Global Social Venture Competition

Congratulations to the GSVC 2010 Finalists!

Blended Value Finalists

Amandes, Prasetiya Mulya Business School, Indonesia
Contact: Adi Wahyu Rahadi, .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)

Amandes was established with a mission to provide affordable safe drinking water for remote coastal people in Indonesia. Currently, around 1.8 million Indonesians live in those areas. They use rainwater and brackish water as their main source of drinking water because of unavailable freshwater sources. Amandes uses seawater distillation system fully powered by solar energy. It applies a business model that developed not only as an operational system but also as a financing and expansion strategy. This model optimizes mutual benefit and close interdependency between the investor and the local communities through a joint cooperation program. Amandes offers an attractive financial return as well as enhances social benefits such as reduction in healthcare and household costs, reduction in carbon emission and enhancement in local economic growth. Amandes business can also be replicated in other countries which have the same water issue for remote coastal communities.

AYZH, Rural Technology Business Incubator, IIT, India
Contact: Zubaida Bai, .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) 

AYZH (pronounced ‘eyes’) is a new venture taking a for-profit approach to developing, commercializing, and scaling low-cost, high quality products that rural women want and need to help improve their standard of living. Under the leadership of founder and CEO Zubaida Bai, the first product AYZH is bringing to market is called JANMA focused on women’s health. JANMA is an inexpensive ($2) clean birth kit addressing the global issue of maternal and child infection and mortality due to unclean birth environments. JANMA is sourced and assembled in India by rural women, creating economic opportunity in the communities we serve. We distribute JANMA through an established network of local pharmacies, clinics, and women-focused nonprofit/nongovernmental organizations. For more information, visit http://www.ayzh.com.

Bags of Hope, Guanghua School of Management – Peking University, China
Contact: Zen Ghong, .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) 

Our company is dedicated to promoting a program named Stacks of Straw, Bags of Hope. We create job opportunities for millions of rural women who are bound to the land in remote areas making very low income to support their families. We provide training for them to process straws to weave bags and promote the distinct local culture through bag design. In this way, we can also prevent tons of straws from being burnt as fertilizers, reducing significant CO2 emission. We plan to sell those straw bags at high-end supermarkets in major cities in China. 30% of our profit will be donated to schools in areas we have cooperation relationships to purchase books. We firmly believe if you give a man a job, you help him only for some time; if you offer a man better education, you help him for a lifetime.

BlueDrop, Haas School of Business – UC Berkeley, USA
Contact: Ryan Stanley, .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)

One child dies every 15 seconds from preventable waterborne diseases because one-sixth of humanity still struggles to meet their basic need for water. BlueDrop is a for-profit company that has developed a low-cost water chlorination system, designed to provide safe drinking water to people living on less than $2 per day. Since 40% of purified water sources are re-contaminated before consumption, chlorine is a more effective method of treating biologically-contaminated water because it continues to disinfect after the initial treatment. The BlueDrop system can produce chlorine and automatically dose it into water in off-grid areas.  The robust design can be made in India with locally-available materials, making it easy-to-maintain in resource-constrained areas. Micro-franchises will provide clean water to communities and sustainable financial revenues to micro-entrepreneurs and our company. This summer, we are launching in Eastern India where we have strong partnerships with NGOs and government agencies. 

C-Crete Technologies, MIT Sloan School of Management, USA
Contact: Rouzbeh Shahsavari, .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)

Concrete is the most widely used manufacturing material on the planet. The key strengthening ingredient in concrete is cement, whose production expends considerable amount of energy and contributes to 5-10% of CO2 emissions worldwide, making concrete the biggest climate change culprit outside of transportation and electricity-generation. C-Crete Technologies has engineered an innovative cement which is stronger than typical cement, while reducing both energy consumption and CO2 emitted during the cement manufacturing process.

Freehap, Chulalongkorn and Thammasat Universities, Thailand
Contact: Natee Jarayabhand, .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)

We, Freehap are not sure if our World is getting happier. We believe that this problem should be considered more seriously and we must find realistic and measurable ways to help improve World Happiness together. We will build a platform to find out how happiness can be improved for different types of people. This platform will be simple and fun to participate. The data will be both useful for improving happiness of our everyday life with our family and friends and also be helpful in projects that aim to help other people to solve specific problems. You can find out more about us at http://www.freehap.com. Let’s be Happier Together, Freehap!

Makane, ESSEC Business School, France 
Contact: Tibor Asboth, .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)

In Senegal, 58% of the population cannot access salubrious and sustainable housing. Makane addresses the issues of housing and poverty by building socially, technically and ecologically adapted houses for underprivileged populations in rural areas of Senegal at a very low price. In order to do so, Makane relies on:
-  A readapted and ancestral building technique called “the Nubian Vault” technique and using bricks of raw clay as main material for the building.
-  Recruitment and training of the local workforce to this specific technique.

Nest For All, Ecole des Mines de Paris, Harvard Business School, Ecole Polytechnique
Contact: Khadidiatou Nakoulima, .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)

Nest For All will provide affordable quality maternal and child healthcare to a large low and middle income urban population in West Africa. Nest For All will extend a network of hospitals and clinics aimed at achieving quality of service, WHO standards, profitability and scale concurrently. The network will address the main shortcomings that patients see in the current public offering. Nest For All will institute a culture focused on service, on reducing transportation and waiting time spent for a visit from 4.5 hours currently to 1 hour and a commitment to quality healthcare delivery. Furthermore, our integrated model will aim at following mothers and children’s health from the prenatal and delivery phase all through childhood. For doctors, the company will provide substantial professional development opportunities and financial upside, allowing them to focus on care delivery (80% of their time vs. 50% today) and fostering best management practices.

Ruma, Harvard Business School, USA
Contact: Aldi Haryopratomo, .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)

Of the 250 million people in Indonesia, 3/4 live below $2.5 a day, and 2/3 have mobile phones. Ninety percent of these users buy prepaid minutes instead of paying a monthly bill. Ruma sells a business-in-a-box that enables small entrepreneurs to sell prepaid minutes. We buy minutes at a discount from 10 telecom operators and store them in our server. When a customer buys minutes from our entrepreneur, we send the minutes electronically via SMS thereby reducing the need for a physical voucher. We worked with Grameen Foundation to develop this model, which is essentially the next evolution of the Grameen Phone.  As of March 2010, we’ve deployed a network of 2,000 entrepreneurs, $3,000 worth of minutes to 80,000 customers each day. Seventy percent of our entrepreneurs were below the poverty line when they joined; now 100% are profitable. We plan to launch a jobs market, micro-insurance and retail application using our prepaid minutes platform.

Winduction, London Business School, UK
Contact:  William Chapman, .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)

Winduction is to commercialize a revolutionary small wind turbine. Their patented and proven design (a prototype is currently running in Ireland) allows small wind to be cost-competitive with grid-parity in many developed markets, enabling cost-effective distributed generation and small wind to become a reality. Winduction holds the IP rights to a generation and control system that acts as an ‘electronic gearbox’, enabling significantly better performance than any existing small turbine, minimal mechanical stress for increased safety and uses off-the-shelf components such as an induction motor. Additionally, this high efficiency is nearly flat across the operating wind speed range, a technical advantage unique to the company. Winduction will bring cost-effective microgeneration to mature and developing markets around the world, including 25% of the global population who have no access to grid electricity.

Re:Motion Designs, Stanford University, USA
Contact:  Joel Sadler, .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)

With 80% of the world’s amputees living in developing countries, there is a profound need for low-cost lower limb prostheses for the developing world. Modern assistive technology has the potential to re-mobilize lower limb amputees, but at a cost typically in the thousands of dollars. Re:Motion Designs is a for-benefit venture that provides high performance, extreme-affordability prosthetics for the 20 Million amputees in the developing world. Our initial product, the JaipurKnee, is a polymer-based polycentric knee joint that can be manufactured for less than $20 USD, and has been featured by Time Magazine, CNN, BusinessWeek and Fast Company as a major innovation of 2009. Compared with existing low-cost prosthetic knee joints, the JaipurKnee provides a new class of stability and gait efficiency for above-knee amputees, and is currently in field trials in India with over 700 patients fitted to date. For more information visit http://www.remotiondesigns.org.

SIA Finalists

AgriSolutions, Great Lakes Institute of Management, India
Contact: Gurava Reddy Maruri, .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)

With advanced methods of doing agriculture and implementing best practices from across the world, AgriSolutions intends to transform the agriculture industry in India. In Andhra, the use of traditional methods of cultivation leads to high costs, low yields and tedious processes. With heavily fragmented land holdings and an average acreage of less than 2 acres, it is very difficult for farmers to adopt any technology by themselves. The increase in labor costs and cultivation costs has made agriculture an unviable practice. AgriSolutions uses agriculture equipment for rice cultivation to aid the farmers for nursery, ploughing, planting and harvesting the crop with the best practices available. These result in a considerable reduction in cost, increase in yield and also improve the productivity of land by more than 30%. AgriSolutions uses vermi-compost units, godowns and machinery operations as the means to provide employment to traditional laborers in need of work.

BLISS (Business and Life Skills School), MIT Sloan School of Management, USA
Contact: Saba Gul, .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)

BLISS aims to reduce exploitative labor and increase literacy in communities where school-age youth must choose work over education to meet household cash needs. It brings working youth to school by offering monetary incentives that are sustained through the sale of crafts created in vocational classes. In addition, it offers a business skills curriculum that encourages financial independence and entrepreneurship. In the process, BLISS promotes indigenous art in the form of socially conscious products, and increases participants’ earning potential—thus changing community attitudes towards the usefulness of education. BLISS has an edge over free/subsidized educational programs because it directly tackles the financial opportunity cost of attending school, and over cash incentive schemes because it can self-sustain via its craft sales. BLISS has a successful pilot project in place for 38 Afghan refugee girls in Pakistan, who previously provided labor at carpet looms for up to 14 hours a day. For more information visit http://www.bagsforbliss.org.

Punô, Ateneo de Manila Graduate School of Business, Philippines
Contact: Beatrice V. Misa, .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)

Punô is a social enterprise that seeks to reduce post-consumer waste through more sustainable retail systems. It leverages its social impact through varied distribution methods that deliver quality, affordable and locally produced eco-friendly household and personal care products that utilize less packaging and encourage more environmental awareness in consumer practice.  Its distribution systems provide retailers an alternative that is not only more environmentally sound, but more economical. Punô also encourages an ecosystem with community producers of natural household and personal care products, integrating their goods into Punô's distribution systems without the constraints of conventional retail packaging. Punô’s sustainable retail systems are unique, utilizing a combination of massive base of pyramid distribution networks, to mid-level, mainstream commercial retail.

Vitanutril®, Reims Business School, France
Contact: Laetitia Raginel, .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)

Vitanutril® produces and sells spirulina-based food in Burkina Faso allying the strengths of spirulina, an algae with an exceptional mix of proteins, minerals and vitamins, and the expertise of a network of local saleswomen well trained on nutritional education. Vitanutril®’s main objectives are to alleviate malnutrition by producing an additional product line of tasty and affordable spirulina-based food targeted towards the poorest and to foster the development of local social micro-enterprises by setting up an economically viable and sustainable structure that can be replicated across Africa.

WE CARE Solar, Haas School of Business – UC Berkeley, USA
Contact:  Laura Stachel, .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)

WE CARE (Women’s Emergency Communication and Reliable Electricity) Solar is a social enterprise that saves lives of childbearing mothers and infants in developing regions by providing obstetric health facilities with solar power for lighting, mobile communication and essential medical devices. Pregnancy-related complications cause over 500,000 maternal deaths annually, primarily in Africa and South Asia. Life-saving obstetric care requires reliable lighting, communication and electricity. Approximately 300,000 health facilities worldwide lack this basic infrastructure. WE CARE Solar has developed and field-tested the Solar Suitcase, a user-friendly, portable, plug-and-play solar-electric system that ensures electricity, lighting, and communication for maternity care in low-resource settings.   In addition, WE CARE is leveraging and building local market-based capacity and partnerships to distribute, install and maintain these systems. The Solar Suitcase facilitates timely and effective emergency care and reduces maternal and infant morbidity and mortality, thus enhancing family productivity, strengthening health systems, and improving markets for renewable energy.