Starting a social business is a huge contribution to the quality of life on the planet.

It could have begun with Muhammad Yunus, who won a Nobel for his micro-finance venture in 2006, and is now a pioneer in harnessing business means for socially conscious ends. He started in 1976 in the Bangladesh village of Jobra with a $27 loan to 42 village women making bamboo furniture.

By 2007, his Grameen Bank had made loans worth $6.38 billion to 7.4 million people. To ensure repayment, the bank uses a system of “solidarity groups.” These small, informal groups apply together for loans and members act as co-guarantors of repayment and support one another’s efforts at economic self-advancement.

Yunus’ new book, Creating a World Without Poverty: Social Business and the Future of Capitalism, premises that this new kind of business should exist only to better peoples’ lives. Investors who start the company would be repaid out of company profits, and, from then on, all the money would go back into the business of helping people. For example, he has developed a partnership between his Grameen Group and Danone – the French food giant – to sell nutrient-enriched yogurt to poor children in Bangladesh.  

Another social business lender is KIVA.  Founded by Matt and Jessica Jackley Flannery in 2005, it is a Web site (www.kiva.org) where anyone can become a lender. The peer-to-peer concept lets you pick your entrepreneur and loan a small amount through KIVA.  The Flannerys have pictures and brief bios about the entrepreneurs, their business and the amount they want to borrow. My husband is a lender and periodically, he gets a notice via e-mail that a payment has been made. His loans are around $25 and the payments may be as small as $5. The Flannerys have been sanctioned by Bill Clinton and have been on Oprah – two big-time endorsements.

Toms Shoes is one of my favorite social businesses since I love shoes. It’s a buy-one-give-one-away thing where you buy a great pair of canvas with rubber soles shoes, (mine are red canvas with paint splatters – very cool) and Toms will give a pair away. Blake Mycoski founded the company in 2005 when he was traveling in Argentina and realized that most of the poor kids didn’t have shoes. In May 2006, he brought 10,000 pairs of canvas shoes to Argentina.

I am dazzled by the fact that he could invent the idea and produce 20,000 pairs of shoes, sell half, and give the other half away in a year. The next year, it was 50,000 pairs to South Africa, and it will be 200,000 pairs of shoes this year.

Go to www.tomsshoes.com and buy a pair for summer. You’ll love them, and somewhere in the world, a kid will have his or her first pair of shoes – though probably not as loud as mine. Another buy-one-give-one opportunity is the BOGO Light Program. Houston oilman Mark Bent had been traveling in Africa for years and wanted to give back.

There are so many problems in that part of the world, and he witnessed firsthand what it’s like for people with no access to affordable electricity. It means students can’t do schoolwork after dark; it means the girls have to gather more firewood for night light. He developed a solar-powered flashlight shaped like a shampoo bottle. The solar panel charges three AA batteries for four to five hours of LED light. One set of batteries lasts two years. Check out Bent’s BOGO light, where purchasing a $25 flashlight means another is sent to a developing country, along with $1 donation to the charity of your choice. For additional information, visit www.bogolight.com.

Have you heard about One Laptop Per Child? “OLPC” was started by Nicholas Negroponte in 2005.  It’s an education project, not just a computer product. It features ePal services, which connect students and classrooms worldwide.

Microsoft has just joined in the effort. The premise is that to be useful for a child, a computer needs to have three things: low power, sunlight readability and automatic connectivity. These computers began to be mass-produced in 2007, and this year, they have been placed in Peruvian villages with no electricity and just recently given to students in Uruguay. ePals says 125,000 classrooms around the world are using at least some of its free tools, reaching 13 million students, and its ambition is to become a global “learning social network.” Want to participate? Go to www.laptopgiving.com.

By 2005, Miles Gilburne and his wife Nina Zolt had invested about $10 million of their own money in a philanthropy that used books and online tools to enhance the skills of inner-city students. They needed to find a way to broaden and sustain their efforts. Their vision of using the Internet for communications and collaboration to improve education has taken on a new life – as a business. They and some investors bought ePal. Now, National Geographic is investing in ePals, and will supply educational content for the ePals learning projects. Worldwide distribution will get a lift from Intel, which will soon ship its Classmates laptops, designed for students in developing nations, with the ePal icon on the screens.

All of these ventures are working to combine a for-profit business with a nonprofit enterprise to fund its mission to change the world we live in. “Capitalism is a very mutable, flexible beast, and what we’re seeing is [more] social entrepreneurs addressing some of these social challenges in profoundly different ways than traditional non-profit organizations,” says John Elkington, co-author of The Power of Unreasonable People: How Social Entrepreneurs Create Markets that Change the World.

There are so many millions of people in the world with no hope for themselves or future generations. That misery is compounded by the latest natural disasters in Myranmar and in China, and we feel powerless. Supporting a social business is one small step. Starting a social business is a huge contribution to the quality of life on the planet. Thank you, Muhammad Yunus, for starting something small that has made a huge impact.