BoP Hub

Collaborative Hub Research & Outreach – 2010-2011

The Singapore-based BoP Hub was establised in 2011 as a collaborative social enterprise hub with the vision to design business to end poverty. It is an accelerator platform with the goal to materialise cross-sector collaboration and strengthen participation in social entrepreneurship. BoP Hub’s goal is to connect social enterprises with impact investing firms, corporations, technologists, manufacturers, public policy institutions and multilateral and bilateral agencies to catalyse effective commodity supply chain of goods and services that are affordable and readily available to consumers and entrepreneurs of the global base-of-the-pyramid (BoP) market.

Kunal worked on a research and client engagement project at the BoP Hub, in collaboration with the World Economic Forum’s Schwab Foundation and Unilever’s CSR division, in London part-time whilst reading his MSc Development Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) of the University of London. His tasks entailed mapping out the global social enterprise and the impact investment space for BoP-Hub engagement; conducting interviews and impact assessment of social enterprises and impact investment firms headed by Ashoka and Schwab Fellows, which included writing pre-screening reports and interviewing the Fellows; and writing up sector reports on the social enterprise space in Indonesia, China and India - particularly on the water and sanitation sectors.