Video: Perspectives on International Social Entrepreneurs

GSBI students

GSBI students

From the GSBI, the Global Social Benefit Incubator and The Next Billion Blog comes a series of video interviews of social entrepreneurs from all over the globe who are meeting in what editor Francisco Noguera calls a 2-week in residence boot camp that closes the Global Social Benefit Incubator.

But what is the GSBI? This is how they explain:

The Global Social Benefit Incubator (GSBI™) is the signature program of Santa Clara University's Center for Science, Technology and Society (CSTS).  It works with social entrepreneurs to empower them and their organizations and to overcome barriers to scale and impact.  Since 2003, 87 award-winning social enterprises have attended this program and become part of a growing network of path finding alumni for creating a more just and sustainable world.


The first person interviewed was Nnaemeka Ikegwuonu who runs Smallholder Farm Rural Radio in Nigeria, providing poor farmers in rural and isolated communities with a rural radio full of information on sustainable agriculture and development in local languages. What is great is that they use radio and Internet to provide the information and is a profitable enterprise.

Yugandhar Mandavkar from India's Grass Roots Action for Social Participation organization was also interviewed, and spoke about the vertical draft energy efficient wood stoves which save women in India from having to collect large amounts of firewood for cooking fires:


Manoj Sinha
is also from India, but he has a different take on affordable energy for rural communities. Husk Power Systems provides pay-per-use energy to communities by providing energy from rice husks. According to GSBI, “HPS systems eliminate over 190 tons of CO2 emissions annually per village by replacing kerosene, diesel, and methane output with renewable sources”. The video, here:

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