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Poster-starts-with-dream810-copy.jpg (960×753) Common Mistakes Made By Social Entrepreneurs | Business Plan Writer | Startup Consultant | The Startup Garage | San Diego. Damascus Fortune - Home. GSMA mWomen Design Challenge. The making of sanitary napkins at the Barefoot College. Unreasonable Institute Marketplace: Greenway Grameen Infra.

What is the urgent social or environmental need you are addressing? Over 700 million people in India & 3 billion people globally lack access to modern cooking fuel, requiring them to cook using solid biomass fuels (mostly wood & cow dung) on rudimentary mud stoves or open fires. Cooking in this manner is dangerous – household air pollution from indoor cooking causes 4 million deaths throughout the world, every year, and is the #1 health risk factor in all of South Asia. The particulate matter released from this cooking method causes lung cancer, heart and lung disease, pneumonia, meningitis, and low birth weight in infants. It also expensive: wood must either be collected or paid for, wasting the productive hours of rural women or draining family income, respectively.

As a result, rural households pay a much higher percentage of income on cooking fuel than urban households do. Cooking with mud stoves or open fires is also severely damaging to the environment. Convince us it will work. Unreasonable Institute Marketplace: MPrep. What is the urgent social or environmental need you are addressing? In Kenya, 6 million of the 9 million students now in primary school will fail. In rural areas, more than 2/3 fail, with more than 80% of girls failing. Millions of kids are powerless without basic skills to find viable jobs. Within rural areas 3-5 million students are without basic school resources. Class sizes are more than 60 students per teacher, personal attention is absent, and schools have no student data until it’s too late.

Communication among stakeholders is often nil. From the hundreds of teachers I’ve worked with and as a teacher myself, I’ve found that what schools need is quality resources and a simple means to communicate. What is your solution to this need? Ultimately, MPrep attacks student failure by offering high quality content, data resources, and a means for schools to rally around student achievement on a centralized platform. Convince us it will work. To date MPrep has: Unreasonable Institute Marketplace: Chaupal.

What is the urgent social or environmental need you are addressing? India’s public health system is over-whelmed with patients but suffers from poor infrastructure. Its private clinics are too expensive, concentrated in city centers and focused on tertiary care when the actual demand is for basic primary and secondary care. According to the WHO, the country has some of the poorest maternal and infant mortality rates and one of the highest incidences of needless blindness. 20% of the world’s maternal deaths occur in India. All it would take to eradicate this? A facility that provides inexpensive, basic deliveries, child care consultations and 15-minute cataract surgeries in a clean environment to a regular family where an expecting mother visits the doctor along with her infant and a family elder typically suffering from age-related eye problems.

What is your solution to this need? The non-profit operations will be sustained by CSR grants and generate foot traffic for the hospital. Unreasonable Institute Marketplace: Trash to Cash. What is the urgent social or environmental need you are addressing? The World Bank states that even after more than fifteen years of economic reforms in India, the employment gap for persons with disability is increasing since they often lack access to education and training.

About 99% are jobless and 99.5% do not go to school. This downward spiral continues as parents of disabled children consider education a waste of time as there are no jobs (results of interviews with 10000 poor families). We train people with disability in traditional Indian crafts and upcycle waste (reduces raw material costs) into quality products. This enterprise specifically addresses the inclusion of persons with intellectual disability in work. What is your solution to this need? Convince us it will work. Last year we generated an income of $90000, have provided employment to 84 persons with intellectual, hearing, visual and orthopedic disabilities and have recycled many tons of waste. About Madhumita Puri. 74 For-Profit Purpose Organizations - From Sustainable Plant Systems to Market Poverty Initiatives. 77 Social Businesses in India - From Technological Irrigation Systems to Tax-Deductible Travel. These social businesses in India prove more to the claim that the country is steadily emerging as a hot bed in the ever growing sphere of social entrepreneurship.

This list comes after the Guardian Social Enterprise Network's Pathik Pathak, a lecturer at the University of Southampton wrote a piece on the International Hub called "Social Enterprise in India Makes Steady Progress. " Progress is a tricky word -- because of the liberal-ness that is implied. But we must ask: progress how? Progress for who? It's also at times problematic to talk about the scenes in India and, say, the United Kingdom as two entirely separate ecosystems. Lessons from a Failed Social Entrepreneur - Mike McGlade. Mission | Nest. Nest is a nonprofit dedicated to identifying and collaborating with responsible artisan businesses through implementation of training and business development. This collaboration enables each enterprise to become profitable as well as have significant positive social impact. We have searched globally to create a network of existing artisanal workshops with strong leadership, that are scalable, and can transform their communities in one of three ways: by alleviating poverty, empowering women, and/or promoting peace.

Through a participatory model, we work with artisans to provide services they need to both preserve and enhance artistic traditions as well as increase the ability to meet the capacity and quality demands of the exporting marketplace. In turn, we are given access to small batch, finely crafted goods by master artisans. Team | Nest. Pearltrees Extension. Socialsync.in. About | Social Innovation Hub (Beta) Social Innovation Hub: Builds a support network for social entrepreneurs with a vision to right a wrongSpawns a rich culture of ideas exchange between the like-mindedFacilitates meaningful partnerships among people willing to work on similar ideasPools information and opportunities to build a collective resource reservoirCreates meaningful connections that are sustained beyond events or publications Imagine yourself building a team of supporters and advisors for your ideas that are aside from your current family and friends.

They can help you convert your ideas to initiatives. You are not vulnerable in front of them; they are not judges, harsh critiques or competitors. “My message to you all is of hope, courage and confidence. Lets make a collective force at SOCIAL INNOVATION HUB to revitalize and revive our inspirations and energies towards making Pakistan a place it was envisioned to be. So let’s get going – how about SIGNING UP today? Bandhan :Philosophy. Mumbai Mentors. Shaheen Mistri was an 18 year-old American on vacation in India, when she came face-to-face with a level of despair that changed her life.

In Mumbai she saw that slum children get a rotten deal when it comes to school; no water, few working toilets, absent teachers and desks without chairs. In most schools, there is little or no hope of learning English, the best ticket to a job in this bustling city. Combine this with the general hardships of slum life in Mumbai-- a shanty for a home that regularly gets bulldozed, inadequate drinking water, hunger, rampant disease and infection, high rates of domestic abuse and alcoholism-- and you wonder how half of the children manage to make it to fifth grade.

"If we believe that our future lies in the hands of our children, this presents a staggering problem; In Mumbai alone, 2.3 million children live in slums and on the streets.” Shaheen Mistri The children, with all of their untapped energy and potential, came running. Biofuels. Biofuels, like biodiesel and bioethanol, are derived from biomass (plants and other organic wastes) and they provide a safe and sustainable alternative to using fossil fuels to power vehicles and machinery.

In rural areas biofuels can be used in mechanised milling and small scale electrification systems. In cities, they are widely used for transport, thereby reducing the damage caused by greenhouse gas emissions. GVEP is supporting a number of biofuel initiatives across Africa and the Caribbean. Biofuel from hydro-fat waste in Suriname N.V.VSH Foods is a prominent hydro-fats manufacturer, supplying both the local and regional market in Paramaribo, Northern Suriname.

GVEP has been helping them grow their business and make it more cost efficient. To reduce operating costs, VSH started using their waste fats and oils to make biodiesel to power their boilers. Biofuel from banana waste in the Caribbean This project thanks to a grant awarded by the 2009 IDEAS Energy Innovation Contest.