[The weekly wrap] The top social entrepreneurship stories from the week that went by
Every week we bring you the best social entrepreneurship stories from around the world. This week we have stories about a social entrepreneur who plans on ending extreme poverty globally, good news from 2013 brought to you by Bill Gates, how three IIT students plan to offer affordable drinking water in public places and four lessons from the world’s most famous social entrepreneur.
Enjoy the read.
1) How One Entrepreneur Plans To End Extreme Poverty Globally:
Jake Harriman, founder of Nuru International, believes he can end extreme poverty globally in the next 30 years.
Here’s Nuru’s modus operandi: The social enterprise starts by identifying a local business, with a top team that has the potential to scale. Nuru provides financial support and mentoring, grows the business and reinvests the profits back into the community.
2) Bill Gates: Good News You Might Have Missed in 2013
Gates believes that 2013 was a good year for social development indicators as there were improvements on a number of fronts. The world got better and smarter with fighting polio, child mortality went down, poverty rate went down, rich countries are re-committing to fight global disease.
3) Merrill taps rich investors for ex-convict social-impact bond
Merrill Lynch and U.S. Trust raised $13.5 million over 60 days to invest in a social-impact bond that will finance a program to lower recidivism rates among ex-convicts in New York.
The investors included former U.S. Treasury Secretary Lawrence Sommers, Utah philanthropist James Sorenson, hedge fund founder Bill Ackman’s Pershing Square Foundation, and the Laura and John Arnold foundation.
Three students from IIT Madras won the second place in the National Students Challenge 2013 for their social enterprise Amrutdhara. Their plan? To offer clean drinking water for Rs.3 at public places like railway stations.
Muhammad Yunus is a pioneer in the world of social entrepreneurship and his efforts have won him the Nobel Peace prize. Here are four lessons based on his philosophy.
6) Why 2014 Will See a Surge in Social Change:
2014 is being positioned as a year that will see an increase in social good initiatives. These include civic tech trendsetting, more support for and from social impact bonds, the rise of social enterprise incubators and data for good.
7) Hyderabad institute launches social entrepreneurship program with Columbia University
The Institute of Management Technology, Hyderabad has announced a one-of-a-kind joint ‘Social Entrepreneurship’ program with Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA). The program was inaugurated on January 1 and will commence from January 2 and go on until January 18, 2014.
8) 10 must-watch documentaries with impactful stories about India
Documentaries are a rich source of information and inspiration but now they can also serve the purpose of bringing to the fore certain highly-sensitive topics, and in engaging society. The conventional, old and boring narrative is gone. The idea is to make documentaries informative as well as entertaining by using personal narratives, which, in a way, engages the audiences. This is happening with filmmakers using documentaries as tools for social change by being direct and challenging the status quo in society and questioning government policies, among other issues.