Andrew Zolli is at it again.  On Tuesday, Zolli's Pop!Tech announced its inaugural class of Social Innovation Fellows.  Biased as I am towards all things "base of the pyramid", I immediately browsed through the list of Fellows with my BoP filter on.  By my count, 7 of the 16 fellows fall under the BoP umbrella, meaning that they use market-based approaches to solve the problems of poverty.  Nice!

I have a bit of a history with Pop!Tech, having been invited by Andrew and his team to live-blog the event last year.  If Pop!Tech puts even half as much effort into this Social Innovation Fellows program as it does the conference, then it's bound to succeed.

Already, the signs point to go - just look at the program's (top-notch) advisors and faculty:

• Paul Polak, design-for-the-poor guru and founder of International Development Enterprises
• Jim Koch, Director of the Global Social Benefit Incubator at Santa Clara University
• Bunker Roy, Founder of the Barefoot College
• Clare Miller, Founder and CEO of the Nonprofit Finance Fund
• Ethan Zuckerman, Founder of Geekcorps and Global Voices and a Berkman Fellow at Harvard

The list goes on...but these are the highlights in my mind.  What social innovator WOULDN'T learn from this group?

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Guest blogger Muhan Cheng graduated from National Taiwan University with a B.S. in Chemical Engineering and received her Masters Degree in Environmental Management from the Nicholas School of the Environment, at Duke University, in 2008. She currently works as an intern with the Ecosystem Services Review Program at the World Resources Institute.

An interview by Muhan Cheng

In many developed countries, fair-trade is usually associated with products like coffee, cocoa and handicrafts from Latin America and Africa, but not usually to crafts coming from countries like China. According to the Fairtrade Foundation, at the end of 2007, there were 632 fair-trade certified producer organizations in 58 producing countries, representing 1.5 million farmers and workers.

Beijing Fair Field Co. Ltd. is one of the first social enterprises that promote the idea of fair-trade in China. The company employs women in rural areas, helps them make handicrafts that preserve the local features and sells the products to urban areas. This income-generating activity strengthens women's business skills, as well as their position in the family. Thus, Fair Field´s social enterprise model serves the objectives of women empowerment and poverty alleviation in rural areas; it runs on a not for profit self-sustaining business model.

I had the pleasure of interviewing Jan Wang, who works for the Microfinance department of China Foundation for Poverty Alleviation (CFPA) and currently serves as a vice president for Fair Field Co. Following is a summary of our conversation. 

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