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Wednesday, Sep. 7, 2011
The in-residence component of our signature Global Social Benefit Incubator concluded last week, with 18 field-based social entrepreneurs returning to their 9 countries to implement the business plans they developed while at Santa Clara University. The culmination of their two weeks on campus is always the business plan presentations, attracting a diverse and high-level audience of over 350.
Each of the social entrepreneurs has 15 minutes to present their business plan to a panel of Silicon Valley leaders, after which they receive feedback and have only a moment to respond. The Center videotapes the presentations so that the social entrepreneurs can continue learning from the experience. Our goal is to help more social entrepreneurs help more of the global poor, with a “big hairy audacious goal” of positively impacting the lives of 1B by 2020 – 25% of the current global poor. The UN projects an additional 2 B people on the planet by 2050, with all but 50 M in the developing world. Successful and sustainable social enterprises act as nuclei for economic growth in the communities they serve. By doing so, they essentially create emerging markets.
The GSBI exemplifies what I call “practical social justice.” The 18 social entrepreneurs we heard from last Thursday did not offer theories about how to change the world: they showed us how it’s done.
Imagine a world where the 1.5 B people 'off the grid' – in Africa, Latin America, Asia, India – have light for children to read and parents to work after night falls; where people can charge their mobile phones without traveling all day; where sustainably generated power can be sustainably stored; where smallholder dairy farmers can keep their cows’ milk cold long enough to sell it; where the very poor in Haiti can cook using 40% less fuel, reducing deforestation at the same time. Imagine a world without energy poverty.
Imagine a world where Filipino women living near garbage dumps; or Roma, also known as Gypsies, in Slovakia; or African slum youth; can all earn a living wage and be proud of their work.
Imagine a world where West Africans earn a living growing biofuels for their own communities; where solar lanterns light up East African villages through an Avon-style model, employing local women.
Imagine a world where the voiceless, poorest of the poor in India can tell their stories to the world, and effect change in their own communities.
Imagine a world where even, or especially, the unbanked can use their mobile phones for secure financial transactions with any merchant; where Filipino microenterprise owners can scale their businesses to a living income while providing essential goods and services.
Imagine a world where rural Haitians can sustainably grow their own protein-rich food; where poor Mexican children have enough micronutrients for their brains to develop. Imagine a world of healthy people.
If you can imagine all of the above, thank you for joining us; if you cannot, you missed a unique opportunity to see how these dreams are becoming reality through the vision and very hard work of the 2011 cohort of GSBI social entrepreneurs.
I was honored, and humbled, to be in their company. Each of them is an amazing human. Collectively, they are the promise of a more just, humane, and sustainable world.
Next year will mark the 10th anniversary of the GSBI. Mark your calendars for the August 23, 2012 business plan presentations, a window into how to change the world for the better.
List of this year's GSBI social entrepreneurs
Posted by Thane Kreiner, Ph.D., executive director of the Center for Science, Technology, and Society at Santa Clara University |
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Wednesday, Aug. 17, 2011
The 2011 Global Social Benefit Incubator (GSBI) cohort features 18 social enterprises from 14 countries around the world, includes 8 women entrepreneurs, and 8 enterprises from Africa, our highest representation in both categories. In addition, 2011 marks the second year of our focus on renewable energy for the underserved; more than half of the 2011 cohort comes from this sector.
The press has been as impressed with our entrepreneurs as we are. Check out these great stories featuring 3 social entrepreneurs from this year's GSBI class.
The GSBI empowers socially-minded entrepreneurs to build sustainable, scalable organizations that solve problems for people living in poverty around the world. Since its inception in 2003, the GSBI has mentored nearly 140 entrepreneurs from more than 20 countries. More than 90% of these ventures are still extant, more than 50% are scaling, and collectively they’ve positively impacted the lives of over 70 million people in base-of-pyramid communities.
Social entrepreneurs who apply and win GSBI scholarships participate in an experiential capacity development program that combines online and in-residence exercises with training and mentoring from academic leaders and Silicon Valley visionaries over an intensive 8 month period. Our mentors help social entrepreneurs sustain and scale their ventures, sell their products and services, and solve problems.
We collaborate with a diverse group of partners including successful Silicon Valley executives, foundations, government agencies, corporations, and a global network of Jesuit universities.
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Tuesday, Aug. 2, 2011
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Tuesday, Jul. 26, 2011
Each year at Santa Clara University’s Center for Science, Technology, and Society, we review hundreds of applications from social entrepreneurs who wish to participate in our fully subsidized capacity development program, the Global Social Benefit Incubator (GSBI™).The GSBI is designed for entrepreneurs in the field - including many from Africa, India, South America, and the Philippines – to access an actionable business model curriculum in just eight months.
During this year’s discovery process, we found the large number of biofuels ventures out of Africa striking. There isn’t enough arable land to feed the growing population there, distribution and other challenges aside. So why are so many field-based social entrepreneurs growing fuel in Africa instead of using the sun?
Could economics be the reason? It is well known that corn-based ethanol production in the United States has resulted in increased food costs for the developing world. In fact, the IMF reported that in 2007, almost half of the increase in production of major food crops was related to biofuels. And, European energy companies may pay for source materials, as evidenced by the Agroils model, a social enterprise that produces sustainable biofuels from non-edible forestry species.
But we do not believe that economic reasons alone are driving African biofuel social enterprises. Our experience with more than 40 ventures in the sector reveals that a large majority of social entrepreneurs are delivering power directly to the communities they serve, not supplying power to the developed world.
An advantage of our practice orientation is that we can ask the social entrepreneurs naïve questions, and they give us great latitude, as well as deep insights. Why grow biofuels in an environment that is much better suited to technologies such as solar power generation? The answer is in the context: many African governments impose enormous tariffs on the importation of solar panels. Solar thus becomes an untenable technology solution for local energy production.
In an informal discussion, one of our professors at Santa Clara, Alexander J. Field, Ph.D., the Michael and Mary Orradre professor of economics and author of the book A Great Leap Forward, proposed two alternative drivers for the governmental tariffs:
1. Corruption: a known factor in African politics. Just this week,Omidyar Network announced $5 million to fund organizations that foster government accountability and transparency in Africa. But is corruption the entire rationale behind the development of biofuels?
2. Innovation stimulation: could the local governments be driving innovation by making solar panels cost prohibitive? Again, this contextual factor may contribute to the implementation of tariffs in Africa, and may work well for some needs of the underserved (such as agriculture) but have unintended negative consequences for technology diffusion in cases of extreme economies of scale, e.g., solar panel manufacturing.
The answers are not black and white. In a recent New York Times article, Anand Giridharadas poses a hypothesis that ‘Real Change Requires Politics.’ We’ve experienced this first hand at the GSBI. The bottom line is that in order to effectively help social entrepreneurs solve issues for those living at the base of the pyramid, we need to better understand the contextual factors, including politics, which influence the successful adoption of optimal technology solutions and business models.
Posted by Thane Kreiner, Ph.D., executive director of the Center for Science, Technology, and Society at Santa Clara University |
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Monday, Jul. 25, 2011
On Thursday, over 20 representatives from academic institutions and international NGOs tuned into a NetHope sponsored webinar that presented a new mobile health tool developed by our very own Frugal Innovation Mobile Health (mHealth) Lab. The featured tool: a cell phone application that can collect, store, and upload customizable forms for use by rural health workers all over the world.
Webinar participants were encouraged to test the software themselves as a way of advancing the troubleshooting process and prepare the application for use in the field. This webinar was the first in series intended to showcase and test the products developed for CHP as they roll off the virtual assembly line.
Stay tuned to the Frugal Innovation Initiative’s Mobile Health Lab to see what they come up with next.
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