[TC-I Changemaker]: CGAP’s Gautam Ivatury on the linkage between technology and financial empowerment of the poor

The ThinkChange India staff is committed to providing our readers with interviews with people we believe are at the brink of something special but have for the most part been overlooked by the mainstream media. Readers will be able to see other conversations under our TC-I Changemakers tab.
This week, Vinay sat down (over the phone) [...]

[TC-I Changemakers]: Interview with Maya Ajmera of The Global Fund for Children

The ThinkChange India staff is committed to providing our readers with interviews with people we believe are at the brink of something special but have for the most part been overlooked by the mainstream media. Readers will be able to see other conversations under our TC-I Changemakers tab.
Maya Ajmera is the Founder and President of [...]

[TC-I Changemakers] A book for every child — the mission for Pratham Books

The ThinkChange India staff is committed to providing our readers with interviews with people we believe are at the brink of something special but have for the most part been overlooked by the mainstream media. Readers will be able to see other conversations under our TC-I Changemakers tab.
This week we had the opportunity to [...]

SocialSync: Creating a web presence for Indian non-profits

SocialSync is a exciting new Indian social sector start-up. I pulled out the below presentation from their homepage. Turns out there are 500,000+ NGOs in India and many of them lack a real web-presence. At the same time, there are 40 million web users and 10 million on Orkut alone! So, SocialSync has created a [...]

Pioneers in Microfinance, Part 2: MYRADA

Today, Microcapital.org published the second part of their “Pioneers in Microfinance” series, in which they continued their interview of a pioneer in microfinance, Aloysius P. Fernandez, Executive Director MYRADA and Chairman of the Board of Microfinance Institution Sanghamithra Rural Financial Services.   To refresh your memory on Part One of this series, read this earlier post by Vinay.
The [...]

Semam Microfinance Investment Literacy and Empowerment (SMILE) and Gram-Utthan receive loan of $2.7 million

As per the most recent newsfeed, Microcapital.org reports that Semam Microfinance Investment Literacy and Empowerment PVT (SMILE) of Madhurai and Gram-Uttham of Orissa have both received loans in the total amount of $2.7 million from Oikocredit, a Dutch cooperative fund.   A profile of the two NGOs follows:
Semam Microfinance Investment Literacy and Empowerment PVT (SMILE) is the largest [...]

Kanavu - Where Dreams are Built

In the words of Paulo Freire, Brazilian educator, activist, philosopher, and author of Pedagogy of the Oppressed:
Self deprecation is … characteristic of the oppressed, which derives from their internalization of the opinion the oppressors hold of them.  So often do they hear that they are good for nothing, know nothing and are incapable of learning [...]

Change-Agent Profile: Shedding Light on Poverty

Change-Agent: Harsh Hande; Company: Selco 
From Deutsche Welle (Germany’s international broadcaster): 
   57 percent of the population in India has no electric light, and many would be unable to afford regular electricity even if it were available. But Harish Hande is working to improve the situation. He set up a company called Selco in Bangalore, which now supplies [...]

Sristi: Nuturing Grassroots Innovations

Vinay just posted an interesting video made, produced by Discovery Channel on grassroots innovators in India. The organization behind identifying and nurturing such innovators is Sristi:
SRISTI is a non-governmental organisation setup to strengthen the creativity of grassroots inventors, innovators and ecopreneurs engaged in conserving biodiversity and developing eco-friendly solutions to local problems

Sristi was founded by [...]

A safe haven for war torn girls

Often it is easy to become so engrossed with the political and strategic factors of a conflict like that in Jammu/Kashmir that we completely overlook the devastating effects that such violent endeavors have on the innocent bystanders stuck within. The most obvious example of this is orphaned children, who must suffer from images of death, [...]

Op-Ed: Transcending Theories, Entering Reality

Victimized. Marginalized. Stigmatized. Wayward. Downtrodden. Immoral.
Vandana is a poor woman in prostitution. But that is not all that she is defined by, although academic discourse may be rife with theories about how she should conceive of her own identity. Vandana defies definition or categorization, for that matter, as [...]

Treating More than Diarrhea

During the course of my work with SEWA Rural, a community health organization in rural Gujarat, India, I often wondered how mental health concerns would ever gain traction in a climate where community members suffered, and sometimes died from, such common ailments as diarrhea or anemia. Those with mental health problems (whether diagnosed or [...]