Muhammad Yunus to Mentor Social Entrepreneurs in India

Prof. Muhammad Yunus, the Nobel Peace Laureate who is widely regarded as the father of microfinance, is floating a fund to provide seed capital to promising social ventures in India. The project, which will involve mentoring of promising social entrepreneurs, is being developed in partnership with the premier Indian Institute of Management (IIM) at Ahmedabad.

Yunus is already in touch with several industrial houses in India to set up the corpus fund. Yunus views a social enterprise as one that does not pay any dividend to its shareholders, but redeploys all its profits into the enterprise whose mission is to address social problems. He says, "It's a new class of non-dividend business done in a serious way to solve social problems."

The alliance between Yunus and IIM-A's Centre for Innovation Incubation and Entrepreneurship (CIIE) was formed after a year of discussions. Rakesh Basant, the chairman of CIIE, said, "We are exploring a collaboration with Yunus to build a stronger ecosystem to support fledgling entrepreneurs who are creating innovative solutions in the social sector."

The CIIE is experienced in helping incubate nascent social enterprises across the education, healthcare and livelihood space. It will enter into collaboration with Grameen Creative Lab (GCL) in Mumbai, which provides seed funding to social businesses. GCL is a joint venture between the Yunus Centre of Bangladesh and Circ-responsibility, a consultancy firm in Germany.

Yunus and the CIIE will join hands to develop an effective mentoring network to help budding social entrepreneurs identify and create viable social business options. Yunus has been in talks with many Indian industrialists to support social enterprises that do not give back profits to the shareholders. He hopes to raise the corpus for this project through Indian business and philanthropic foundations.

Vineet Rai, the founder and CEO of Aavishkaar, a for-profit enterprise that invests in organizations that are making a social impact, sums up the situation in India: "Rich industrialists in India prefer charity than investing in business without any return expectations." It is only now that India as a nation has started exploring the risk-reward paradigm and it may be a few more years before the Yunus model finds takers in India.

Source: The Economic Times

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