Yunus Center at AIT
A collaboration between Professor Yunus and the Asian Institute of Technology (AIT), the Yunus Center AIT (YCA) is among the first of its kind, located within a regional post-graduate research university.
SB Challenge: A unique test of skills for building collaborative business alliances to solve social problems while creating wealth. SB Learning: A dynamic set of guided or independent learning options for academics or practitioners rooted in best practice.
Vision Working within AIT’s development mandate, create a world free from poverty by harnessing the power of social business and effective technologies to improve the lives of the marginalized.
SB Academy: Young Leaders’ Program and Yunus Fellowships, offering experiential learning and decision-making skills.
Mission
GCL@YCA: A cycle of creative events in partnership with GCL to spark ideas bridging business and academia.
To establish an action-learning platform that fosters the development, implementation and valuation of sustainable social business models driven by research, technology and partnerships that effectively solves social problems, with a particular focus on gender equality.
Ongoing Initiatives M-HealthAsia – Pilot training & normative SB model assessment in collaboration Italian partner
Approach
YCA and the AIT-based Wetlands Alliance (WAP) are supporting Mobilediagnosis® (MD) in piloting its training among rural communities in Kratie, Cambodia. Based on this pilot and a detailed assessment, a social business model may be evaluated for roll out in similar communities in the Asia-Pacific region.
An Action-Learning approach, with ongoing dialogue at its core, towards becoming an effective, open platform with the professional capacity to process relevant information received from stakeholders and key constituencies within and outside AIT and the Grameen family, and converting it into practical ideas for social business promoted and implemented through diverse partnerships and the effective learning outreach.
MD, an Italian healthcare non-profit has patented a mobile phone application that transmits MMS images from microscopes or optical devices to clinical labs where diagnosis for microbial disease can be rapidly confirmed.
Program Portfolios 2014-15 SB Action: Need-responsive, gender-mainstreamed social business projects, identified and run for their profit potential.
MD has typically offered their application as part of welfare programs in Afghanistan, the Congo, and Madagascar. YCA’s collaboration with MD aims at moving beyond charity towards creating a social business model spread across rural communities around central laboratory hubs located in existing diagnostic facilities
SB Archives: An open repository of practical knowledge, action research findings, case studies and online workshops. 43