Poverty Banished by the Bottom Line

Most business school social entrepreneur courses focus on service. In a program at one Boston university, students are pushing the bottom line. Northeastern University's social entrepreneur course recently took students to the Dominican Republic where they helped locals create sustainable, viable businesses. Only two other business school social entrepreneurship programs — at Stanford and UC Berkeley — use this same bottom line approach to social change. "Profit is the key to fighting poverty," says Dennis Shaughnessey, the faculty director of the social entrepreneurship program at Northeastern.

To this end, the students have helped set up "village banks" in the DR. The goal — much like that of Grameen Bank, the first microfinance model pioneered by Nobel Peace Prize winner Dr. Muhammad Yunus — is to "provide the poor with access to capital so that they can lift themselves out of poverty, and provide a better life for their children."

The students are learning lessons in micro-credit, micro-enterprise development and business entrepreneurship in an emerging market economy. Another practical aspect: "The premier new emerging markets are in places where most big companies don't yet do a lot of business — and we want to build a leadership cadre that learns about these places and also learns to exchange their diverse backgrounds and skills," said Stanley Litow, vice president of corporate citizenship at IBM.

Sometimes, pushing profit can also push out poverty.