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Over the past years, the global temperature has reached an alarming scale causing climactic volatility, which led to frequent and extreme weather events. The sudden shift in the climate system not only resulted to environmental threats, it also made a great impact on poverty.

Climate change had made the lives of people in poor communities and countries more complex. Their dependence on natural resources to live and their limited capacity to cope with climate extremes and variability made these people more vulnerable to the effects of climate change.

According to the Global Humanitarian Forum’s report titled “The Human Impact of Climate Change”, it claims that 315,000 people are dying every year as a result of climate change. Most of these people died from hunger because their environment, which had been their ally is now their worst foe. The sudden shift of their climate system not only affected their crops but it also posed a great threat to their health.

During an interview hosted by the Global Poverty Project, a Ugandan Farmer said that when he was young, his farmland was very cold. Now, the area is warmer. Before 1970, people in his area did not know what Malaria was. The mosquitoes that spread Malaria thrived in his land due to the high temperature. At present, Malaria is the number one cause of death in the area.

This is one of the confronting and meaningful information that needs immediate action. As Kiribati President, Anote Tong, said, “Some industrialized countries have argued that climate change would hurt their economic development, sadly, I say no. Climate change is not an issue of economic growth. It is an issue of human survival.”

Moreover, the result from the recent Climate Change talk held at Germany last July 2009 revealed that it is not enough for industrialized countries to commit in cutting greenhouse gas emissions. Leaders and head of states from rich countries must also understand the scale of the threat climate change poses and therefore, they must take ambitious steps to face it.

Rich countries and communities must not hold back and delay in taking action. Money is not a problem. It is always there but the political will is not. It is only a matter of time when food shortage, drought and public safety that endangers the people of poor countries will become irreversible.

Similar to conflicts like disease and economics, climate change has left leaders from rich nations with two options, which are to grab this chance to help reduce poverty by supporting poor countries with increased funding and shared technology, which will help poor people adapt to climate change or build high walls and hide from the consequences of their unjust decisions.

Five Youth Social Enterprise Initiative (YSEI) Asia 2008 Fellows to receive USD75,000 start-up funding. Wednesday 22 Apr 2009

Youth Social Enterprise Initiative (YSEI) is pleased to announce its Asia 2008 Start-up Stage fellows.

The five young social entrepreneurs who have been selected from the YSEI Asia 2008 programme have showed great commitment towards realising their business idea. In addition, Cyril Devan from Malaysia, Stephanie Caragos and Khristine Lopez, both from the Philippines, Ajay Shakya from India, and Thailand’s Patipat Susumpow have successfully demonstrated competence in building viable social enterprises through their participation in YSEI which is a GKP Global Partnership Programme.

Apart from receiving valuable knowledge through training and mentorship from seasoned entrepreneurs, as well as gaining access to networking opportunities and peer-to-peer support, these five fellows competed with 14 others in the 2008 programme to receive step-by-step funding to nurture their social enterprises.

Ten of the 19 fellows had each received USD10,000 in seed funding earlier. Devan, Caragos, Lopez, Shakya and Susumpow will now each receive a further USD15,000 scaleup funding to grow their fledging businesses.

The YSEI Asia 2008 programme, initiatied in May 2008, embodies the second phase of YSEI which was launched in 2006.

A bit about the Fellows

Elevyn, Cyril Devan, Malaysia

Artisans in remote areas of Malaysia often need to resort to middlemen, who drain most of their margins. To generate income on a fair trade basis, Elevyn is using an innovative, web 2.0-based, online platform that links the selling of handmade products to the support of social and environmental causes.

LetIThelp, Stephanie Caragos, Philippines

LetIThelp takes on solving structural unemployment and underemployment in poor communities by providing capacity building on specific IT skills that are in market demand and match trainees to job opportunities.

Microfinancejobs, Ajay Shakya, India

Despite the expressive growth of microfinance in India, the related job opportunities and potential candidates are yet to find an alley for a quick match. Microfinancejobs developed an online jobs platform to bridge the gap between 1,500 microfinance institutions in India and 10,000 professionals who would be willing to work in microfinance field.

Mobile Telecentres, Khristine Lopez, Philippines

In metro Manila most public schools students have limited or no access to computers and Internet. Mobile Telecentre provides onsite ICT skills training and career opportunities to over 6,000 students in metro Manila by using ICT tools adapted to a 3-wheeled trike.

Open Dream, Patipat Susumpow, Thailand

Open Dream provides low-cost web and application development service to social groups and organizations by leveraging the network of social software developers for project collaboration. Their sustainability comes from channeling fees from high paying clients to subsidize the low-paying ones.

About YSEI

YSEI is a high-engagement social venture program for emerging young social entrepreneurs in developing countries. Through its Fellowship Programme, YSEI provides young social entrepreneurs with support in four key areas:

Knowledge: Essential development knowledge & tools on social entrepreneurship

Financing: Up to USD 60,000 from Seed, Start Up and Scale Up stages for only 2 ventures

Mentorship: Technical consulting through mentorship

Networks: Access to diverse networks

Visit YSEI here

I’m writing this from the launch of Phase 2 of our youth fund (www.ysei.org) in Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia. We’re holding the launch of the YSEI Fellowships 2008 at the GKP Pavilion at the WCIT 2008 Exhibition Area

The Fellowship recognises the potential of young social entrepreneurs in contributing to socio-economic growth and provide sstart-up support for young social entrepreneurs from developing countries to nurture their innovative ideas.

YSEI Asia Fellowship 2008 will provide support for 10 Fellows with a seed funding totalling USD125,000, on-site mentorship, essential development knowledge and tools on social entrepreneurship as well as access to diverse networks.

Twenty candidates have been shortlisted through an online competition for the Fellowships this year. We’ll be posting a full Podcast of the week’s events shortly.

Our other Tandem event being held this week in KL - The Tigers’ Lair: “Social Entrepreneurs Pitch for Scale-up Funding”

Enter the Tigers’ Lair pits 4 entrepreneurs in a high-profiled contest to bid for funding to grow their social enterprises.

The contestants are young social entrepreneurs based in developing countries, who believe that their enterprises are viable and will offer high potential for returns.

Each will have a one-time opportunity to pitch their business plans to the ‘Tigers’ – a panel of 4 successful entrepreneurs and funders.

The winner must pass the Tigers’ probe in order to be considered for funding, business advice, mentorship, and global networking opportunities.

The pitchers are all part of the YSEI fellowship. We have two of our ’superstars’ fromlast year and two new potential stars getting upon stage

Raj Ridvan Singh - International Director & Co-founder of Science of Life System 24/7 (SOLS 24/7)

SOLS 24/7 provides holistic life-skills education and boarding to underprivileged youth especially girls. SOLS 24/7’s mission is to develop as many youth as possible to become skilled, responsible, dynamic, disciplined, compassionate and socially-conscious to provide them with the necessary support to secure job placements or start their own businesses. Part-time students are charged a nominal fee for revenue generation.

Marielle Nadal- Co-Founder, and currently Executive Director of Idea!s Creatives

Idea!s is a youth-led social enterprise based in the Philippines. Idea!s uses the power of creative communications to enhance the outreach, impact and fundraising efforts of organisations with social objectives, thereby allowing them to touch and transform the lives of more people. Revenue comes from regular and reduced rates for private corporations and non-profit organisations, respectively.

Urjana Shrestha - Founder of Fair-Trade Crafts

Fair-trade Crafts from Nepal is a business model that creates employment opportunities and promotes traditional craftmanship talents to global markets. The enterprise aims to provide job opporturnities for some of the country’s most disadvantaged people by promoting their traditional crafts to the international market and providing them with good value of their work, which will in turn help sustain their talents, reduce poverty and advance community development.

Jamil Goheer-Founder of Cultural Classics

Cultural Classics (CC) is a platform that gives voice to artisans and their spectacular creations from rural and backward areas. CC contributes towards economic empowerment of under privileged community of skillful artisans while creating opportunities for them in these economically disadvantaged areas of the world. CC is determined to leverage the lifestyles of the artisans and share their information through their web portal all over the globe. CC exports these handicrafts in bulk to buyers worldwide.

SolvePoverty launches Social Outsourcing community. You can now outsource work to a Telecentre with a Social Mission.

Social outsourcing means “IT outsourcing with a human face; with a social conscience and a development agenda”. You can now outsource jobs that can be performed remotely such as website creation, link building, article submissions, Blogs. data entry, programming, virtual assistants and many other online tasks.

You can connect with a non-profit social enterprise like Digital Divide Data (DDD) in Cambodia and outsource your data entry and digitization work. DDD are a non-profit social venture that uses technology to improve lives of some of the world’s least developed nations. They are breaking new ground by bringing well-paid technology jobs to countries where they didn’t previously exist and to groups who struggle just to survive.

When you outsource to DDD you have the satisfaction of knowing that 100% of your fee goes towards helping employ disadvantaged youth from their communities.

To search for other social outsourcing services use the Find A Provider search feature

Outsource your web development and SEO projects to the letIThelp Telecentre in the Philippines!. cDOT are the community telecentre program of award winning Philippines web development firm, Syntactics. Located in Cagayan de Oro in the Southern Philippiness, Syntactics offer Software Development, SEO, Internet Marketing and Website Design.

Their team of professional web designers and developers all work training disadvantaged youth from the local community in all aspects of web development and as the young graduates are ready they are offered paid positions within the firms ranks.

Social Responsibility

letIThelp is committed to the development, establishment and sustainability of Information and Communications Technology (ICT) initiatives for youth in the Philippines and through active participation like their telecentre aim to create a growing movement amonsgt similar communities across the Philippines providing young people with little or no hope with opportunities to work in the fast growing outsourcing industry.

letIThelp Have Moved to Our Bigger and Better Telecentre

“We have moved to a bigger and better space! With the growing need for more space in order to train more youth, we have found the perfect area to use for our services. We are now right in the heart of the City!

Since we are right in the middle of the city, it would be easier for students to come for their trainings at any time of the day or evenings. ” Says Stephanie Caragos, founder of cDOT and CEO for Syntactics, Inc. “We are also happy that from a very small beginning, we have been able to grow and provide jobs to some of the most disadvantaged youth in the Southern Philippines. We have been able to train them into becoming skilled and dedicated IT professionals.” Added Jun Kaamiño, the COO for the company.

letIThelp Services

Web Development
Site Maintenance
Blog Customization
Online Applications Development
Dedicated IT personnel provision

Our Social Mission

True to the mission of social enterprises which is “bridging social opportunity into sustainable reality innovatively, effectively and efficiently,” letIThelp.org goes in line with this to help selected and deserving fresh graduates in Mindanao find the right opportunities in their chosen field of profession. There is a balance needed in the IT industry in the Philippines at this point. Initially, there is the increase of IT outsourcing jobs being directed to the country, however, there is a need of a ready pool of trained and experienced IT professionals to continually sustain the industry and manpower needs. On other hand, there is a saturation of fresh IT graduates from poor families and are graduates of vocational schools and colleges who have the passion and commitment to work in these companies yet, due to the poor and inadequate educational system and lack of actual projects and proper industry-based mentoring, majority of these fresh graduates could not get into their desired work and are forced to accept other jobs that are not attuned with their education, wasting their possible talents and skills just because of the lack of confidence in most companies on them due to the fact that they lack the background, references and experience. Therefore, even if they have finished their education, a sustainable income and the chance of growth for the majority of them is still not attainable.

This being the case, letIThelp will select based on their skills, attitude, desire and passion for work, graduates who are in need of the additional training and work. They will then have the opportunity to learn and earn at the same time for their families. These graduates will be trained and mentored by the Syntactics, Inc. team leaders and supervisors to help them learn the right industry standards, workpace and discipline. After their training period, they will then be promoted to higher positions in the organization, hired by Syntactics, Inc. as a commercial developer, dedicated to a client as a dedicated staff or will be given the chance to work in other IT companies to help answer the need of additional well trained manpower thereby helping more companies grow, to earn more and provide more jobs in society.

LetIThelp will focus more on the hiring underprivileged fresh graduates coming from Mindanao and in providing these graduates opportunities and work close to their families so they no longer have to spend for any relocation expenses and they can be closer to their families.

cforms contact form by delicious:days

WorldNomads.com will send one exceptional student on assignment to visit a Fred Hollows eye camp in remote, Cambodia. You will receive training from ABC Radio Journalist and Executive Producer, Tim Latham. Staying at the eye camp for three days witnessing sight restoring cataract surgery to local villagers and gaining special access to interview The Fred Hollows team and local villagers, you will seek out your own unique story to be recorded on your new mobile digital recorder. Enter Here

Check out other Study Abroad Information and Jobs

We’re working with 8 youth led, award winning social business ventures on a new project we co-created with partners the GKP, TRN and Mitra. It is called The Youth Social Entrepreneurship Initiative (YSEI). We have already raised the initial funds to provide the 8 YSEI fellows with US$15,000 each plus knowledge tools and mentorship however we need more donations to expand our work with this project. If you would like to sponsor a YSEI fellow or OrphanIT please make a donation below. We are a fully registered non profit organisation (NGO). If you would like to know more please contact us here

Make a Donation via our secure donations gateway.

solvepoverty.com (this click and give site) is part of OrphanIT which is a fully incorporated non profit, non stock entity. We are registered with the Philippines Securities and Exchange Commission as an NGO and with the Australian Government as a non profit entity. Your donations go directly towards one of the telecentres or youth led social ventures we work with in South East Asia. You can view these projects here.

About OrphanIT

We’re a capacity building, non profit organisation, created to provide an effective and results driven consultancy services to telecentres and ICT groups in developing nations and communities. Our primary focus areas are: Training, Mentorship, Jobs, Social Impact and Sustainability. We have a totally transparent policy on your donations so you can see exactly where your money is going to and who it is helping. 90% of your funds go directly to the projects you nominate and we use only 10% for administrational purposes. View www.OrphanIT.com

Clicking the red button once a day!

That’s the big one on the front page of solvepoverty.com. Every time you click it (once a day only) you release Euro 0.05 cents currently paid for by paid by Unisys who are a sponsor of our partners the Global e-Inclusion Movement

The funds released by your clicks go towards the cost of resources and activities (e.g., training, equipment, etc.) supporting the development of ICT for education projects in poor areas of the world.

Become a distance mentor and help coach youth led entrepreneurs in South East Asia

If you have knowledge and skills you believe would be useful to youth led, social business ventures in developing communities then consider becoming a part time YSEI Mentor. Mentoring is undertaken on a volunteer basis and carried out remotely via email, skype, instant messaging programs and the phone. Make a big difference with your knowledge! You will be working with the Youth Social Entrepreneurship Initiative - (YSEI) fellows….. You can view the 8 YSEI fellows projects here

Ideally you have skills in one or more of the following areas: management, business, marketing, microfinance, non profit, IT or entrepreneurship. The objective of the mentorship program is to help the YSEI projects reach their goals on-time and on-track. Please complete the Mentors application form here so we can match you up with one of the fellows. We have projects underway in India (3), Bangladesh (2), Philippines (2) and Timor Leste (1).

Link to us

Place one of our link banners on your own web site, or send one to a friend whom you think will put it on their site. Click here to view them.

Sponsors

Let your company or friends and colleagues know about what we are doing and see if they would like to get involved by sponsoring a student or centre. Get a subdomain to solve poverty that advertises your business or website.

Tell your friends

This is one of the most common ways that people find out about us. Tell your family, friends and colleagues at your local club or association, school, university and work. Spread the word - far and wide.

……SOLS have raised the initial funds to start the 100 seat computer centre. We’re now looking for volunteer computer teachers to help us with the setup and initial training.

Accommodation will be provided at the SOLS telecentre plus you’ll be working on one of the most exciting and award winning, youth social entrepreneurship ventures in the world!

SOLS have raised the funds for East Timor’s 1st computer telecentre for young, disadvantaged young people in Timor Leste.

The new SOLS 24/7’s telecentre will have a 100 seat capacity, a fast internet connection and teachers. To date, East Timor does not have a single high-tech computer lab available to disadvantaged young people. The telecentre will teach up to 800 of SOLS boarding students and 150-800 part-time students in it’s first year of operation.