Social Entrepreneurs

In northern Madagascar, the village of Anketrakabe lies 60 kilometers from the nearest paved road. There, farmers without running water or electricity grow cocoa beans that, unlike most of Madagascar’s cocoa harvest, will not be sent to far away Europe for processing. These farmers partner with the Brooklyn-based chocolate company Madécasse (pronounced mah-DAY-cas) and ship their cocoa to the capital …

Charles Kane is a director and former president of One Laptop Per Child. Before joining the impact-focused organization in 2008, he worked as an executive at several successful technology companies.  One Laptop Per Child was founded in 2005 with the ambitious goal of providing a cheap, rugged, and useful laptop computer to every child who needs one; the organization partners …

Over the past two months, GOOD has profiled organizations in Africa using market solutions to solve water and sanitation challenges, improve agriculture, and promote public health. Social enterprises like these are transforming development work, and social entrepreneurs are being hailed as rock stars. But social enterprise isn’t the first trend to hit the development sector. From women’s empowerment to “sustainability” …

Two federal agencies will steer tax money for social programs through a new for-profit investing tool tested in the United Kingdom and Australia, according to a report co-authored by the White House and the Nonprofit Finance Fund. Rather than providing social services directly, the bonds will allow the government to task a firm in the private sector to solve a …

Ahmad Ahskar is founder and chief operating officer of the Hult Global Case Challenge, an international competition that pits teams of business school students against one in another to develop social enterprise solutions to the world's most pressing problems. Each year, a new challenge is selected—this year's is fighting global poverty in the areas of education, energy, and housing—and teams compete …

American Idol and So You Think You Can Dance? have turned ordinary people, however briefly, into stars, making the rest of us wonder if maybe we could find our 15 minutes. A year and a half ago, one of the minds behind those shows decided to create a new type of star. Sharon Chang, the former chief creative officer of …

In domestic relationships, one of the quickest ways to butter up your partner is by taking out the trash. In business, removing festering piles of waste also makes you the sort of person who's gets missed when you're not around. In 2009, Nikhil Arora and Alejandro Velez were recent graduates of the University of California at Berkeley who had both …

In 1919, just after the First World War ended, a little less than a century ago, the Irish poet WB Yeats wrote his celebrated poem The Second Coming, in which he predicted: Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The …

Heather Fleming is a designer and an engineer who co-founded Catapult Design, a nonprofit firm that collaborates with social entrepreneurs to ensure the products and business models they've designed to change people's lives work in practice. Fleming began her career doing product development in Silicon Valley, but transitioned into humanitarian design after working with Engineers Without Borders.  All too often, …

When Chid Liberty thinks about addressing poverty in his native Liberia, he thinks about the industrial revolution. There are many NGOs in Liberia that “are good at coming up with these very cutesy projects for women,” says the CEO and co-founder of Liberty and Justice, a fair-trade enterprise that trains and employs women in the garment industry. But in a …

  In Port-au-Prince, Haiti, where 80 percent of people live in poverty, serving the poor has proven a growth strategy for microlender Fonkoze.   With more than a quarter-million customers, Fonkoze, a Creole abbreviation of "the Shoulder to Shoulder Foundation," is Haiti’s largest microfinance group. Fonkoze is a full-service nonprofit bank for the poor, offering financial services from credit to insurance and …

'Why or how could anyone want to make shoes in a place full of so much poverty and corruption?’ That’s the question many people asked Canadian Tal Dehtiar when he founded Oliberté Footwear, the first company to make premium shoes in Africa using African materials and explicitly linking shoes sold by Western retailers to job creation on the continent. Dehtiar …

Thanks to the success of TOMS Shoes, it seems like a new lifestyle company putting charitable giving at the center of its brand debuts every week. Jewelry, rugs, and eyeglasses have all been transformed into instruments of philanthropy, supporting causes from clean oceans to rural development in Afghanistan. So Sevenly, a newcomer in the crowded space, may appear to be riding …

Jason Graham-Nye has had a varied career, to say the least: He's worked as an stockbroker, a high school teacher, and a rugby coach. Now, he is the CEO and co-founder of gDiapers, a company that makes eco-friendly diapers. When Jason and his wife Kim had their first child, they discovered that traditional diapers have a big negative impact on …

The Adventure Project's Becky Straw shares five simple ideas to help Haiti two years after it was devastated by a massive earthquake. Learn more about reconstruction efforts in Haiti, and see photos of the country today.  Get a Family Cooking Most poor Haitians live on $2 per day and spend 40 percent of their income on charcoal for cooking. Give …