A number of recent posts on NextBillion seem to feature the Indian School of Business, and with good reason!

The Global Social Venture Competition (GSVC) is the largest student-run business plan contest in the world, which provides mentoring, exposure and prizes for social ventures from around the world. GSVC started off at the Haas School of Business at Berkeley, and since then, Columbia Business School, Yale School of Management, London Business School and the Indian School of Business have joined as partner schools. Read about the 2007 edition here.

For those of you in Asia:
This year's Asia round for the GSVC will be held at the Indian School of Business (ISB) in Hyderabad, with the preliminary deadline for submission of plans being Nov 15, 2007. The Asia round finals will be held at the ISB this between March 8-10, 2008, and the global finals will be held at Berkeley on April 18-19, 2008. So, if you're sitting on a business idea, model, concept or even an existing business which has a double or triple bottomline, and would like exposure and perhaps even seed/growth capital, head over to the ISB's GSVC Asia Round website, where you can find all the instructions necessary for submission of business plans and participation, including vital information and FAQ's for entrants.

Some advice from Prof. Reuben Abraham, judge for the 2007 finals:

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I have been following discussions inside the microfinance field, specifically regarding the Compartamos IPO.

"Carlos Danel and Carlos Labarthe, the CEOs of Compartamos, a nonprofit-cum-commercial bank which charges an annual interest rate of nearly 100 percent, believe that only the lure of profits will motivate people to lend to the poor. Today Compartamos reaches 700,000 borrowers and 88 percent of its clients come back for more loans. In 2006, it was rated as Mexico's most profitable bank”

via PSD blog and iPienso. I also read the Microfinance Gateway reports from CGAP and Microcredit Enterprises. These reports caused me to reflect upon the debate, and I came to the following conclusion: while poor people are in need of credit and willing to pay high interest rates, that in and of itself doesn’t justify charging such rates and earning huge profits out of them.

Compartamos started in 1990 as a non-profit organization lending small amounts of money to indigenous Mexican women. Today, Compartamos has turned into a giant, for-profit bank with more than 600,000 clients. Compartamos' transition from NGO to for-profit bank sparks controversy – while many indigenous women in Mexico are grateful for the programs, now the bank is targeted by critics. Among these critics are Chuck Waterfield, Jonathan Lewis, and Mohammad Yunus - Nobel Prize winner and pioneer of microfinance.

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Each year, the NYU Catherine B. Reynolds Foundation Program in Social Entrepreneurship awards up to 20 Graduate Fellowships in Social Entrepreneurship to students from across 11 NYU schools.

The Catherine B. Reynolds Foundation Program in Social Entrepreneurship is designed to attract, encourage and train a new generation of leaders in public service.

Each year, the program exposes a highly selective group of graduate and undergraduate students from throughout New York University to the cross-disciplinary skills, experiences and networking opportunities needed to advance and support their efforts to realize sustainable and scalable pattern-breaking solutions to society's most intractable problems.

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