Global Social Venture Finals are today. Check out www.socialvc.net for details.

Here’s the page if you want to see the teams in the finals

Bio Power Technology- Prasetiya Mulya Business School, Indonesia

BioVolt- MIT Sloan School of Management

Build Your Own Village- Gordon Institute of Business Science, South Africa

Defen Safety Syringe- National Chengchi University, Taiwan

Fair Planet Brasil- ESSEC Business School, France

Greenlight Organic- University of California, Davis

Husk Power Systems- Darden Graduate School of Business, University of Virginia

Market for Change- Haas School of Business, University of California, Berkeley

MicroEnergy Credit Corporation- Columbia Business School

Wine with a Passion- Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University

NY Times writes a detailed article about Compartamos, the successful microfinance bank in Mexico:

Carlos Danel and Carlos Labarthe turned a nonprofit that lent money to Mexico’s poor into one of the country’s most profitable banks.

But not all of their colleagues in the world of microlending — so named for the tiny loans it grants — are heaping praise on the co-executives of Compartamos. Some are vilifying them as “pawnbrokers” and “money lenders.”

They are the center of a fractious debate: how far should microfinance go toward becoming big business?

Link

Today, the once-struggling venture has morphed into a primarily for-profit enterprise. And the striking transformation of In2Books is emblematic of a larger trend: charities are changing their spots and making use of some of capitalism’s virtues.

The process is being pushed forward by a new breed of social entrepreneurs who are administering increasing doses of bottom-line thinking to traditional philanthropy in order to make charity more effective.

Link

Weekend reading from Business Week on Muhammad Yunus’ new book:

Nobel Peace Prize winner Muhammad Yunus, who pioneered the concept of microcredit—providing the poorest of the poor with tiny loans to start their own moneymaking ventures—is promoting a new idea these days. He calls it “social business,” and in his just-released book, Creating a World Without Poverty, he contends that it promises to relegate destitution across the globe to where it belongs: inside a museum.

Link to Businessweek.

Nicholas Kristof pens this inspiring article about social entrepreneurs from Davos, Switzerland.

American Public Media’s public radio business show Marketplace (www.marketplace.org) reports on entrepreneurs and the issues they face. American Public Media is also doing a new kind of journalism that involves reaching out to communities of people with knowledge, expertise and experience on a topic.

To support Marketplace’s entrepreneurship coverage, APM is building a Public Insight Network of entrepreneurs from around the country (and the world) to inform reporting. Marketplace is also very keen on exploring social entrepreneurship. So for all you social entrepreneurs out there, tell APM your experience, become a source for public radio, and help shape national media coverage of (social) entrepreneurship.

Tell APM what it takes to be a social entrepreneur, here
Give a more general description of your business, here
Sign up for the Public Insight Network without filling out either survey, here

Being in the Network means receiving an email about once a month asking for your insight on stories APM is working on. You can respond if the questions connect with your experience or delete the email if they don’t. You can unsubscribe any time.

Called “Causes on Facebook,” it allows you to create a cause, or promote an existing one to their friends You can pick from 1.5 million non-profits in the U.S. It uses Facebook’s “feed” feature to notify friends when you’ve joined a new cause. Finally, it allows you to promote the cause in other ways, building up points through a reward system, letting you show off virtual trophies that you win on your profile page after say, donating money. Ultimately, it wants to make it easier to raise money for causes. It launches with formal partnerships with ten non-profits.

A few things to note about Project Agape. First, the founder, Sean Parker, is most popular for his cofounding of Napster. Since then he’s led several high profile internet startups but this is his first philanthropic venture. He was CEO of Facebook at one point, and it was most likely this connection that allowed him to get early access to Facebook’s new platform, which was just announced today.

“Causes on Facebook” was announced today with the “intent to showcase the strengths of Facebook’s new “Platform,” a set of tools to allow developers to build applications upon Facebook. The screenshots over at Venturebeat are pretty cool. You can check them out directly here and here.

There’s a new project launched by NOW on PBS covering social entrepreneurs.

Called “Enterprising Ideas,” the project will feature monthly broadcasts on social entrepreneurs, beginning with this Friday. We’ve created an unprecedented five-minute “preview” on YouTube of this Friday’s show, which I like to call “One Million Served:”

Here is the copy from the website about the first show which features a social entrepreneur in Kenya who used the franchise model to deliver affordable healthcare:

Can the quality of healthcare in developing nations be transformed by the same principle that makes fast food such a success here? On Friday, May 25 at 8:30 pm (check local listings), NOW travels to Kenya to investigate an enterprising idea: franchising not burger and donut shops, but health services and drugs in rural Africa. American businessmen are teaming with African entrepreneurs to spread for-profit clinics around the country in the hopes of providing quality, affordable medical care to even Kenya’s poorest people. But can they overcome obstacles like extreme poverty, corruption, fraudulent services, and long distances to establish a sustained solution to a chronic problem?

NOW is also launching a new website on May 25th at www.pbs.org/now/enterprisingideas that will feature a blog, a contest for social entrepreneurs, tips and tools, and much more.

Additional coverage: Boing Boing- PBS “Now”: Can US entrepreneurial know-how save lives in Africa?

This is a day late but I just wanted to blog about this new series that aired yesterday night on HDNet.

Free Market incentives are spectacularly changing lives and entire economies over much of the world. In the last 25 years, hundreds of millions of people– 400 million in China alone– have climbed out of the dire poverty of living on less than $1 per day. It is the largest movement out of poverty in human history.

Yet, two thirds of the world’s population– four billion people– still does not have the tools to thrive in free markets. Forced to operate outside the rule of law, they have little education, no legal identity, no fungible property, no credit, no capital, and thus few ways to prosper.

However, when given the incentives and the tools, these people are proving they can apply their free choice, intelligence, imagination and spirit to dramatically advance their well-being and that of their families and communities.

The documentary features Muhammad Yunus, winner of the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize, founded the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh, Hernando de Soto, founder of The Institute for Liberty and Democracy in Peru, James Tooley, British professor of education policy, and Johan Norberg, Swedish author and scholar.

Thanks to the Marginal Revolution blog for putting this on our radar.

Check out this story in the current Businessweek on the Acumen Fund–
Designing Change: How venture philanthropy fund Acumen uses design thinking to help solve real-world problems

Here’s some text from an email by founder Jacqueline Novogratz:

We wanted to share with you an article on Acumen Fund that just appeared in BusinessWeek’s “Inside Innovation” supplement (the March 12 issue, now on newsstands). The story, an extension and update of what was featured in their online magazine last fall, is also up on their website – along with a few web-only features, including slide shows on our investment in drip irrigation and about the Acumen Fund Fellows.

We’re excited, of course, to be able to share the Acumen Fund message, but more so about the growing interest there seems to be in market-based models for addressing problems of poverty.