Economia
India: On the trail of social enterprise
UK magazine Social Enterprise has launched an innovative expedition to India to track the budding social enterprise movement, by rickshaw.
di Staff
Deniz Hassan is marketing manager at Social Enterprise magazine and will take to the roads of India with just three wheels and some good intentions.
As the sun really begins to shine on the burgeoning social enterprise movement in India and Bangladesh, Social Enterprise magazine’s team aims to take travel journalism to new, quite ridiculous, heights. On new year’s day, Social Enterprise will dispatch its intrepid marketing manager, Deniz Hassan, to India equipped only with some rudimentary cartography and a 150cc rickshaw.
Social enterprise on the sub continent is on the up, with Nobel Peace Prize winner Muhammad Yunus leading the way with his microfinance revolution, which has enabled over seven million people to work their way sustainably out of poverty.
Setting off from Pondicherry in the south, the Social Enterprise rickshaw team will manhandle their carriage ‘with no-horses-drawn’ across an entire sub-continent, passing through some of the toughest topography in the world: from the flood-plains of Bangladesh to the hill stations of Assam.
Stopping in to chat with a host of social entrepreneurs, Social Enterprise will illuminate the depth and ingenuity of the projects run by some of the world’s poorest communities in bringing about social change.
From safe drinking water projects such as those installed by FRANK, a social enterprise investing 100 per cent of its bottled-water profits in community run and owned water facilities, to affordable reading glasses produced by the Scojo Foundation, Indian social enterprise really is having a direct impact on those who really need it.
Inspired by the Social Enterprise World Forum held last month in Edinburgh, Deniz Hassan was inspired to take the trip after hearing a plethora of stories from Indian social entrepreneurs. ‘The scope of ideas out there that are working against the odds is absolutely breathtaking. Definitely a good kick up the arse for us over here,’ he says.
Deniz Hassan will be posting a regular blog in January 2009 on www.socialenterprisemag.co.uk.
