Reaching the BoP: Micro-grid Payment and Metering Solutions – Part 2

Part I of the article highlighted the need for decentralized energy solutions, and various products and services offered by private enterprises to meet the energy needs of rural poor households. Fixed Payments and Metering Solutions Commercial micro-grid enterprises with solutions to provide reliable power supply, are gradually building trust among low-income consumers. Mechanisms to enhance payment [...]

Reaching the BoP: Micro-grid Payment and Metering Solutions

On the occasion of World Environment Day, Sankalp Forum is running an online campaign to showcase clean energy enterprises that are having a positive impact on pressing environmental issues. In this blog, we highlight enterprises that are using technology to break barriers of adoption of clean energy.  It is ironic how an energy resource-rich nation [...]

World Environment Day Tweetchat: How are businesses addressing environmental issues?

Social innovation has been hard at work, devising and applying creative ideas to solve development issues.

Accelerator Workshops Survey

Online Marketing 101 for Early-stage Businesses

Creating an online presence for your business (most commonly a website) can be expensive, so before you start, you need to ask yourself if your business benefits from having one. Does your business need to be on the Internet? If a website for your business can do one or more of the following 3 things [...]

Seen and Heard at Sankalp Unconvention Summit 2013

One month after the world’s largest social enterprise gathering came together at the Sankalp Unconvention Summit 2013, a presentation of some of the highlights, some of the big ideas and some of the bold opinions follows below the picture blog. And don’t forget, the dates for the next Summit have already been announced. Block your [...]

Entrepreneur Blog Videos: Avani Bio Energy

Sankalp Finalist 2013 Avani Bio’s founder talks about how his company creates value from waste to generate electricity from pine needles. He also talks about what takes him into the Himalayas and keeps him ticking.      

Entrepreneur Blog Videos: IQST

What goes in making a social entrepreneur? Hear from Aditya Baran Malik, the first in our series of entrepreneur video blogs. He talks about spotting opportunities by observation, “You don’t need market research to know that there is a waste management or a primary education challenge in India.” IQST won the Sankalp Social Enterprise Award [...]

Impact Investing in Asia: From Promise to Realization

In the upcoming Sankalp Forum, East and South-East Asia will be well represented by a panel of organisations committed to helping scale innovation and social enterprise.  While the projections of the 2013 GIIN-JP Morgan report are cause for optimism, these regions suffer from the usual industry challenges: a nascent pipeline and a general disconnect between [...]

Making Social Enterprise Incubation More Effective

Sankalp Unconvention Summit is just round the corner and the theme is Looking Beyond Impact: Seeking Transformational Change. After a successful tweetchat last week to get the dialog started, we are organizing a Google Hangout to feed into another track in the Summit - Incubating the Incubators: Developing an Effective Framework for Change. Details: When: April 12, Friday, 4 [...]

Are we looking at “Impact” right? Get on this tweetchat

We have all been watching closely as Social Enterprises have been at work addressing some of the most pressing problems that we have as a society and country. We’ve seen them walk the tightrope between maximizing impact and social sustainability while being sustainable themselves. But since impact is at the heart of what these enterprises do [...]

World Water Day: Social Enterprises filling a gap

On the 21st World Water Day, 128 Million people in India still lack access to safe drinking water. A large percentage of water reaching homes here is still untreated and contains sewerage and industrial waste. The World Bank estimates that 21% of communicable diseases and 75% of child mortality is caused due to contaminated water [...]

Choosing an incubator for your social enterprise

So you’ve finally succumbed, and decided to scratch your entrepreneurial itch. Not satisfied with just creating any entrepreneurial venture, you’ve decided you want to concentrate on solving some of society’s knottiest problems. You’ve decided you want to be a social entrepreneur. Getting a social enterprise started is difficult in itself. Don’t go it alone – [...]

5 Tips to Improve Your Chances of Receiving Capital

How do you convince an investor that your business is the one to invest in? How do you learn the investor’s language so that your business is communicated as a viable and scalable prospect? Most importantly, how is it that you find the investor best suited to your business?

Infographic: Indian Microfinance Looking Beyond the AP Act and its Devastating Impact on the Poor

In December  the Government of Andhra Pradesh passed a law (the “AP Act”) which effectively shut down private sector microfinance in the State. The AP Government stated that its goal was to protect the poor. Now,  months later, the impact of the AP Act is clear: rather than protecting the poor in AP, it has had the opposite effect and indeed harmed the poor by starving them of access to credit and basic financial services.This infographic by Legatum Ventures puts the current scenario in perspective. Intellecap has helped in the making of this report.

Join Our Live Twitter Chat on 28 March: Reimagining Capitalism

Are the answers to a new model of capitalism in the margins? Are there insights and lessons in the nascent and little known worlds of social enterprise and impact investing? Those are questions we’re bringing to this year’s Sankalp Summit, but we also want to know what yours are.  Join us in a live Twitter [...]

Sankalp Forum and Ennovent Join Hands

We’re pleased to bring ennovent on board as a partner for the Sankalp Summit 2012. This partnership will bring together synergies that will benefit the ecosystem of social entrepreneurship in India. Sankalp Awards 2012 finalists will get access to ennovent’s Impact Circle, an exclusive network of investors who want to accelerate innovations for sustainability at [...]

Impact Investing: World Changing Movement or Struggling Financial Instrument?

The popular 180 degree debate at Sankalp Forum’s annual summit this year will ask a controversial question about impact investing – is it made out to be more than it really is? We’ve put together diverse opinions from across the sector, add your own and tell us what you think.  Is it “a dangerous promise” [...]

Stitching Together the Social Enterprise Mosaic in India

Early stage businesses thrive best in an environment that brings together, and facilitates efficient working of all players needed for them to grow. The favourite, and oft-quoted example of such an enabling ecosystem is the Silicon Valley, but there are examples closer to the developing world as well – like the information technology industry in [...]

Reimagining Capitalism: Seeking Alternatives to The Single Bottomline Model

The global economy is a system in crisis. The UN estimates that the three richest people in the world possess more financial assets than the poorest 48 nations combined. Around the world, individuals and communities are demanding that capitalism be redefined. A Deloitte ‘Millenials Survey‘ in early 2012 asked 1000 millenials and 390 business leaders [...]

Creating A Greater Impact Through Experiential Learning

Journeys for Change, in partnership with The Sankalp Forum, is organizing a unique 3-day immersive journey to visit some of Mumbai’s most exciting social enterprises, designed to inspire participants to create greater profit and impact in their work.

Sankalp Partners with Organic, Fair Trade and Designer Clothing Brand NoNasties

The Sankalp Summit is excited to collaborate with noNasties a 100% organic, fair trade and designer clothing brand. The Mumbai based start-up is teaming up with the Sankalp Summit to create customized t-shirts for the 31 finalist Sankalp entrepreneurs who will get together at the Sankalp Bootcamp on March 9 and 10 at the Indian School of Business in Hyderabad, and will then go on to pitch to the Sankalp Grand Jury at the upcoming Sankalp Summit on April 12-13.

2012′s Most Sustainable and Scalable Enterprises Announced

Social enterprise empowers the Bottom of the Pyramid by engaging them into the market as suppliers and consumers of goods and services. Unlike other interactions with the Bottom of the Pyramid, that prescribe policy from the top-down, social enterprise is a bottom-up approach to alleviating poverty. As a consequence of market feedback mechanisms, today’s SMEs [...]

National Social Entrepreneurship Forum Joins Hands with Sankalp Forum; Announces Launch of Flagship Program

National Social Entrepreneurship Forum (NSEF), one of Sankalp’s champion partners recently announced its flagship program; Authors of Change. NSEF is a youth led non-profit organization that aims to bridge the talent gap in the social enterprise sector through a number of initiatives including setting up centers of excellence at top institutes across the country; providing [...]