Browse by title

Stephen and Bette Gibson founded the Academy for Creating Enterprise (the Academy) in Cebu, the Philippines in order to give local necessity entrepreneurs a chance to obtain an education on microenterprise. The Academy employs the “discovery learning,” or “guided learning,” methodology—the same methodology that Professor Clayton Christensen uses with his students at Harvard’s Business School. The Academy opened a second location in Mexico City in 2008 under the direction of Dr. Jeremi Brewer, Dr. Rebecca Brewer, and Mr. Gandhi Blas Pérez. Using the Gibsons’ curriculum and methodology, Academy Mexico has trained more than 4,100 individuals, and an estimated 500 new income generating activities have been created along with nearly 700 new jobs.

Seventy percent of India’s population is under 35 years of age. A large portion of this oft-spoken demographic dividend is either unemployed or underemployed. To avoid an impending demographic disaster, Bharatiya Yuva Shakti Trust (BYST), the brainchild of Lakshmi Venkatesan, has taken up the cause of entrepreneur creation and support. This chapter details the entrepreneurial rise of BYST, its various experiments, its unique “Guru-Sishya model” of mentoring, and stories of few successful entrepreneurs created. BYST’s approach to bringing together education, mentoring and resource facilitation will serve as a model for all who are interested in creating and nurturing necessity entrepreneurs.

Jeff Brownlow shares the results of an interview he held with necessity entrepreneurs in Puebla, Mexico. The answers these entrepreneurs give show their lack of business knowledge and suggests that what they need more than anything is business training. Jeff and his business partner Jeremi Brewer are currently working on bringing business education to those necessity entrepreneurs who need it the most.

The Entrepreneurial Finance Lab (EFL) was created to expand access to finance in emerging markets by equipping banks with better tools to measure credit risk. Built with the aim of tackling a 2.5 trillion dollar financing gap for micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs) around the world, EFL's digital psychometric credit assessment evaluates small business owners on key elements of entrepreneurship in a scalable and automated manner. This application has been implemented across Latin America, Africa and Asia, and is currently completed somewhere in the world every five minutes by a previously un-bankable applicant. It helps bring the developing world's most capable, yet previously un-bankable, entrepreneurs into the formal financial fold. Emerging from a research initiative at the Harvard's Center for International Development, EFL has facilitated over $275 million in lending to MSMEs. Case studies from Latin America and South Asia highlight the tools' use and impact.