Sun co-founder uses capitalism to help poor, By Vika Bajaj, October 5, 2010, New York Times: “Vinod Khosla, the billionaire venture capitalist and co-founder of Sun Microsystems, was already among the world’s richest men when he invested a few years ago in SKS Microfinance, a lender to poor women in India. But the roaring success of SKS’s recent initial public stock offering in Mumbai has made him richer by about $117 million – money he says he plans to plow back into other ventures that aim to fight poverty while also trying to turn a profit. And he says he wants to challenge other rich Indians to do more to help their country’s poor…”
Tag: Microfinance
Telecommunications in Developing Nations
For the poor, cellphones can offer lifeline, By Cecilia Kang, September 8, 2010, Washington Post: “For the world’s poorest, cellphone technology carries opportunity, aid groups say, as text messages and other mobile applications have created a new platform to reach the most remote farms and crowded urban slums of Africa, Asia and Latin America. The Grameen Foundation, a Washington-based group known for helping women with the smallest of business loans, has two dozen people in a technology lab here developing mobile Internet applications to help spread its microfinance model. It’s warning farmers in Uganda about banana crop rot through text messages and collecting data on spreadsheet applications on smartphones…”
Microlending in the US
Micro-lender bringing his vision of helping the poor to D.C., By Jonathan O’Connell, April 19, 2010, Washington Post: “In 1976, Muhammad Yunus began making loans of a dollar or less to poor farmers and textile makers in his native Bangladesh. Thirty years later, he and the nonprofit micro-lender he founded, Grameen Bank, shared the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize. To date, Grameen has lent more than $9 billion to more than 8 million borrowers, almost all in Bangladesh. Now Yunus plans to bring low-interest credit to the poor and unemployed in Washington. Grameen America, a U.S. offshoot, is already lending in Queens and Brooklyn, N.Y., and Omaha and has lent to more than 2,500 American borrowers. Yunus says that although the United States is one of the wealthiest places in the world, the need for small, low-cost loans is evident in the number of Americans coming to Grameen to borrow money…”