The concept of microfinance - small loans to the entrepreneurial poor - is not a new one on US business school campuses. Indeed, as they expand their globally minded curricula, many business schools have devoted more time and money, and sometimes even entire courses, to the subject.

Other schools have gone a step further: the UCLA Anderson School of Management in California helps young female entrepreneurs in Kenya transform their poverty-stricken lives by starting homegrown businesses.

It all started this year when Judy Olian, the dean of Anderson, was at the Fortune Magazine/State Department International Women Leaders conference. There she met Pauline Mwangi, who trains emerging entrepreneurs in Nairobi. Ms Mwangi was creating a pilot programme, "Young Women in Enterprise", for Technoserve, the non-profit international development organisation. The aim of the programme, funded in part by the Nike Foundation, was to equip young women from low-income areas of Nairobi with business and life skills to start small businesses.