Continuing our interview series, Ashoka Peace interviews Daniel Lubetzky, serial peace entrepreneur who is creating new models for bridging the for-profit and non-profit worlds, and showing our peacebuilding can be financially sustainable.

1. What is the innovation you are pioneering? What are you doing that nobody else is doing and why?

What we like to do is to build models where business and social interests are totally aligned and reinforce one another. It is not easy to do.  A lot of the area of “corporate social responsibility” is structured around perceived sacrifices to the bottom line in order to address other important societal objectives.  The fun stuff comes when you are able to innovate through ventures whose financial and social objectives reinforce one another. 

Gayle Tzemach Lemmon is working on a book about a young Afghan entrepreneur whose business supported her family and her community during the Taliban years. Read all of Gayle's blog posts.

Women were among the first beneficiaries of the international community's 2001 arrival into Afghanistan following the Taliban's retreat. Eager to support their families, many turned to entrepreneurship, often with support and training from development organizations and non-profits working in the country. Over time they launched ventures ranging from business consultancies to soccer ball and handicrafts production. Though business conditions challenged all entrepreneurs, these women worked hard to make the most of the market opportunity. Often they catered to the foreigners living in and passing through Afghanistan who wanted to support the nation's women and who could afford the steeper prices of higher-quality goods.

A piece I worked on recently from Afghanistan highlights both the opportunities and the challenges facing women entrepreneurs in post-conflict reconstruction. The US military has, for the first time, set aside more than $350 million over five years in contracts for Afghan businesswomen to produce tees, socks and outdoor gear for the Afghan National Army and Afghan National Police. As the American military sees it, the initiative is part counter-insurgency and part economic development.

Says Air Force Maj. Charles Seidel, who is overseeing the program: "Fifty percent of the country are women.  If we are going to make a difference, we have got to create jobs, we have to give hope. How better to do that?’’

On the opportunity side: Women are eager for the business and hungry to win the military contract.  For the past eight years Afghan women have ventured into entrepreneurship and created start-ups in fields ranging from tailoring to trucking.  Their profits have gone to educate their children and support their families, and along the way they have helped to reshape their roles among their relatives. 

Ashoka Peace is proud to present a recently published article in the latest issue of Beyond Profit that describes the rationale and goals and inspiration behind our work.

In this article, we discuss the stories of two classic social entrepreneurs - Jerry White and Neichute Duolo - who came up with new solutions for problems of violent conflict, and through those stories, we begin to elicit the principles and patterns that are driving innovation in the peacebuilding field.

You can also read the article in full on the Beyond Profit blog.

We welcome your comments, suggestions and dialogue.

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Kissing the Tiger: Peace as a Pre-Requisite for Development

Roshan Paul and Sarah Jefferson

A few interesting developments have taken place in Iraq in the last week:  First, Eric Schmidt, Google’s CEO, visited Iraq to launch a massive digitalization project of the Iraq National Museum.  Then, within a day, the Iraqi government announced its first Youtube channel.  While these two events were likely coordinated, it’s noteworthy that Iraq is at a stage where it’s now able to start thinking about things like social media.

What is the Google project?
The Google project is a joint project with the State-Department to digitalize the Iraq National Museum.  Since the beginning of the war, 15,000 items dating back to the Mesopotamian era have been stolen from the museum.  While 6,000 have been retrieved, the museum has had major security problems over the last decade.  Google employees are charged with taking photographs of the museum to create a digitalized museum for the world.  They have already taken more than 14,000 photographs and are hoping to launch the digital museum by early 2010.