Last week, Ashoka announced that the organization will use a US$15 million grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to support the placement of Ashoka fellows in Africa and India. The grant money will specifically target social innovation and entrepreneurship in…
iDiscoveri…
Last night I had the good fortune of sitting in on a talk given by Nancy Barry, a pioneer in the field of creating private, market-based solutions to poverty alleviation for women across the globe. Her talk was very powerful…
Recently, I attended a talk by Acumen Fund Fellow and Harvard Kennedy School alumna, Catherine Casey, who worked in Kenya with the Sustainable Healthcare Foundation, a micro-franchise healthcare and drug distribution chain based in Nairobi, Kenya. The Acumen Fund fellowship is…
In a series of articles on Slate.com, Mira Kamdar (of the World Policy Institute and author of Planet India) discusses the challenges and outlook for organic farming in India based on her visit to Punjab farms. After an introduction to her visit and…
What happens when a law is passed in a vacuum? The answer: it doesn’t get implemented.
What happens when the government throws rules and regulations at people, without giving them the tools to apply them, or without developing enforcement mechanisms to…
Many of our prior posts have spoken to the urgent need to overhaul, or at the least, significantly revamp the education system in India, as evidenced by the massive rise in demand for both primary and higher education institutions in…
In a recent interview with IndiaKnowledge@Wharton, Vikram Akula of SKS Microfinance touted mobile banking (conventionally used for performing balance checks, account transactions, payments etc. via a mobile device such as a mobile phone) as the future of microfinance, but cited India’s…
The ThinkChange India staff is committed to providing our readers with interviews with people we believe are at the brink of something special but have for the most part been overlooked by the mainstream media. Readers will be able to…
Last month, we posted about the expansion of the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) to all districts in India starting on April 1. Even though the government chose to expand this program, the scheme has its share of pros and…
