Social ROI: A Social Entrepreneurship Blog

In case you read this blog only through RSS, we decided to refresh the site.  Some content and links needed to be moved around. Please let me know if you spot any issues.  You can reach us via the contact form.

Also, we’ve doing some refreshing in the office and have to give a shout out to a new office product that we’ve been trying out- this wifi enabled Brother laser printer (which replaced a Brother laser printer we loved but it didn’t have wifi). We’ve been plugging in our laptops to print, which was a big hassle, but no more of that!

More than 300 social entrepreneurs, a plethora of international and regional investors, funding agencies, corporate houses, and philanthropic organizations will come together on Tuesda, April 28, 2009 in Mumbai in an event that will change the landscape of social investing in India. Come and be a part of this landmark event!

Sankalp (English: Pledge or Determination) is India’s first Social Enterprise and Investment Forum with the primary goal of bringing together various stakeholders sharing a common conviction that capital should be invested to create multiple bottom-line returns (financial, social and environmental) and not exclusively financial (profit-maximizing) or social (philanthropic) returns.

Set against the background in India, where 924.1 million Indians (nearly 95% of India’s population) have incomes below USD 3000 per annum in local purchasing power, and 78% of this from rural India, India has been able to clock growth rates between 6.5% and 7% despite the slowdown. India presents us with questions of development coupled with the unlimited potential of an emerging market.

The event endeavours to recognise and award truly impactful enterprises and catalyze investments in sectors such as agriculture and rural innovations, affordable education, healthcare inclusion, environment and clean energy, and highly scalable social models.

At a time when investors are looking for sustainable returns, Sankalp presents opportunities to engage with the emerging class of impact investors and connect with evolving yet investible ideas in high impact sectors. The primary aim is to create a holistic ecosystem to facilitate catalytic growth in these recession proof sectors which yield lower longer term returns.

Sankalp 2009 will feature a stellar line up of thought leaders, luminaries, and speakers including Naina Lal Kidawai, CEO of HSBC India, Vijay Mahajan, CEO of Basix, Anthony Bugg Levine of Rockefeller Foundation, Gurcharan Das (former MD P&G), Sarath Naru of Venture East, and Vineet Rai, founder Aavishkar.

Sankalp Forum is the brainchild of Intellecap – a pioneer in the multiple bottom line investment industry. The key partners for the inaugural 2009 event include Rockefeller Foundation from the US, Rianta Capital from UK, National Bank for Rural and Agriculture Development (NABARD) and Rural Innovations Network (RIN).

Sankalp Forum will be held in Mumbai, India, on April 28^th at the Taj Land’s End and additional details can be found at www.SankalpForum.com

GoodCompany Ventures, a team of social finance investors and start-up experts, today announced the launch of a business incubator targeting entrepreneurs with innovative solutions to unmet social needs. The program will provide facilities, mentoring and access to a network of capital sources to qualified entrepreneurs whose business models offer investors an attractive mix of financial return and social impact. The program will culminate in a venture fair where companies will pitch their ideas to investors.

Here’s a link to their website and a link to their press release.

Standard & Poor’s launched its S&P U.S. Carbon Efficient Index, designed to measure the performance of large cap U.S. companies operating with a low carbon emissions footprint.

The index, which currently has 362 companies gleaned from the S&P 500, are selected using calculations from Trucost Plc, an environmental data gathering organization.

Link

A video from Nuru International– a 501(c)(3) organization with the mission of implementing innovative and collaborative solutions to end extreme poverty in rural communities throughout the world.

via Economist’s View:

Today’s world hunger crisis is unprecedentedly severe and requires urgent measures. Nearly one billion people are trapped in chronic hunger – perhaps 100 million more than two years ago. Spain is taking global leadership in combating hunger by inviting world leaders to Madrid in late January to move beyond words to action. With Spain’s leadership and United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon’s partnership, several donor governments are proposing to pool their financial resources so that the world’s poorest farmers can grow more food and escape the poverty trap.

According to The Chronicle, S.F.O. has partnered with 3Degrees, a San Francisco-based offsets firm that invests in clean-energy and carbon-reduction projects. The airport is supplying the kiosks and putting $163,000 into the program — and while the prices from are yet to be determined, a 3Degrees official told The Chronicle that offsetting a trip to Europe currently costs around $36.

Link

From reader Sarah:

Please join this effort by sharing this StopPovertyNow.org movement with your readers.

Consider:

► One billion people live on less than $1 a day
► One-in-five people live without adequate water or food
► 26,000 children die each day from preventable causes
You will join a worldwide movement to Stop Poverty Now. Thanks to passionate individuals like you, Grameen Foundation and its local partners have served more than 6 million families with microfinance so that they have a better
tomorrow. With more of us engaged, we can Stop Poverty Now. A donation of as little as $10 to Grameen Foundation will add your voice to
this important cause.

How it works:
Log onto StopPovertyNow.org and see a client whose life was changed by Microfinance.

Help us bring that picture to life. Select a portion of the picture to fill in.

Add your voice to the picture by sharing an inspirational message and/or a picture that tells others why you want to Stop Poverty Now.

You will join a worldwide movement to Stop Poverty Now. Thanks to passionate individuals like you, Grameen Foundation and its local partners have served more than 6 million families with microfinance so that they have a better tomorrow. With more of us engaged, we can Stop Poverty Now.

Insecticide-treated nets (ITNs) are a simple, cost-effective way to fight malaria and are distributed to pregnant women and children in Kenya, often for free. But when Noboru Minakawa of the Institute of Tropical Medicine in Nagasaki, Japan, and colleagues surveyed villages along Lake Victoria, they found people were using the nets for fishing or drying fish, because the fish dry faster in the nets than on papyrus sheets, and the nets are cheaper (Malaria Journal, DOI:

Link

A guest post from Rishabh Kaul at Source Pilani:

Inside Goenka Public School, which is situated in the bustling centre of Pilani village, is housed one of India’s fastest growing rural BPO’s.

Welcome to the world of Source Pilani.

A brainchild of L K MaheswarI (the current Vice Chancellor of BITS Pilani), who convinced the Goenka family to invest in such a venture; he’s played a crucial role in scaling Source Pilani to where it is today. Giving a shout out to the alumni and getting them on board to man the ship, today the gritty team of Manoj Vasudevan. Sandeep Thalluri, Ashish Khandelwal and Bharat Bongu are putting in tons of man hours in order to put Source Pilani on the map.

The establishment of a rural BPO was mainly to tackle and capitalize on the problems faced by the urban BPO’s such as high attrition rates, increasing salary costs and sky-rocketing real estate prices. This lead to the belief that such a move would provide a host to some of the biggest opportunities such as access to a large pool of talented work force in and around Pilani, world class infrastructure facilities. Apart from this it would also help in building a brand name of the Goenka’s in the social entrepreneurship sector.

Today Source Pilani has several clients including some international ones. One success story which the founders narrated to me was regarding their work in the medical transcription domain:

“We partnered with Truworth to deliver Medical Transcription services. We have been consistently achieving 98.9% quality. Trueworth started realizing cost benefits of around 30%”

Source Pilani has also been providing data entry and form processing services to JhunJhunu (district in which Pilani is located) collectorate for e-Gram and NREGS. They have been delivering exceptional service despite the complex work flow. They deal accurately with a large volume of data of 890 villages and were recognized and felicitated by the district collectorate for the outsourcing services they provided

With revenues already in lakhs, an ever increasing list of clients, a workforce of 60 skilled personnel who are regularly rewarded based on their performance and a board consisting of BITS Pilani faculty and Alumni, things look bright for Source Pilani.

They are currently also participating in Tata NEN’s hottest Startup award, you can vote for them here

Alternatively, you can also SMS HOT117 to 56767

Rishabh Kaul is an undergraduate student at BITS Pilani and is actively involved with the Center for Entrepreneurial Leadership there. He blogs at Whatever Things