Stanford Social Innovation Review

Social entrepreneurs are inventing new technologies to solve the world’s problems – disease, malnutrition, pollution, and illiteracy – to name just a few. But it takes more than a fancy new gadget to make life better. That’s why the organizations profiled here are working with businesses, NGOs, and governments to get their inventions into the hands of those who need them most.

MacArthur “genius” prize winner creates drugs for the developing world.

How Lutherans are transforming their love of coffee into global good.

Step aside, Stephen Covey. Kent Buse and Andrew M. Harmer have discovered seven new highly effective habits. And theirs may help rid the world of its more deadly diseases, rather than just upping people’s productivity.

Despite the hoopla over microfinance, it doesn’t cure poverty. But stable jobs do. If societies are serious about helping the poorest of the poor, they should stop investing in microfinance and start supporting large, labor-intensive industries.

To find out how best to stem corruption in development projects, a Harvard economist conducted a sophisticated experiment in 608 Javanese villages. His results challenge current wisdom: Send in the outside auditors, rather than rely on local monitors.

How for-profit clinics are healing and enriching the rural poor in Kenya.

Few microfinance institutions articulate what, exactly, their ultimate goals are and how to achieve them. If the goal of microfinance is to alleviate poverty, the authors say, then MFIs should focus on helping their clients build successful enterprises, rather than on making more and bigger loans.

Despite temptations to broaden its focus, the Rural Development Institute has remained single-mindedly devoted to its mission. As a result, the organization has helped 400 million poor farmers around the world take ownership of some 270 million acres of land – all on a modest budget.

Toxic environments knock impoverished kids’ systems out of kilter.

Management wisdom says that nonprofits must be large and in charge to do the most good. But some of the world’s most successful organizations instead stay small, sharing their load with like-minded, long-term partners. The success of these networked nonprofits suggests that organizations should focus less on growing themselves and more on cultivating their networks.

Why grassroots design will determine the winners in developing markets.
by Joshua Weissburg

Financial aid discourages innovative solutions to poverty. 

Conservative Protestants are poorer partly because of their religion.

Critics of microfinance institutions (MFIs) ask them to choose between helping the poor or making money for investors, but this is a false choice. MFIs can have their impact and profit, too, says the author, the CEO of the Grameen Foundation. He sketches a new vision of microfinance as a platform, not a product; one that relies on high volumes, not high margins, and that uses limits on private benefit, holistic performance standards, and third-party certification to help MFIs meet both their bottom lines.

World of Good connects female artisans in poor countries with retailers (including Whole Foods Market, pictured) in the West. 

Commercial microfinance institutions (MFIs) must calculate two bottom lines: alleviating poverty for clients and also generating profits for investors. To achieve the latter goal, some MFIs charge their impoverished clients exorbitant interest rates. The recent Banco Compartamos IPO in Mexico raises a red flag, demonstrating how easily well-intentioned MFIs and their investors can shift from microlending to microloan-sharking.