Mechai Viravaidya launched Population & Community Development Association 30 years ago to address the necessities of life for rural populations: HIV/Aids, income generation, women's rights, environment, governance... It's all about "empowerment of the poor."

Global X recommends that you watch Mechai Viravaidya as he gives a piece of advice to young social entrepreneurs (at 2'32 in this three-minute interview): "Young man, young woman, go out and change the world! The world is yours. Help people to become philanthropists. Make 10 million junior Jeff Skolls. We will have so much more money to give than Jeff Skoll!"

At last year's Skoll World Forum in Oxford, Global X ran into Martin Burt, the social entrepreneur who launched Fundación Paraguaya. They met again a few days ago in Zurich, and Global X asked him a few questions about his work.

Martin Burt describes a key concept that explains his success: model replication, "the same principles that apply to microfinance: if you treat poor people with dignity, they will get out of poverty. We are trying to apply that to education."

As Martin Burt explains at 3'37" in this five-minute interview: "With dignity, with appropriate finances and the appropriate curriculum, you can turn a poor, 15-year old rural adolescent girl into a rural entrepreneur by the time she is 18, a person who can get a good job in the private sector or make her own job."

Martin Burt's goals at Fundación Paraguaya: to move "from poverty alleviation to poverty elimination."

To conclude the interview, Global X asks Martin Burt to share a piece of advice: "Concentrate very methodically on sustainability. All the doors open when you have operational, thematic and financial sustainability." Otherwise, it's not social entrepreneurship, but charity.

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Global X interviews P. N. Vasudevan, an entrepreneurial leader with a background in commercial finance who is now CEO of Equitas, a for-profit microfinance institution working in Bangladesh and India.  

He remembers noticing that poor women usually don't have a place at the table because they don't bring food, "but microfinance creates a perceptible shift in the power balance" when women start bringing revenues.

Microfinance helped P. N. Vasudevan open his eyes. As he tells Global X, he now realizes that he never noticed women cooking on the sidewalk by his house and young children defecating on the street without any supervision, then going back to eating without being cleaned up.

"I never saw it in the past, even though it happened every day, but I just never noticed." 

Watch this short interview then read the Unitus case study.

Global X interviews Urmee Mehta Mankar, with Mumbai-based microfinance institution Swadhaar (Self Support). Even though this microfinance institution is quite young (it was launched only two years ago), there is lot to be learned from this interview.

You may want to pay attention to Urmee at 2'27" into this interview, when she recommends to "get out into the field and learn about the market reality." Before launching Swadhaar, Urmee and her CEO spent a year in several slums in Mumbai to find out what Swadhaar's potential customers really needed.

To their own surprise, they found out that women were willing to pay higher interest rates but didn't want to work in groups and be held responsible for other's financial situations. Her advice: "Go out and understand the market!"

Urmee then tells Global X a very moving story, one that involves a 12-year old boy who was selling tissue paper boxes at a Mumbai intersection. Urmee was fascinated by his sense of pride when he told her: "I am not begging, I am doing my job!"

She concludes: "This is typical of the spirit of the people that we are trying to help. He has become my mascot!"

Watch this short interview then read the Unitus case study.