We are a community of social entrepreneurs, professionals, and academics from across four continents. We created Ubuntu at Work to assist women micro entrepreneurs escape poverty. Ubuntu at Work is driven by our core belief that leveraging global networks can help women and their communities aspire to better futures and to move along a more rapid, equitable, and sustainable development trajectory.
Our Mission
To help women micro entrepreneurs enhance their capabilities, pursue their entrepreneurial aspirations, and escape poverty.
What We Do
Ubuntu at Work collaborates with women micro entrepreneurs with an income of less than $2/day. We work with the women in developing their existing micro-enterprise or establishing a new one. Most of the women micro entrepreneurs we collaborate with have no craft or other marketable skills when they join the Ubuntu at Work community. With the help of field staff and volunteers around the world, we help the women gain new capabilities, collaboratively develop green products they can make at their homes or in Ubuntu at Work’s Baobab Workspaces near them, and market these products around the world. In addition, we collaborate with our women micro entrepreneurs to develop their communities.
Through our work we seek to offer our women micro entrepreneurs the support to realize their aspirations and achieve their goals. We see ourselves as building on the work of micro finance institutions and helping women micro entrepreneurs develop their unique pathways out of poverty and gain capabilities that allow them to create sustainable and entrepreneurial lives for themselves, their families and their communities.
Our Impact
Since January 2009, when Ubuntu at Work was founded, the Ubuntu at Work community has reached out to women, children, and men in five poor communities in India (we have just begun our operations in Egypt and South Africa) and helped them enhance their capabilities, expand their aspirations, and escape poverty. These groups of women micro entrepreneurs are establishing entrepreneurial ventures that connect to global markets and transform their communities.
We measure ourselves not in terms of how many products we sell but in terms of the skills and capabilities our women micro entrepreneurs have gained in the time they have collaborated with us. Our goal is to not just help them make craft products such as bags or scarves for the global marketplace but to gain the skills to move up the supply and production chain.
To request a copy of our 2009-2010 Annual Report and our financials please email info@ubuntuatwork.org.
Our Team
US Team Vibha Pinglé
Matthew Rudolph
Margot Graves
Felice Noelle Rodriguez
Development Committee Catherine Kerr
Vijayendra Rao
Lina Fruzzetti
Alice Amsden
Marina Regelman
Yamuna Mukherjee
Kaushik Narayan Ramanathan
Guy Stuart
Ashutosh Varshney
Sandy MachsonIn Egypt Iman Bibars
Bessie Pollozhani
Shymaa Bedaiwe AllamIn India Smita Chakravorty
G Geetha
Shahida Noorie
Arshiya Taj
Chetna Sinha
In South Africa Stella Tshona
Steven FriedmanIT Design & Development Vibha Pinglé is President and Founder of Ubuntu at Work. Ubuntu at Work evolved out of her research on women micro entrepreneurs in South Africa, Egypt, Nigeria, India, Indonesia and Nepal. Her research examined why only a few women micro entrepreneurs are able to develop their businesses, while most remain survivalist businesses. After completing her Ph.D. in sociology at Brown University, Vibha lectured in social studies at Harvard University, was a visiting professor at Brown University, an assistant professor at Rutgers, and a fellow at the Institute of Development Studies. She has been a consultant to the World Bank, DFID, the Aga Khan Foundation, UNDP, and Fidelity Investments. Her publications include: Rethinking the Developmental State: India’s Industry in Comparative Perspective (St. Martin’s Press, NY, 1999), Identity Landscapes, Social Capital, and Entrepreneurship: Small Business in South Africa (CPS, Johannesburg, 2001), book chapters, articles in professional journals and in newspapers. She is currently writing a book on women micro entrepreneurs entitled: Voices in the Mist: micro entrepreneurship in the era of identity politics. Top Matthew C.J. Rudolph has spent eight years studying in India and conducting research around South Asia. Matthew has also studied and conducted research in Greater China for over two years. He works on the international political economy of development with an emphasis on India, South Asia and Greater China. Matthew speaks Hindi, Mandarin, and French. He holds a doctorate in Political Science from Cornell University and has taught at Princeton and at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, CA. He currently teaches at Georgetown University, Washington D.C.
Top Steven Friedman is Director of the Centre for the Study of Democracy, Rhodes University and University of Johannesburg. He is a political scientist whose has specialized in the study of democracy. Steven researched and wrote on the South African transition to democracy before and after the elections of 1994 and is currently studying the role of citizen action in strengthening and sustaining democracy. He is currently based in Johannesburg.
Top Vijayendra Rao is a Lead Economist in the Development Research Group of the World Bank. He received his PhD in Economics from the University of Pennsylvania and held appointments at Chicago and Michigan, and Williams College before joining the World Bank in 1999. His work attempts to integrate economics with sociology and political science to inform poverty-reduction policies in poor countries using a combination of ethnographic and econometric techniques. His publications include Culture and Public Action (Stanford University Press, 2004), Development in Karnataka (Academic Foundation Press, 2008), the 2006 World Development Report on Equity and Development, and several papers in leading journals on the broad themes of village democracy, community development, gender inequality, culture and economic behavior, and mixing qualitative and quantitative methods. He is an Advisory Committee Member of the Successful Societies Program at the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, serves on the World Bank’s Social Development Board, and on the editorial boards of four journals.
Top Lina Fruzzetti is a Professor of Anthropology at Brown University. Her areas of interest include: social anthropology, kinship, politics, study of ritual and the construction of gender, development and political studies, race and ethnic relations, Islamic societies and notions of identity, ethnographic film; feminist movement in Africa and Asia, study of ritual and kinship, construction of gender and identity, nationalism and post-colonial identity (India and Africa). Within social anthropology, Lina’s specialty is in the relationship between kinship, marriage, and rituals and the meaning of the construction of gender in India. She has done extensive work on caste and the life cycle rites of Hindus; she is now addressing the recent structural changes to the institution of marriage and what constitutes the person. Her research on nationalism and post colonial studies has taken her to a more comparative approach addressing the feminist movement, and the problems and politics of identity and citizenship within Islam and Hinduism. In addition to the primary research work in India, she also focuses on East and North Africa communities. She has co-directed four documentaries on the communities where she has worked: Seed and Earth, Khalfan and Zanzibar, Fishers of Dar, and Singing Pictures. Her current project is about an Eritrean woman whose life spans four continents and three colonial regimes, over a period of seven decades. This study analyzes her life in Eritrea under Italian colonial rule and Ethiopian occupation, her life as a refugee in Sudan, and finally her return home to a liberated, independent Eritrea. The study centers on her life experiences, trials, and accomplishments, as well as her transnational family and how her experiences inform our interconnected, global world.
Top Alice Amsden is Barton T. Weller Professor of Political Economy in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She has served as a consultant with the World Bank, OECD, and various United Nations organizations. Has written extensively on problems of industrial transformation in East Africa, East Asia, and Eastern Europe. She is currently completing the manuscript of her forthcoming book: ‘Farewell to Ideology : Developing from Role Models’.
Top Kaushik Narayan Ramanathan is a graduate (1991) of Industrial Design from NID. Design to him means being thoughtful and then making innocent the experience for others; design becoming visible only by its function and leaving aesthetic as a means rather than the end itself. Having practiced in main stream industry for several years, he now works for himself in a more multi-disciplinary approach in Goa.
In Kaushik’s own words: “It was a conscious decision to live/work out of a non-urban setting but shift the equation radically. I realised I was garnering a false sense of invulnerability, when infact nature all around me was reminding me that all things are connected. Humanity seeks self-sufficiency whilst nature demands relationships. And this is the manner in which I choose to work. I continue to practice design (if i have to give a definition to what I do,) but with a quest to harness and maintain what are the basic needs of a human; how to retain innocence with a thoughtful eye to the bigger picture.”
Top Guy Stuart is a Lecturer in Public Policy. He received his PhD from the University of Chicago in 1994 and then worked for four years in Chicago in the field of community economic development. During this time he served as the Director of the FaithCorp Fund, a nonprofit community loan fund. At the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University he teaches courses on management and microfinance. His book Discriminating Risk traces the historical origins of today’s mortgage loan underwriting criteria in the United States and examines current underwriting practices. He is currently conducting research on racial and economic segregation in the United States and on microfinance in India, Mexico, and Malawi.
Top Sandy Machson’s career in coaching and consulting, human resources management, organizational strategy, and talent development spans over 25 years. She has served as the senior Human Resources executive in corporate and not-for-profit organizations. Sandy established What’s Next Coaching in 2006 to work with corporate, non-profit and private clients on career challenges and life transitions. She helps her clients express their unique passions while also addressing the practicalities and objectives of a career search. Through support, inquiry and exercises, she supports, challenges and helps clients open doors to clarify their goals and make positive changes in their work and personal lives. Sandy has a BA in psychology from the University of Rochester and an MSW from Smith College. She is currently a professional coach, certified by New Ventures West, an organization accredited by the International Coaching Federation. She completed the Executive Leadership Program at Simmons School of Management in Strategic Leadership in Human Resources.
Top Ashutosh Varshney is a professor of political science at Brown University. He was the 2008 winner of the Guggenheim fellowship and the Carnegie Scholar awards. His research and teaching cover three areas: Ethnicity and Nationalism; Political Economy of Development; and South Asian Politics and Political Economy. He is currently working on a multi-country project on cities and ethnic conflict, and on the rising North-South economic divergence in India. In addition to two authored books, Ashutosh has edited several books, and has published over 30 academic papers. He also contributes guest columns to newspapers and magazines. He served on the former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan’s Millennium Task Force on Poverty (2002-5). He has also served as an adviser to the World Bank, UNDP and the Club of Madrid.
Top Iman Bibars launched Ashoka’s program in the Arab world. Iman has a BA and an MA in Political Science from the American University in Cairo (AUC), and a PhD in Development Studies from Sussex University in the UK. Iman also joined the Georgetown University Arab Studies MA Program and was a Parvin Fellow at Princeton. Iman is a regional expert with more then 22 years experience in the social sector of the Arab World and the Africa region. She has committed her life to work with marginalized and voiceless groups, such as female heads of households in the poorest slums of Egypt, street children, street vendors and garbage collectors. She has worked with many international agencies and NGOs, including UNICEF, Catholic Relief Services, CARE-Egypt, GTZ and KFW. Iman is herself a social entrepreneur, and co-founded and chaired The Association for the Development and Enhancement of Women (ADEW), an NGO providing credit and legal aid for poor women who head their households.
Top Chetna Sinha was born in Mumbai and earned her master’s degree in commerce and economics from Mumbai University in 1982. At the end of the 1970s, Chetna was a leader in the Jayprakash Narayan student activist movement, which fought for the democratic and basic human rights of the rural and marginalized communities. Chetna has been honored with the 2005 Jankidevi Bajaj Puraskar award for rural entrepreneurship, a national award that honors a woman who has made an outstanding contribution to uplift the welfare of women and children, particularly in rural areas. She has also been awarded lifetime membership with Ashoka Innovators for the Public and was selected for the first class of Yale University’s World Fellows program in 2002-3. In addition, she has participated in Harvard University’s 2003 Bridge Builders’ Conference. The Mann Deshi Mahila Bank, founded by Chetna, has also recently won first prize in social sector of the international 2005 Ashoka Changemakers Innovation award, which promotes market-based strategies that benefit low-income communities.
Top Catherine Kerr received her BA from Amherst College and her PhD from the Johns Hopkins University. She currently holds a NIH K01 mentored research grant awarded by NCCAM in 2006. She uses neuroimaging and behavioral approaches to investigate mind-body therapies and the sense of touch. She is looking specifically at whether some mind-body therapies not typically regarded as touch-based (including mindfulness based stress reduction [MBSR] or Tai Chi) work by eliciting changes in neural processes and structures that encode touch and bodily sensations. She is working in collaboration with investigators at MIT and MGH and maintains the Kerr Lab at the Osher Research Center.
Top Thejesh GN works with one of the biggest IT houses in India. He is very passionate about social media, social entrepreneurship and technology. He likes to fiddle with open source software. He loves applying open source technologies in the social sector. His other interests are blogging and traveling. You can easily catch him on twitter.
TopUbuntu at Work Inc. – Registered in the United States as a 501(c)3
Ubuntu at Work Trust – Registered in India