Bringing Fair Trade to Indigenous Farmers
COO of Bats'il Maya Alberto Irezabal talks about the social environment in Chiapas that led to the founding of the organization, and how the co-op works.
Podcast
Poverty
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Innovations That Address the Last-Mile Distribution Challenge
Social enterprises have taken up the challenge of developing markets for newly designed cook stoves in India.
Podcast
The Peer Water Exchange: A Platform for Change
Rajesh Shah, a 2010 Tech Award winner, shares his social entrepreneurship model that leverages technology, new media, and peer interaction to solve the water crisis.
Sparking Water Innovation
The water we drink is not as safe as we’d like, and treating water has major environmental and economic impacts. We can no longer take water resources for granted.
Are We Serious About Financial Inclusion for All?
Steps that regulators and finiancial service providers can take to move toward the goal of financial inclusion.
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Design Thinking for Social Innovation
By working closely with the clients and consumers, design thinking allows high-impact solutions to social problems to bubble up from below rather than being imposed from the top.
The Problem With Fair Trade Coffee
Fair Trade-certified coffee is growing in sales, but strict certification requirements are resulting in uneven economic advantages for coffee growers and lower quality coffee for consumers.
Microfinance Misses Its Mark
Despite the hoopla over microfinance, it doesn't cure poverty. But stable jobs do. If societies are serious about helping the poorest of the poor, they should stop investing in microfinance and start supporting large, labor-intensive industries.
In Microfinance, Clients Must Come First
Few microfinance institutions articulate what, exactly, their ultimate goals are and how to achieve them. If the goal of microfinance is to alleviate poverty, the authors say, then MFIs should focus on helping their clients build successful enterprises, rather than on making more and bigger loans.
Romanticizing the Poor
Market solutions to poverty, which include services and products targeting consumers at the “bottom of the pyramid,” portray poor people as creative entrepreneurs and discerning consumers. Yet this rosy view of poverty-stricken people is not only wrong, but also harmful.