Archive for Jobs

This story originally appeared in the October 2011 edition of the Searchlight South Asia newsletter created by Intellecap for the Rockefeller Foundation.

By Carlin Carr

The need for quality employment in the developing world underlies the success of nearly all other development initiatives. Job creation has become one of the most pressing issues on the road towards fueling the economic engine and impacting complex and intertwined poverty issues, such as education, nutrition, healthcare and housing. Without the ability to have a stable, reliable income, there is little hope for the poor to engage in sustained solutions that will improve their circumstances. » Continue reading “South Asia’s Jobs Challenge”

This story originally appeared in our June 30th, 2011 e-magazine. Click here to download the pdf e-magazine.

Ecotourism is a booming industry in Latin America, especially in the Tambopata region of southeastern Peru. But is it the best use for limited land?

In 2008, the Tambopata region of southeastern Peru – located in the southwest Amazon eco-region and the Tropical Andes biodiversity hotspot – boasted 37 ecotourism operations based around the Tambopata National Reserve.

Industry in the area traditionally revolves around slash-and-burn agriculture, cattle ranching, Brazil nut extraction, timber extraction, alluvial gold mining and private reserves, but the area is increasingly taking advantage of the ecotourism market – estimated by a 2010 report at $28.8 billion a year in developing countries alone. » Continue reading “Is ecotourism good for the amazon?”

Last week, Ashoka Changemakers held the first ever Twitter social enterprise chat. Participants included social enterprises, advisory firms, impact investors and others.

What resulted was a lively discussion, via Twitter updates, about the challenges facing entrepreneurs creating economic opportunity. Some of the key points brought up during the chat were the importance of relevant government regulation, training employees and providing opportunities at the local level.

The chat was held leading up to the Powering Economic Opportunity: Create a World that Works competition. The competition, a joint venture between the eBay Foundation and Ashoka Changemakers, to find the “world’s most innovative market-based solutions that create economic opportunity and generate employment for disadvantaged populations.” The deadline is June 15^th.

Photo credit: Gates Foundation

In Forbes, Eva Pereira makes the distinction between “opportunity” entrepreneurs and “necessity” entrepreneurs. This is the difference between someone creating a technology start-up and selling street food. Growth happens by investing in the “opportunity” entrepreneurs.

Pereira writes:

According to the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor, a non-profit research organization, economic growth is not driven by these “necessity” entrepreneurs, who decrease in number as the economy develops. The key to fostering growth is to support “opportunity” entrepreneurs, who choose to start new enterprises in response to market needs.

One of the key reasons this is true is because “opportunity” entrepreneurs create jobs, and many argue that job creation is the best way to stimulate and sustain economic growth. While “necessity” entrepreneurs create a job for themselves, the value is limited. » Continue reading “Moving Away from Necessity Entrepreneurship”

This story originally appeared in our February 24, 2011 e-magazine. Click here to subscribe.

Anil Kumar, a school dropout from village Gora Bazar in Uttar Pradesh, went from being a labor earning less than INR 2,000 per month to become a supervisor earning INR 10,000 per month.

By Santosh Parulekar

In the early morning hours of April 27, 2009, five students woke up the head of Pipal Tree Ventures’ training center in Uttar Pradesh by banging on his door. Just days earlier, the students were given jobs at a reputed construction company in Chennai. The boys had returned. They did not want to work in Chennai.

I remembered one of the boys. Just 10 days back, I shook hands with Anil Kumar and wished him good luck for his first job. I had been impressed by the spark in the boy. My trainers told me that he was from a poor family and lives in a hut in the Gora Bazar village. » Continue reading “Journey of a School Dropout to a Supervisor”

By Dipika Prasad, Intellecap intern

Manoj Vasudevan is a young social entrepreneur with a bit of a surprise up his sleeve. Addressing the winners of ISB’s iDiya 2010, he said his company, Source Pilani, takes up large-scale social media projects for companies like Lenovo. It tracks online conversations, grades them according to kind of feedback, and maintains an extensive record. Source Pilani is a 3-year-old venture that provides services like medical transcription outsourcing, social media outsourcing, and business process outsourcing (BPO) services. The company employs a staff of 55 that hails from the village of Pilani and adjoining areas.

A winner of the first edition of iDiya 2009, Source Pilani was started with the vision of taking a BPO to the BOP and engaging some of the 130 million rural skilled workers who are unemployed due to lack of opportunities in India.  Source Pilani’s people are recruited through townhall sessions that are advertised as “rozgar diwas,” which means employment day in Hindi. Once hired, they are trained in BPO skills over a three-month period and paid an average monthly salary of INR4,000 (USD$90). Vasudevan says he incurs a cost of INR7,500 to 8,000 per employee and his billing rate is 10,000 to 12,000 per employee. Beyond Profit caught up with Vasudevan to find out more about his journey, the impact he has had, and his views on future trends for the BPO sector: » Continue reading “Providing BPO Services out of Rural Rajasthan”

For seven long years, the 27-story home of Mukesh Ambani slowly barged into the skyline of South Mumbai’s posh Altamont Road. The home is now finished, and the five members of the Ambani family will move in next month. Mumbai residents have been gossiping for years—both about the controversial design as well as the perceived excesses.

A short list of the reported luxuries:
• Three helipads
• A different story for each season
• A room that can artificially create weather
• 50-seat theater
• A grand ballroom
• 400,000 square feet of interior space—more than the Palace of Versailles
• A staff of 600

It’s that last number that I was discussing with a gentleman in Delhi last week. With Western bias clearly affecting my opinion, I took the side that 600 people is an excessive, and unnecessary, number of staff for such a small family. Honestly, the figure disgusted me. » Continue reading “Mukesh Ambani’s Antilia: Extravagance or Employership”

This is the first in a series of six posts related to Affordable Private Schools. Every other week, we will be posting a new article on one aspect of the movement to give the poor a better education through entrepreneur-led schools in developing countries.

Yesterday, at the Clinton Global Initiative, there was a fascinating discussion on the pressing need to tackle youth unemployment on a global scale. Why? There are nearly 1.2 billion people on our planet between the ages of 15 and 25—the largest youth demographic in human history. About 90% of this group lives in the developing world and faces significant barriers to economic success.

What does this mean? We need to create over a billion jobs over the next decade—and we’re going to have to get creative about it.

As we’ve learned by watching the impact of the recession in the US, jobs don’t just materialize out of thin air. Job creation requires both a top-down policy effort, and a bottom-up focus on education. It requires long-term planning and forward thinking.

When we say that education is a key component, it’s important to realize that we don’t just mean putting kids in school. That’s the first step, of course. But, there’s much more to it than that.

First, there’s school quality. Take India for example. A remarkable 95% of primary school-age children are already in school. Half the battle has been won—the students are enrolled and going to school. What’s the problem then? According to a recent op-ed by author and commentator Gurcharan Das, one in four government primary teachers is illegally absent on any day and one in four who is present is not teaching. Part of these dismal stats is due to low teacher pay. The other reason is simply a lack of oversight. In a country as big as India, and in countries as rural as Kenya or Nigeria, this  is the time to to put the power into the hands of the people instead of depending on government to educate the masses—because that’s not necessarily working.

» Continue reading “1 Billion Idle Minds or 1 Billion Opportunities?”

A Future Employer?

With more than half a billion people under the age of 25, India is sitting atop a potential powerhouse of intellectual and physical energy. But, India’s demographic dividend is only a ‘potential’ positive unless India’s social entrepreneurs become actors in this transition.

A look at the numbers released in the recently published India Labour Report 2009 reveals that the population will grow to 1.4 billion by 2026, and 83% of this increase will be in the 15-59 age group—a huge lump of productive labor. Much has been said about India’s need to educate its youth in order to capitalize on this demographic window of opportunity. And, there is no denying the importance of education. But, there is also a dire need for job creation and job training. By 2025, India will house a whopping 25% of the world’s total workforce, with the projected number of new entrants into the workforce each year at 12.8 million. Where are these jobs going to come from?

Read the rest of the article by the Editor of Beyond Profit on the Wall Street Journal.

The greatest challenge in the social enterprise space: scale. How do you move beyond a few cases of great work and great impact to a sector that has the potential for scale? How do you institutionalize and build good organizations around the successes that many social entrepreneurs have had with small pilots? There seems to be a lot of hype around some small scale organizations, but there needs to be a big push – a big push to create models that are actually scalable, cost effective, and efficient; a big push to attract investment; and finally, a big push to attract talent to the sector.

This is what Neera Nundy, Managing Partner of Dasra and leader of the track on Intellectual and Human Capital at the Khemka Forum on Social Entrepreneurship tomorrow, emphasized when I had the chance to sit down with her last week. According to Nundy, “As organizations think about growing their outreach, they need to think about growing thier teams in terms of expertise and skills.” Funding needs to be thought of as not only supporting programs, but being used to hire the people that you need to grow. » Continue reading “Building Alternative Talent Pools”