Richard Morse, research associate at the Stanford’s Program on Energy and Sustainable Development, discusses carbon offsets as a way to engage the developing world in climate change mitigation.
Social entrepreneurs are solving big problems from the bottom up, with low-risk actions taken to discover, develop, and test ideas.
Jocelyn Wyatt, social innovation lead at IDEO, describes her organization's efforts to use design thinking, a problem-solving system that is grounded in a client's or costumer's needs.
Always talk to the people you are trying to help. And make sure you listen.
Alexis Belonio has accomplished the seemingly impossible and developed a clean burning cooking stove and continuous-flow industrial flow burner.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
