are quite a few people who will fit the above description but a number of them generally require that one spark or that one defining thought to motivate them to take the so-called ‘plunge’. Can you encourage them enough?!!

A Design to Encourage Social Entrepreneurship

Nature of work: The design could be just a visual or a combination of slogan and a visual. The design will be ultimately printed on:

1. T-shirts

2. Coffee Mugs

Target Audience: Men and women in the age range of 18 years to 35 years.

Target Geography: India

Reward Amount: INR 5,000

The winner will be featured as a unique talent on creADivity.com

Last Date for submission: 15^th September, 2008, 11:59 p.m.

[Send to modulator@creADivity.com]

A Strategy Essay to Encourage Social Entrepreneurship

Nature of work: An 800 word strategy essay on encouraging social entrepreneurship in India.

Target Audience: Men and women in the age range of 18 years to 35 years.

Target Geography: India

Reward Amount: INR 5,000

The winner will be featured as a unique talent on creADivity.com

Last Date for submission: 15th September, 2008, 11:59 p.m.

[Send to modulator@creADivity.com]

All material submitted in the competition will be deemed a property of creADivity