The Development Through Enterprise and NextBillion.net team is happy to welcome Lauren Abendschein to WRI.  Lauren will be working with us for 5 weeks - the length of Oberlin College's winter term.  She will graduate from Oberlin with a B.Mus. this spring and finish up her B.A. in Politics in Kenya next fall. She was an intern at Ashoka's Integrated Technology Initiative last summer. In 2005, Lauren was the project manager for a grant application to the NIH. She was also an intern in the marketing department at Bloomberg. Lauren has been a leader for Amnesty International chapters in high school and at college. Next semester, she will be teaching an ExCo (student led course) on Social Entrepreneurship at Oberlin.
 
She loves to travel, hike, perform and listen to music, and make chocolate desserts. Though her primary instrument is the French Horn, she's very interested in non-Western music and instruments, particularly the Kora and Sitar.

Taking a page from Thomas Friedman’s The World is Flat, a group of business students in India are piloting a new idea to share some of the data processing wealth of India’s urban centers with its villagers. The team, Profits for People (also known as ProGreen), has developed a model whereby small rural and semi-urban cooperatives can do the data-entry and conversion services of large Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) companies at a fraction of the cost.