Microfinance organizations

Check out the list of Microfinance organizations in the world and be inspired by their wonderful visions and achievements:

Grameen Foundation
We're a dynamic, nonprofit organization that uses microfinance and innovative technology to fight global poverty and bring opportunities to the world's poorest people. With tiny loans, financial services and technology, we help the poor, mostly women, start self-sustaining businesses to escape poverty.

Grameen Bank (Bangladesh)
Grameen Bank was started in 1976 by Professor Muhammad Yunus with the money in his pocket. Today it serves over five million poor clients in Bangladesh, helping thousands rise out of poverty each week.

Opportunity International
"Giving the poor a working chance - that's what Opportunity International is all about. Small loans, sometimes as little as $50, in the hands of a poor entrepreneur can transform the lives of individuals, families, and entire communities."




Microcredit Summit Campaign
"The Microcredit Summit Campaign brings together microcredit practitioners, advocates, educational institutions, donor agencies, international financial institutions, non-governmental organizations and others involved with microcredit."

FINCA
Provides financial services to the world's poorest families so they can create their own jobs, raise household incomes, and improve their standard of living.


Posted by: Mimmy Duhaylungsod

Social Business Entrepreneurs

by Muhammad Yunus

Capitalism is Interpreted too Narrowly

Many of the problems in the world remain unresolved because we continue to interpret capitalism too narrowly. In this narrow interpretation we create a one-dimensional human being to play the role of entrepreneur. We insulate him from other dimensions of life, such as, religious, emotional, political dimensions. He is dedicated to one mission in his business life ---- to maximize profit. He is supported by masses of one-dimensional human beings who back him up with their investment money to achieve the same mission. The game of free market works out beautifully with one-dimensional investors and entrepreneurs. We have remained so mesmerised by the success of the free market that we never dared to express any doubt about it. We worked extra hard to transform ourselves, as closely as possible, into the one-dimensional human beings as conceptualised in theory to allow smooth functioning of free market mechanism.

Economic theory postulates that you are contributing to the society and the world in the best possible manner if you just concentrate on squeezing out the maximum for yourself. When you get your maximum, everybody else will get their maximum.

As we devotedly follow this policy sometimes doubts appear in our mind whether we are doing the right thing. Things don't look too good around us. We quickly brush off our doubts by saying all these bad things happen because of "market failures"; well-functioning market cannot produce unpleasant results.

I think things are going wrong not because of "market failure". It is much deeper than that. Let us be brave and admit that it is because of "conceptualisation failure". More specifically, it is the failure to capture the essence of a human being in our theory. Everyday human beings are not one-dimensional entities, they are excitingly multi-dimensional and indeed very colourful. Their emotions, beliefs, priorities, behaviour patterns can be more aptly described by drawing analogy with the basic colours and millions of colours and shades they produce.

Social Business Entrepreneurs Can Play a Big Role in the Market

Suppose we postulate a world with two kinds of people, both one-dimensional, but having different objectives. One type is the existing type, i.e. profit maximizing type. Second type is a new type, who are not interested in profit-maximization. They are totally committed to make a difference to the world. They are social-objective driven. They want to give better chance in life to other people. They want to achieve their objective through creating/supporting sustainable business enterprises. Their businesses may or may not earn profit, but like any other businesses they must not incur losses. They create a new class of business which we may describe as "non-loss" business.

Can we find second type of people in the real world ? Yes, we can. Aren't we familiar with "do-gooders" ? Do-gooders are the same people who are referred to as "social entrepreneurs" in formal parlance.

Social entrepreneurism is an integral part of human history. Most people take pleasure in helping others. All religions encourage this quality in human beings. Governments reward them by giving tax breaks. Special legal facilities are created for them so that they can create legal entities to pursue their objectives. Some social entrepreneurs (SE) use money to achieve their objectives, some just give away their time, labour, talent, skill or such other contributions which are useful to others. Those who use money may or may not try to recover part or all of the money they put into their work by charging fee or price.

We may classify the SEs, who use money, into four types :

i) No cost recovery
ii) Some cost recovery
iii) Full cost recovery
iv) More than full cost-recovery

Once a SE operate at 100% or beyond the cost recovery point he has entered the business world with limitless possibilities. This is a moment worth celebrating. He has overcome the gravitational force of financial dependence and now is ready for space flight ! This is the critical moment of significant institutional transformation. He has moved from the world of philanthropy to the world of business. To distinguish him from the first two types of SEs listed above, we'll call him "social business entrepreneur" (SBE).

With the introduction of SBEs, the market place becomes more interesting and competitive. Interesting because two different kinds of objectives are now at play creating two different sets of frameworks for price determination. Competitive because there are more players now than before. These new players can be equally aggressive and enterprising in achieving their goals as the other entrepreneurs.

SBEs can become very powerful players in the national and international economy. Today if we add up the assets of all the SBEs of the world, it would not add up to even an ultra-thin slice of the global economy. It is not because they basically lack growth potential, but because conceptually we neither recognised their existence, nor made any room for them in the market. They are considered freaks, and kept outside the mainstream economy. We do not pay any attention to them, because our eyes are blinded by the theories taught in our schools.

If SBEs exist in the real world, it makes no sense why we should not make room for them in our conceptual framework. Once we recognise them supportive institutions, policies, regulations, norms, and rules will come into being to help them become mainstream.

Market is always considered to be an utterly incapable institution to address social problems. To the contrary, market is recognised as an institution significantly contributing to creating social problems (environmental hazards, inequality, health, unemployment, ghettoes, crimes, etc.). Since market has no capacity to solve social problem, this responsibility is handed over to the State. This arrangement was considered as the only solution until command economies were created where State took over everything, abolishing market.

But this did not last long. With command economies gone we are back to the artificial division of work between the market and the State. In this arrangement market is turned into an exclusive playground of the personal gain seekers, overwhelmingly ignoring the common interest of communities and the world as a whole.

With the economy expanding at an unforeseen speed, personal wealth reaching unimaginable heights, technological innovations making this speed faster and faster, globalisation threatening to wipe out the weak economies and the poor people from the economic map, it is time to consider the case of SBEs more seriously than we did ever before. Not only is it not necessary to leave the market solely to the personal-gain seekers, it is extremely harmful to mankind as a whole to do that. It is time to move away from the narrow interpretation of capitalism and broaden the concept of market by giving full recognition to SBEs. Once this is done SBEs can flood the market and make the market work for social goals as efficiently as it does for personal goals.

Social Stock Market

How do we encourage creation of SBEs ? What are the steps that we need to take to facilitate the SBEs to take up bigger and bigger chunks of market share ?

First, we must recognise the SBEs in our theory. Students must learn that businesses are of two kinds : a) business to make money, and b) business to do good to others. Young people must learn that they have a choice to make --- which kind of entrepreneur they would like to be ? If we broaden the interpretation of capitalism even more, they'll have wider choice of mixing these two basic types in proportions just right for their own taste.

Second, we must make the SBEs and social business investors visible in the market place. As long as SBEs operate within the cultural environment of present stock markets they'll remain restricted by the existing norms and lingo of trading. SBEs must develop their own norms, standards, measurements, evaluation criteria, and terminology. This can be achieved only if we create a separate stockmarket for social business enterprises and investors. We can call it Social Stock Market. Investors will come here to invest their money for the cause they believe in, and in the company they think is doing the best in achieving a particular mission. There may be some companies listed in this social stock market who are excellent in achieving their mission at the same time making very attractive profit on the side. Obviously these companies will attract both kinds of investors, social-goal oriented as well as personal-gain oriented.


Making profit will not disqualify an enterprise to be a social business enterprise. Basic deciding factor for this will be whether the social goal remains to be enterprise's over-arching goal, and it is clearly reflected in its decision-making. There will be well-defined stringent entry and exit criteria for a company to qualify to be listed in the social stock market and to lose that status. Soon companies will emerge which will succeed in mixing both social goal and personal goal. There will be decision-rules to decide upto what point they still qualify to enter the social stock market, and at what point they must leave it. Investors must remain convinced that companies listed in the social stock market are truly social business enterprises.

Along with the creation of the Social Stock Market we'll need to create rating agencies, appropriate impact assessment tools, indices to understand which social business enterprise is doing more and/or better than others --- so that social investors are correctly guided. This industry will need its Social Wall Street Journal and Social Financial Times to bring out all the exciting, as well as the terrible, news stories and analyses to keep the social entrepreneurs and investors properly informed and forewarned.

Within business schools we can start producing social MBAs to meet the demand of the SBEs as well as preparing young people to become SBEs themselves. I think young people will respond very enthusiastically to the challenge of making serious contributions to the world by becoming SBEs.

We'll need to arrange financing for SBEs. New bank branches specialising in financing social business ventures will have to come up. New "angels" will have to show up on the scene. Social Venture Capitalists will have to join hands with the SBEs.

How to Make a Start

One good way to get started with creating social business enterprises would be to launch a design competition for social business enterprises. There can be local competition, regional competition and global competition. Prizes for the successful designs will come in the shape of financing for the enterprises, or as partnership for implementing the projects.

All submitted social business proposals can be published so that these can become the starting points for the designers in the next cycles, or ideas for someone who wants to start a social business enterprise.

Social Stock Market itself can be started by a SBE as social business enterprise. One business school, or several business schools can join hands to launch this as a project and start serious business transactions.

Let us not expect that a social business enterprise will come up, from its very birth, with all the answers to a social problem. Most likely, it will proceed in steps. Each step may lead to the next level of achievement. Grameen Bank is a good example in this regard. In creating Grameen Bank I never had a blue-print to follow. I moved one step at a time, always thinking this step will be my last step. But it was not. That one step led me to another step, a step which looked so interesting that it was difficult to walk away from. I faced this situation at every turn.

I started my work by giving small amount of money to a few poor people without any collateral. Then I realised how good the people felt about it. I needed more money to expand the programme. To access bank money, I offered myself as a guarantor. To get support from another bank, I converted my project as the bank's project. Later, I turned it into central bank project. Over time I saw that the best strategy would be to create an independent bank to do the work that we do. So we did. We converted the project into a formal bank, borrowing money from the central bank to lend money to the borrowers. Since donors became interested in our work, and wanted to support us, we borrowed and received grants from international donors. At one stage we decided to be self-reliant. This led us to focus on generating money internally by collecting deposits. Now Grameen Bank has more money in deposits than it lends out to borrowers. It lends out half a billion dollars a year, in loans averaging under $ 200, to 4.5 million borrowers, without collateral, and maintains 99 per cent repayment record.

We introduced many programmes in the bank --- housing loans, student loans, pension funds, loans to purchase mobile phones to become the village telephone ladies, loans to beggars to become door-to-door salesman. One came after another.
If we create the right environment, SBEs can take up significant market share and make the market an exciting place for fighting social battles in ever innovative and effective ways.
Lets get serious about social business entrepreneurs. They can brighten up this gloomy world.

Posted by: Mimmy Duhaylungsod
Source: Grameen-info

Inspiring Social Entrepreneurs

Muhammad Yunus, founder of the Grameen Bank and father of microcredit, provides a classic example of social entrepreneurship. The stable but unfortunate equilibrium he identified consisted of poor Bangladeshis’ limited options for securing even the tiniest amounts of credit. Unable to qualify for loans through the formal banking system, they could borrow only by accepting exorbitant interest rates from local moneylenders. More commonly, they simply succumbed to begging on the streets.

Here was a stable equilibrium of the most unfortunate sort, one that perpetuated and even exacerbated Bangladesh’s endemic poverty and the misery arising from it.Yunus confronted the system, proving that the poor were extremely good credit risks by lending the now famous sum of $27 from his own pocket to 42 women from the village of Jobra.

The women repaid all of the loan. Yunus found that with even tiny amounts of capital, women invested in their own capacity for generating income. With a sewing machine, for example, women could tailor garments, earning enough to pay back the loan, buy food, educate their children, and lift themselves up from poverty. Grameen Bank sustained itself by charging interest on its loans and then recycling the capital to help other women.

Yunus brought inspiration, creativity, direct action, courage, and fortitude to his venture, proved its viability, and over two decades spawned a global network of other organizations that replicated or adapted his model to other countries and cultures, firmly establishing microcredit as a worldwide industry.

The well-known actor, director, and producer Robert Redford offers a less familiar but also illustrative case of social entrepreneurship. In the early 1980s, Redford stepped back from his successful career to reclaim space in the film industry for artists. Redford was struck by a set of opposing forces in play. He identified an inherently oppressive but stable equilibrium in the way Hollywood worked, with its business model increasingly driven by financial interests, its productions gravitating to flashy, frequently violent blockbusters, and its studio-dominated system becoming more and more centralized in controlling the way films were financed, produced, and distributed. At the same time, he noted that new technology was emerging – less cumbersome and less expensive video and digital editing equipment – that gave filmmakers the tools they needed to exert more control over their work.

Seeing opportunity, Redford seized the chance to nurture this new breed of artist. First, he created the Sundance Institute to take “money out of the picture” and provide young filmmakers with space and support for developing their ideas. Next, he created the Sundance Film Festival to showcase independent filmmakers’ work. From the beginning, Redford’s value proposition focused on the emerging independent filmmaker whose talents were neither recognized nor served by the market stranglehold of the Hollywood studio system.

Victoria Hale is an example of a social entrepreneur whose venture is still in its early stages and for whom our criteria apply ex ante. Hale is a pharmaceutical scientist who became increasingly frustrated by the market forces dominating her industry. Although big pharmaceutical companies held patents for drugs capable of curing any number of infectious diseases, the drugs went undeveloped for a simple reason: The populations most in need of the drugs were unable to afford them. Driven by the exigency of generating financial profits for its shareholders, the pharmaceutical industry was focusing on creating and marketing drugs for diseases afflicting the well-off, living mostly in developed world markets, who could pay for them.

Hale became determined to challenge this stable equilibrium, which she saw as unjust and intolerable. She created the Institute for One World Health, the first nonprofit pharmaceutical company whose mission is to ensure that drugs targeting infectious diseases in the developing world get to the people who need them, regardless of their ability to pay for the drugs. Hale’s venture has now moved beyond the proof-of-concept stage. It successfully developed, tested, and secured Indian government regulatory approval for its first drug, paromomycin, which provides a cost-effective cure for visceral leishmaniasis, a disease that kills more than 200,000 people each year.

Why not call these people social entrepreneurs? It wouldn’t be a tragedy. But such people have long had a name and an exalted tradition: the tradition of Martin Luther King, Mahatma Gandhi, and Vaclav Havel. They are social activists. Calling them something entirely new – i.e., social entrepreneurs – and thereby confusing the general public, who already know what a social activist is, would not be helpful to the cause of either social activists or social entrepreneurs.

Source: http://www.ssireview.org/

Fundamentals of social change in our time

Bill Drayton is a changemaker and an ambitious one at that. Through his “citizen sector” organization Ashoka – Drayton does not use the term non-profit – he is playing the instruments of capitalism to orchestrate social change. Basically he provides social entrepreneurs with the necessary start-up capital. Then monitors the social returns.

AT FIRST SIGHT, the founder ofAshoka looks quiet and reserved – and yet you immediately sense the strength of his convictions. Here is a man who fights day and night for what he believes in. His most powerful weapon in this battle is rhetoric. He has no time for superficiality and never tires of explaining what he is out to achieve. All of which makes an interview with Bill Drayton a surprising and remarkable experience – in a positive sense. He talked to THE FOCUS about the fundamentals of change in our time.

The Focus: Let’s kick off with a big question: How have you seen the citizen sector evolve in recent years? How do you think it’s going to evolve, and how would you like to see it evolve over the coming decade?

Bill Drayton: The citizen sector, like the rest of the world, is faced with making the transition in this coming decade from a base-building period to a very rapid and self-multiplying take-off period. That is going to challenge every institution – every individual – very dramatically and the citizen sector in particular. Around 1980, the citizen sector followed business to become entrepreneurial and competitive in structural terms. That we lagged three centuries behind business here explains why we had fallen so far behind. Since then we’ve had thirty years of catch-up – very rapid catch-up of productivity, scale and now globalization. So at one level, business and society now can work together, which was not practical earlier. That represents a huge strategic opportunity for the ultimate clients, for business, and for the citizen sector. It’s going to pretty much demolish the existing boundary lines – including legal boundary lines and financing systems. But at a much deeper level, now that the citizen sector has caught up, it’s about transitioning to a world in which everyone is a changemaker.

“This is the transition to the Everyone a Changemaker world.”

The Focus: You once said “social entrepreneurs don’t want to help, they want to change the world.” Where does social entrepreneurship enter this equation?”

Drayton: Social entrepreneurship gives birth and lends shape to change. But let’s back up a bit: Around 1700, business broke the mold. Up to that point, ever since the agricultural revolution we’d had “a world of a few players”. The model that we still live with in almost every institution in society is this world of a few players. Agriculture produced a small surplus, so it could only support a few players. So when we think about a company or citizen sector organization, we think about a few people having the ideas and “managing” everyone else – and that has been the structure of society for a very long time. The problem is that this structure just won’t work in the context of logarithmically escalating change that also comes from more and more angles.
The Focus: What does the accelerating pace of change mean for present day organizations?
Drayton: An organization that works along conventional hierarchic lines will not be able to function in this fast-changing world. It’s an obsolete model. It doesn’t matter whether you’re in the business or social sector; the same pace of change is going to be there. It doesn’t even matter much how big the organization is – whether you have 10 people or 20,000. Now this is a wonderful, magical transition, once we get through it. It’s getting through the transition, this next decade, that’s going to be the challenge.

The Focus: Which means a fast change in mindset for management?

Drayton: Correct. This is the most profound change in the management of people since the agricultural revolution. To put that another way: In the business sector we’ve been through several centuries of very slow change, escalating to modest change. Now the rate at which change is accelerating is literally logarithmic. So what was once a very flat curve is going to get very, very steep faster and faster. And while managing a ten percent slope is one thing, managing an eighty percent slope that is still escalating is a very different thing altogether. Even this explanation is understating the nature of the change, because it is going to be taking place not just for business, not just for the citizens sector, but all across society and of course that multiplies the impact. Why do I think this upcoming decade is going to be the most critical period? Because up to now the change has been happening in a way that has not affected most people. Now people need to understand what’s happening in their strategic environment and so this is a classic awareness-tipping process.

The Focus: How can you tell that we’ve reached a tipping point right now?

Drayton: Over the last couple of months, we at Ashoka have been studying the awareness-tipping process. When you look at the Gandhian movement in India, the civil rights movement in the US, the women’s movement at a more international level… they all followed a remarkably similar and very understandable pattern. Right now I think we are, for the shift from the “few players” to Everyone a Changemaker, in the low foothills of the process that has a multi-stage built-in dynamic of self-multiplication. Typically there is a long time when one or two organizations are working away on change. When you think about organizations like the Indian National Congress or the NAACP in the US, most of them took a long time to build up. Gradually you begin to get small clusters where you have a critical mass – where the change is actually taking place. Then you start reaching the point where we are now. With Everyone a Changemaker. You get to the point where a few people who run professional organizations, who organize meetings, who edit magazines, say “oh this is important. Our members or readers might be interested in this.” So they stage a panel session at their annual meeting; they publish an article, and of course these activities make the change more credible. They help people articulate what they are experiencing, which leads to more articles and meetings, and you begin to get a positive dynamic. The next thing that starts happening is that the process of change becomes clearer to a lot of people who are affected by change but didn’t understand it. As it becomes clearer they begin to change their behavior and that, of course, accelerates the actual change process.

The Focus: Then comes the tipping point…

Drayton: Then comes the third stage of this awareness-tipping, when everybody starts realizing: “Hey, women want to be treated differently!” and asking “How are we women supposed to behave now?” or “How do I treat my wife now she’s starting to act differently?” For the next ten to fifteen years, you can’t pick up a newspaper without having some story on this topic. Why? Because the whole population is trying to figure out how on earth they are going to deal with this change.

The Focus: Building networks is one of Ashoka’s core strengths. Does it hold the key to mastering change?

Drayton: If you can get the best entrepreneurs in the world working on a common goal or a problem – get them to think and then to act together – you have something that is a quantum step beyond the sum of the individual social or business entrepreneurs. This is much easier to do with social entrepreneurs, because they are not individually trying to capture a market. That makes it easier to have open-architecture collaboration. If you get 500 leading Ashoka Fellows to think and work together, about what’s really important for children and young people, for full economic citizenship or the environment, you have something that’s never happened before – let alone at a global level. Individual Fellows, as you know, are very powerful. Over half of them have changed national policy within their first five years, and ninety percent have had independent institutions copy their idea within five years. So imagine the power of 500 people and ideas of that caliber collaborating to tip the world in their field. Each of them has a powerful and proven but partial idea, but when one brings them together, the group can see these most critical principles and go on to develop a joint marketing plan and collaboration.

“Social entrepreneurship is very contagious because people deeply and centrally want to express love and respect in action.”

The Focus: You propagate social change in the business sector. How can this idea win through in a corporate world that often stands for very different values?

Drayton: Being a changemaker for the good is very contagious because people deeply and centrally want to express love and respect in action. They want to be a player, a contributor. Moreover, people who don’t master the underlying social skills and who don’t give themselves permission to be a changemaker are marginalized, which is the most awful experience they can have. So this transformation from the old world of a few players to one of Everyone a Changemaker is a liberation movement in the broad sense of the word. We’re liberating people to be able to express love and respect in action in big ways. The level of social skills that is required today is much higher than was required to be a successful person twenty years ago, and in ten years it’s going to be much higher still. And so every manager is going to have to figure out how to help all the human beings they work with – clients, suppliers, customers, employees, colleagues – to master these skills and hone them. This must be central in the definition of what makes a good manager and a good organization.

The Focus: There’s a clear logic behind that. In our everyday practice we see this same process being driven from below: Young graduates are very picky about which organizations they are going to join.

Drayton: Let me use a real-life example, without naming the company. Over recent months I have been talking to several hotel and travel companies. One of these companies is family run. They have just under a hundred thousand employees. They have employed the Henry Ford model, so they train people “you tuck the bed in this way” – that’s how they manage all these people. They do all the thinking. I think this is a hopeless model. The moment one competitor figures out how to run an Everyone a Changemaker hotel chain, this company will be dead as a dinosaur. Imagine by contrast what an Everyone a Changemaker hotel company will be like. The message to everyone in the company is: “Look, all those people out there are travelers. What needs do they have that we could serve?” This is a very different definition of the role of chambermaid or receptionist.

The Focus: So what does all of this mean for organizational leadership? And how do you try to promote change within organizations in practical terms?

Drayton: It’s really all about something every business should do: Figure out what the clients need. But don’t leave it to a few smart people at your company to do that. You need to say to everyone in the organization: “You are a changemaker. You can figure out what customers need. And if you also figure out how to make it work, you are a hero. You are going to do really well. You are going to be a role model for other people in the firm.” Everybody, including the doorman, is empowered. We should be doing the same thing in education organizations, in human rights organizations, in hotels chains and electronics firms – this is the transition to the Everyone a Changemaker world.

Source: - http://www.ezifocus.com/content/thefocus/issue/article.php/article/54300800

Posted by: Mimmy Duhaylungsod

Who is Bill Drayton?

Bill Drayton was born in New York in 1943. His father was an explorer, his mother a cellist. He gained a BA from Harvard in 1965 before going on to Oxford where he read Economics, won a First, and received his MA in 1967. He then attended Yale Law School and obtained his JD in 1970. Drayton began his career with McKinsey as a consultant. Later he worked as Assistant Administrator at the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). In 1980 he founded Ashoka, an internationally-oriented citizen organization that tackles the woes of this world with the means of the marketplace. Drayton has played a major part in defining social entrepreneurship: entrepreneuring changes whose success is measured not in terms of profits but of social transformation and whose business models are designed to be copied by other social enterprises to accelerate the pace of change. When it was founded in 1980 as a venture capitalist supporting change in the world, Ashoka had a global operating budget of US$50,000. Last year that had risen to around US$40 million. Today, Ashoka is active in more than 70 countries and supports the work of over 2,000 Fellows – social entrepreneurs it helps from the start-up phase onward. The Ashoka community also includes those who are now thoroughly proven social entrepreneurs, such as the Nobel Prize laureate and founder of Grameen Bank, Muhammad Yunus.

Source: http://www.ezifocus.com/content/thefocus/issue/article.php/article/54300800

Posted by: Mimmy Duhaylungsod

Spotlight on The First Filipino

Illac Diaz
AKA Illac Angelo Ancellotti Diaz

• 1st Filipino winner of the 1st DHL Young Entrepreneurs for Sustainability Award (YES, 2007)

• 1st Filipino recipient of the Ten Outstanding Young Men award for social entrepreneurship (TOYM, 2005)
• 1st Filipino Winner, Massachusetts Institute of Technology US$100K Business Plan Competition
• Founder of the Usap-Kamay program
• Founder of MyShelter Foundation

“Nowadays, our most important resource is being left out: the young people who want to make a change. Young people can change the world. Sometimes, establishments don’t work. It’s up to us to find a way to do what we want.”

Illac Diaz’ higher education

Cornball homegrown jokes aside, there are certain things youcan’t learn in Harvard, as self-proclaimed social entrepreneur Illac Diaz demonstrates while his beat-up Pajero is halted in lunch-hour traffic. “Kabalikat means supported by,” he explains, after what seems like his own stab at releasing stress, heaving a few of those “Anong tawag mo sa…” Pinoy jokes at me. “It’s like all of these people are sharing in a burden and pulling it forward,” he continues, gesturing with his hands performing a tugging motion above his shoulders before gripping the steering wheel once again.

He finally chuckles to himself after defining such a word, astonished at his having whipped it out in conversation, much more in the guerilla phone interview he’d just granted a local AM radio station minutes before; Illac having to suddenly park the car in the prickly heat as he sweated through his suit jacket and effortlessly answered several live-broadcast questions an announcer fired at him in the local tongue. “That’s what happens if you’re under pressure. It all comes out,” he says with a titter, alluding to his employment of Kabalikat to enumerate all the sponsors and partners that were crucial to the kickoff of his latest heal-the-word initiative: the Millenium School Design Competition for School Buildings in Developing Countries.

While such unexpected eloquence can arise in the most pressing of situations, it also leads to why Diaz is back in the country for two weeks, right before he jets back to his ol’ Ivy League and finishes up his scholarship-backed Masters in Public Administration. Sure, at 34, the guy’s had enough higher education to last him a lifetime of bragging rights in Manila’s cocktail circuit (a scene the guy is quite familiar with, considering his sometime stint as a model-slash-something ‘til he realized he wanted to endorse something more significant than coffee or cereal and be more than a bachelor with the decked-out pad), but despite an extra-chunky educational background that reads like every parents’ academic wish list — full scholarships in Ateneo de Manila (BS Management Economics), the Asian Institute of Management (Master in Entrepreneurship), the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT, baby; throw in several Grand Prize wins in a few of the school’s Business Ideas competitions), and Harvard, of course — all that noggin-fueling all these years hasn’t totally come full circle until now.

Getting schooled on natural disaster

Several times in your student life, you may have switched the radio on for that titular announcement of whether classes were cancelled or not. Especially when it got a little too windy outside and the dinner table discussion the night before touched upon hard rain and winds that you hoped were on their way to unburdening you from a dreary day of school. But kids in impoverished rural areas ask a slightly different question, maybe along the lines of whether there’s an actual school to run to come whatever natural disaster may hit their town. Say a typhoon blows about 7,000 classrooms away in a six-hour period (as what happened in Bicol) or ravages several towns in Zambales, Benguet, and Antigue, turning homes into scaffolding and displacing 90,000 families in the process (the recent Cosme catastrophe), upping disease because of unsanitary conditions brought about by such, and the unsavory fact that, well, school’s out ‘til further notice. Or flashfloods wipe an area out (Quezon, ’04), and, along with it, that flimsily-constructed public school built out of four posts, bricks, and a roof; the last refuge and meeting place for families whose lives had been ransacked by a vengeful mother nature. And more so in the past few years, when climate change has raised the lever of typhoon frequency in our country: “20 every year, seven being destructive” as National Disaster Coordinating Council (NDCC) president Tony Golez declares. “23 billion pesos is spent to rehabilitate and reconstruct (schools) and the following year, they’ll be destroyed again, so it’s always one step forward, one step backward.”

“Well, everything has a bottom line of infrastructure and the whole game plan has changed. The predicament we’re in is that we’re a vulnerable island nation and we’ve got to face the facts — such as that the building of schools and communities on former trade routes, areas with access to water, or plantations was based on a demographic consideration,” Illac explains why in 2005, he put up the My Shelter Foundation, which carried out the first earth bag construction practice (full school complexes made from 85-90 percent earth) in Asia, five clinics and 20 classrooms built from recyclable materials around the area without chopping wood or expensively shipping too much of that cement and steel — all contributing to it being the expense of the old mass-produced design and easier to reconstruct when natural disaster strikes. “The old model is so confined. Classrooms had to be built for mass production, so it was simply an efficiency model. But what happens when blueprints for rural infrastructure have become obsolete because of climate change and these kinds of 150-km winds,” he asks. “What happens when schools are getting destroyed faster than you can build them? What can we do other than accept this force majeure — this act of God that we can’t really do anything about?”

Academic sustainability

When Diaz’s My Shelter Foundation clasped hands with Golez’s NDCC and coalesced to establish the Be Better Build Better Program, lower cost and sustainability of construction were given a more practical question: What about building a school that actually saves more lives and keeps those classes going in the process?

With the urgency of such a question, it wasn’t hard to get NGOs and companies aboard the green ‘n’ efficient wagon, with the NDCC, Philippine Green Building Council (go figure), United Architects of the Philippines, Private Sector Disaster Management Network, Redeye (for ad and marketing dispatch), and Department of Education pitching-in resources. And then sponsors like DHL, Holcim, and ABS-CBN’s Sagip Kapamilya who lent a monetary hand providing the $10,000 first prize, $5,000 second prize, $3,000 third prize, and $2,000 for each of the four honorable mentions. Together they called for new designs that can go above and beyond Diaz’s revived earth bag concept and pave the way for greater sustainability, preparation for disaster (enabling a community with proper protocol as well), and a place where life and learning can continue to flourish.

And what Diaz labeled as “appropriate technology” can certainly describe the winners of the competition, from a third place play on eco-sand that thwarts post-disaster unsanitary conditions to the second place “Dancing with Disaster” design that breaks strong-pressure wind apart and funnels it away from the structure. “Others took us by surprise — one even using mounds of earth as speed bumps so wind could flow over the school. One even used trees as buffers — and then there was an A-frame design where the sides of the roof would go up and wind would go through the structure,” says Diaz of the variable solutions the international architectural community reached during the competition. “It’s just the horizon of possibility that expands and convinces you that there’s a way to do things and spin adaptability on its head.”

There is nothing like proving a creatively effective feat, however, especially when the first place design from Malaysia is used in the reconstruction of a Reming-and-Milenyo-devastated public elementary school in Nato, Camarines Sur this month. Then the Philippines will, as Diaz implies, finally be sliding a localized solution across a global table and, in true kabalikat force, push the discussion on sustainability forward; like our country is finally raising its hand in a classroom of positive change as the Millennium School competition becomes a jump-off point that, annually, will contribute to the progression of third-world countries with similar problems in infrastructure.

“This is not even the first step — this is half a step. There are many issues to global climate change, but one thing we know for sure is that whether by nature or by man, it’s exacerbating,” Illac says, furrowing his brow. “I can just imagine the evolution of thought here — with more people thinking about it. I’d call this a growing encyclopedia on what happens when disaster strikes and the global focus with this project is realizing that there are more schools being destroyed than there are funds to build them. It’s to ensure that the kids — roughly 50 percent of the rural area population — don’t find their schools destroyed and end up spending another semester or the next two years in a tent.”

Of course, battling global warming is all about the children, anyway; the future, if you will. Harvard diploma or not, the educated rest of us can learn a little something from Diaz: that there’s a lot more we can do with our diplomas just so all the others who don’t even have a place to learn in can actually get their own as well.

Source:Illac Diaz’ higher education -http://supreme.ph/2008/06/18/illac-diaz-higher-education/

Posted by: Mimmy Duhaylungsod

The change makers - Illac Diaz with Muhammad Yunus

Filipino & Bangladeshi
THE CHANGE MAKERS

Posted by: Mimmy Duhaylungsod

Filipino Social Entrepreneur Illac Diaz

It's Possible To Change The World - Illac Diaz

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By Artessa Saldivar-Sali
June 11, 2006 | Philippine Star

TF! Editorial Comment: Entrepreneurship skills can be mobilized for social change in addition to turning a profit. With creativity and vision, social entrepreneurs leverage business acumen and an eye for opportunity to meet pressing social needs. The article below tells of the successful initiatives of Illac Diaz, borne out of his approach to social entreprenueurship--bringing "the strengths, efficiencies and solutions of business to bear on problems of society."

The Philippine flag has been flying high and proud not just on the lofty peak of Mount Everest, but in the hallowed halls of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston. A team of young Filipino entrepreneurs has been winning competitions with innovative ideas that combine social relevance with business savvy.

Most recently, the team topped the MIT $100K Entrepreneurship Competition with their project CentroMigrante, a self-help business model that provides clean, safe and affordable urban housing for the thousands of Filipinos who come to Manila from the provinces to look for jobs as seafarers.

Earlier, the same team joined–and won–two smaller but no less prestigious competitions. In the IDEAS Competition, which allows members of the MIT community to develop creative ideas that make a positive impact on the world, the team took the grand prize with their First Step Coral project which uses a turbine powered by sea current to energize a wire frame on which corals grow four times faster than the normal rate. In an unprecedented feat, the same group also won the second prize for their replicable, low cost cement peanut sheller, which allows peanut farming communities to peel peanuts for planting up to 50 times faster than the traditional manual method.

The team also won the $1K Business Warm-up Competition for their Earth Classroom project, using locally available materials like soil to build classrooms in rural areas at half the cost.

The prime mover behind all these projects is Illac Diaz, a 30-something former actor, model, athlete and advertising executive turned social entrepreneur. As such, he has blazed a trail in combining social concern, business acumen and constant innovation. A keen observer of the marginalized groups of society, he uses this strength to transform small ideas for socially responsive businesses into acceptable large-scale models for meeting the needs of people who require immediate solutions to their problems. He applies business skills not for personal gain but for the practise of business with a wide social impact.

His most outstanding effort in community-oriented entrepreneurship is the landmark Pier One Seafarer's Dormitory, which provides clean, safe and affordable transient housing and services for thousands of maritime overseas Filipino workers and their families within the Manila area.

The idea for Pier One came during Illac's "serendipity walk," an exercise students at the Asian Institute of Management, where he obtained a Master in Entrepreneurship degree, go through. Students are asked to literally take a walk, observe and come up with business ideas. From his walk around the T.M. Kalaw area in Manila, where seafarers looking for jobs congregate daily by the thousands, Illac realized that no housing alternatives were available to this transient, low income group, who had to make do with squalid, cramped and dangerous living spaces usually in squatter areas while they waited for job placements, or while their papers were being processed.

Though the Philippines provides over 25 percent of the world's ship manning requirements and has adopted labor export as a national policy, it does not provide reliable housing for seafarers. Given the billions of dollars in remittances that maritime OFWs plow back into the Philippine economy, it is shameful that when these seamen come home, they have to struggle to find decent housing until their next assignment, which may not come for months. The government provides them with hardly any assistance beyond a token covered shed on the roadside.

Recognizing this need, Illac set up a 40-bed dormitory in 2000, offering not just a place to sleep but also temporary employment opportunities, job search assistance and even skills upgrading. Today, Pier One is a 1,500 bed concern with branches in Intramuros, Recto and Ermita that has been operating sustainably, with profits invested back into the business, upgrading and expanding facilities. To date, over 80,000 seafarers have been served by the project.

The Pier One prototype has evolved into the winning CentroMigrante project, which will offer a build-for-stay system wherein tenants will be given the option to construct the units from prefabricated parts in exchange for a period of free occupancy. There will also be a work-for-stay system where those without money may sign up for temporary jobs. The shelters will also provide skills seminars on career development, personal finance, remittances management and small businesses, and will coordinate with the 400-plus manning agencies to establish an onsite job board to help with job searches. The prototype system was able to reduce average waiting time for jobs from seven to three months.

Another project, MyShelter Foundation, originated when Illac observed the lack of classrooms in the provinces, at the same time trying to find a way to solve the housing problem in Negros Occidental. Undertaking a thorough business analysis of the area, Illac noticed that the nearby adobe bridges, built by the Spanish hundreds of years ago, were still intact, resilient products of the earth itself. He did research in India where adobe houses are common, then underwent intensive training at the CalEarth Institute in California under the renowned Iranian architect Nader Khalili.

He became an expert in the Earthbag Construction System, and found that this could be applied to the Philippines. By utilizing the endless supply of indigenous materials like soil and using local labor, cost of the houses and classrooms could be kept down, and money kept within the community. These savings in construction could then be applied to increase teachers' wages and bring computer technology to schools.

The Day-Asan National High School in Surigao, with an enrolment of 273 students, currently holds classes in the basketball court and make-shift huts. Since the town was established 25 years ago, not a single classroom has been built, and students used to walk an hour and half each way to attend school in a nearby town. Local villagers have been trained and will build a six-classroom module using the Earthbag Construction System. The structure can be finished and used within 12 to 14 weeks.

A project that will be launched within the month is the Peanut Revolution, which addresses the tedious task of manually peeling peanuts for planting, a task usually given to women, children and the elderly of the community. Using a simple cast cement sheller built like a large peppermill, whole peanuts are put in from the top, and as they fall into the inside rotor, the shells are slowly ground open, dropping the kernel without harming it. From a mere one kilo per hour when done manually, the process is increased to 27 kilos up to 50 kilos per hour with the sheller. Improvements include a foot pedal model, and one with a blower to automatically remove the crushed shells.

Previous automated peanut shellers have been expensive and well out of reach of the average small peanut farmer. This simple model, made from fiberglass molds that can produce several hundred shellers, only costs around P3,000. Microfinancing programs have expressed willingness to fund its acquisition by small farmers.

Illac and his group are also developing other simple, easily replicated cement agricultural machines that will increase farmer yields in a variety of crops. An international cement manufacturer is considering the project for implementation worldwide.

Social enterprise is not just about the money and jobs that are the bottom line of any business, but more about a central mission to create sustainable models of social development where the measure of success is the number of people helped. Illac's successes have proven that focusing on human capital as being at least as important as equity capital in private interventions to social inequity is an idea whose time has come.

Illac just completed a research fellowship in the Special Program for Urban and Regional Studies in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at the MIT. At the Asian Institute of Management, he was the youngest ever to be awarded the Honors & Prestige for work in the field of social entrepreneurship. Last year, he became the first TOYM recipient for social entrepreneurship.

Illac belongs to the Diaz clan that includes former Miss Universe Gloria Diaz; his mother is gallery owner and art patron Silvana Diaz. He was once a much sought after commercial model and sometime movie actor, but even when he was still in high school he already exhibited a penchant for social entrepreneurship.

He founded the Usap-Kamay program where teachers from the Southeast Asian Institute for the Deaf (SAID) would teach Ateneo students sign language and they would in turn tutor SAID students in math, science and English. As an indication of its success, Usap-Kamay continues up to the present, with an annual average of 20 Ateneo participants and hundreds of alumni in the program.

He also set up Good Guys Inc. and Sagittarius Copy Machines to help Metro Manila law students by eliminating the daily difficulty of lining up to photocopy legal cases for their classes, as well as bringing in better copying technology that minimized the health risk to machine operators from toxic liquid toners.

Sports also figures prominently in Illac's already busy life. "My passion for sports has been with me ever since I was young," he relates. "I was a hyperactive child and the only way that my parents found to calm me down was by putting me into every sport possible. That way, once I came home I would be completely exhausted!"

He was on the Philippine team to the Asian Youth Games and the Asian Games from 1988 to 1995, and was national decathlon champion from 1991 to 1993. He holds the UAAP records in track and field for the long jump, javelin, 400 meters and 4x400, and the Philippine record for the long jump. He also climbed mountains with the UP Mountaineers, which turned out to be "the perfect training" for what is now called adventure racing.

He has participated in the Eduro Challenge, the Philips Survival Challenge, the Xterra Triathlon, the San Mig Challenge and the Inter-island Challenge. He was part of the Philippine team to five AXN Urban Challenges, and took part in the Marlboro Adventure and Tiger Beer Outdoor Quest. He sails with the Manila Yacht Club team, and even occasionally contributes to newspapers and magazines.

Illac, whose name is an Aztec term meaning "God of Light," is in a unique position to inspire others with ideas, vision and passion to create enterprises that uplift sectors of society that would otherwise be forgotten. He is pioneering a whole new field of entrepreneurship, one that seeks to bring the strengths, efficiencies and solutions of business to bear on problems of society.

He insists that true charity does not mean giving out cash, and that to engage in socially responsible endeavors automatically means financial struggle. Business and development can and must be working partners, and Illac Diaz is taking that path with resounding success.

Source: Filipino Social Entrepreneur Illac Diaz - http://www.truthforce.info/?q=node/view/1739

Posted by: Mimmy Duhaylungsod

Young Social Entreneurs (YSE projects)

Young Social Entrepreneurs Matt Cape (Wahblo) and Pappy Clement (Fundisanani) explain their ICT projects at the Global Knowledge Partnership Conference. -Positive Social Impact-

Gladys from the Philippines
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Education for the future

Posted by: Mimmy Duhaylungsod

What is a Social Entrepreneur?

A social entrepreneur, in our view, is a person or entity that takes a business approach to effectively solving a social problem. We call this approach an "enterprising idea." Borrowing from the collaborative approach that often distinguishes social entrepreneurs, we also offer the following definitions from a variety of reputable sources.

Here are some definitions of social entrepreneurs...

Are individuals with innovative solutions to society's most pressing social problems.
Ashoka

Act as the change agents for society, seizing opportunities others miss in order to improve systems, invent and disseminate new approaches and advance sustainable solutions that create social value.
PBS "New Heroes" Program

Are driven by a social mission and a desire to find innovative ways to solve social problems that have been neglected by either the market or the public sector.
Kauffman Center for Entrepreneurial Leadership Are pioneers of innovation that benefit humanity. [Note: Enterprising Ideas is partially funded by the Skoll Foundation.]
The Skoll Foundation

Use the disciplines of the corporate world to tackle daunting social problems.
Fast Company

Recognize a social problem and uses entrepreneurial principles to organize, create, and manage a venture to make social change.
Wikipedia

Social entrepreneurship is... The art of "simultaneously pursuing both a financial and a social return on investment (the double bottom line)."
Institute for Social Entrepreneurs


Souce: http://www.pbs.org/
Posted by: Mimmy Duhaylungsod