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Aravind Eye Hospital, founded by Dr Govindappa Venkataswamy and Thulasiraj D. Ravilla in 1976, has treated over 2.3 million outpatients and performed over 2.7 lakh surgeries in 2006-07, almost two-thirds of them for free.

Bunker Roy’s Barefoot College, which began in 1972, has turned thousands of school dropouts in rural areas into "barefoot" doctors, teachers, engineers, architects, designers and communicators.

The 1972-born Self-Employed Women’s Association, a brainchild of Ela Bhatt, is India’s largest union that offers its members — poor, self-employed women — an astonishing array of financial, health, childcare, insurance, legal, vocational and education services.

Social entrepreneurs are to social change what business entrepreneurs are to the economy. They are the driven, creative individuals who question the status quo, harness new — often overlooked — opportunities, refuse to give up and remake the world for the better; and increasingly, they are filling the void left by the failures of governments and bureaucracies.

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What does a $20 donation do for Ashoka?

A $20 donation represents much more to us than just the money. It means that the investor, begins to explore the field of social entrepreneurship. It means one more person becomes aware of the powerful work of social entrepreneurs around the world and it means one more person will hopefully be inspired to create social change. And of course, it also helps provide support to Ashoka Fellows and gives them the freedom to pursue her/his idea. Once launched, the impact will grow and multiply for decades. And success will provide a powerful role model encouraging many, many others to step up and become change-makers. That is the enduring value of a donation to Ashoka.

What is Social Entrepreneurship?

Whenever society is stuck or has an opportunity to seize a new opportunity, it needs an entrepreneur to see the opportunity and then to turn that vision into a realistic idea and then a reality and then, indeed, the new pattern all across society. We need such entrepreneurial leadership at least as much in education and human rights as we do in communications and hotels. This is the work of social entrepreneurs. Social entrepreneurship is the field Ashoka has been building for 27 years that helps the world’s most promising new ideas and the social entrepreneurs behind them get started, succeed over their long life cycles, work and collaborate together through the local to global community we are building. The field and Ashoka also must deal with its major structural needs--for example, the urgent need for a far more effective financial system, one analogous to the competitive, rapidly responsive, and therefore highly diverse system that serves business. We are also now demonstrating how the world’s leading social entrepreneurs can entrepreneur together, a giant step beyond and greatly reinforcing the work of each individual entrepreneur.

What was your first entrepreneurial venture?

A fourth-grade newspaper, typewritten, with as many carbon copies as could be squeezed into the machine.

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To view this article with product design diagrams and graphics, click here.

MIT’s D-Lab can turn a plastic baby bottle into lab equipment and refashion a toilet as a chlorination system. Here’s how its low-cost, low-tech solutions are saving lives around the world.

MIT is often thought of as a high-tech clubhouse, a play space for brilliant thinkers who churn out one world-changing innovation after the next. MIT brainiacs have brought us everything from vital advances in high-speed photography and internet architecture to robots with artificial intelligence. But not all of their solutions are mind-numbingly complex. What use is an electrical invention if you live in a community that doesn’t have the reliable power to use it, or a fragile device in an area where it’s almost impossible to find spare parts?

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Bill Gates’ address at Harvard’s commencement ceremony this year brought much-needed attention to the idea of ‘creative capitalism’. Talking about the world’s sharpest inequities, Gates convinced his audience that the answer to them lies in making markets work better for the poor. In his words, creative capitalism is about "stretching the reach of market forces so that more people can make a profit, or at least make a living, serving people who are suffering from the worst inequities."

The need for creative capitalism arises from the basic workings of free-market corrupt-state economies - most developing world economies - where the poor have neither any power in the market nor any voice in the system. In India 125,000 children lose their lives every year to Rotavirus, a preventable disease, vaccination against which costs a few thousand rupees. This is 300 times the number of people who die in a plane crash worldwide every year.

But while Boeing and Airbus spend millions of dollars and work relentlessly to make their aircraft safer, no company is rewarded immediately for investing heavily in research that makes Rotavirus vaccination affordable to the mass potential consumer base in the developing world.

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Not long ago, an unnamed global corporation decided that it wanted to help children in the southern African nation of Namibia -- and so it spent millions to donate scores of new computers and television sets for the classrooms in a particular region of this poverty-plagued, mostly rural nation.

They should have talked to someone like Jonathan Johnnidis first. Currently pursuing his doctoral studies at the University of Pennsylvania with a focus on virology, Johnnidis recently spent time in rural Namibia working to improve healthcare with a non-governmental agency (NGO) called WorldTeach. The rural aid worker had information the large corporate benefactor apparently did not -- that there is no electricity grid in that region.

Johnnidis drew a sharp contrast between that misguided project and another, more successful partnership between Namibia and the government of Germany, which was once colonial ruler of the African nation and now is helping to build miles of new roadways there.

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DIRSI (Regional Dialogue on the Information Society) has released the final draft on its report about mobile phones and poverty in Latin America and The Caribbean. The report abstract notes that access to telephony for low-income groups is largely based on different strategies of use around mobile telephony.

The main goal of this research project was to understand the strategies employed by the poor in Latin America and the Caribbean to access and use mobile telephony services, as well as to identify the major market and regulatory barriers for increased penetration and usage. More generally it investigated how access to mobile telephony contributes to improving the livelihoods of the poor.

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Sensing a huge potential in the mass segment, foreign banking major Barclays Bank will soon launch a banking product aimed at the unbanked and under-banked segment in the country.

Unlike its other foreign peers which entered the Indian market by tapping high networth clients, Barclays, a late entrant, believes there is a fortune to be made at the bottom of the pyramid.

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...But nearly three years later, only about 2,000 students in pilot programs have received computers from the One Laptop project. An order from Uruguay for 100,000 machines appears to be the only solid deal to date with a country, although Mr. Negroponte says he's on the verge of sealing an order from Peru for 250,000. The first mass-production run, which began this month in China, is for 300,000 laptops, tens of thousands of which are slated to go to U.S. consumers. Mr. Negroponte's goal of 150 million users by the end of 2008 looks unattainable.

Mr. Negroponte's ambitious plan has been derailed, in part, by the power of his idea. For-profit companies threatened by the projected $100 price tag set off at a sprint to develop their own dirt-cheap machines, plunging Mr. Negroponte into unexpected competition against well-known brands such as Intel Corp. and Microsoft Corp.'s Windows operating system.

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Spanish language magazine Compromiso Empresarial (Oct. 2007) has two pieces specifically focused on the importance and growth of BOP markets worldwide:

En el Punto de Mira: "Somos Pobres, Pero Somos Muchos"
(Spanish only)

Entrevista con Rob Katz
(Spanish only)

Please see the attached files, or access the articles online.

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Business Strategy Review
Autumn 2007

"Value at the Bottom of the Pyramid"
By Juan Luis Martinez and María Carbonell

C.K. Pralahad's book, "The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid"—about those with an annual income of $2,000 or less—is the inspiration behind the first of two articles from London Business School's journal. The authors look at how firms can tap this fortune. They pointedly state that companies should work with (rather than extract money from) the poor, and avoid a paternalistic approach.

Codensa, a Colombian energy firm, is presented as a case study. Needing to expand its market, Codensa turned its attention to the informal economy and came up with a successful strategy that let poor customers buy appliances on credit, repaying the loan via their energy bills.

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