Amy Wilkinson, a Public Policy Scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center

There is a fresh new wind swirling through the worlds of philanthropy and social activism. It is detectable in the large – scale grants of the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation and in hundreds of small local philanthropic projects. It is a wedding of good business practice to the cause of social progress. Practitioners of this art are known as social entrepreneurs and their strategies are energizing the development world. Particularly effective are the small scale micro loans made to the rural and urban poor for individual projects Amy Wilkinson explains the dynamics of this new field.