(Young social entreprenerus working on direct marketing organic potato & organic lifestyle venture)

ChangeFusion supports young social entrepreneurs in East and South Asia regions that potentially will have high social/environmental impact, financially sustainable and enterprise scalability. The support focuses on business development incubation, creating networking opportunity for the ventures as well as investment placement.

Cases from our portfolio includes:

Community Friendly Movement (CFM) - Sources hand-made crafts from across India and sells in bulk and e-commerce to USA and Europe. The total turnover for CFM last year was USD 170,000.

Idea!s - Provides advertising and communications services to nonprofits in the Philippines. It has a hybrid business model that takes on market rate jobs while subsidizing nonprofits that cannot afford proper communications work.

SOLS 24/7 - Science of Life Systems (SOLS) 24/7 provides life-skills education to underprivileged youth in less developed countries. To date, it has schools both in Cambodia and Timor-Leste with over 2000 students.

ChangeFusion is entering into Nepal in mid-2008 due to the reopenning of political economic opportunities in the country after democracy in reinstalled.

To dated, we've setup a country representative team led by Luna Thakur Shrestha that had done the followings;

• Brief market survey on young social entrepreneurs. We've founded that there are hundreds of very early stage promising youth social enterprises in Nepal working on various sectors such as information technology, organic agriculture, handicrafts, eco-tourism and community forestry.

• Organized Hakuna Matata Afternoon with Young Social Entrepreneurs on 25th of September 2008. The event brought together over twenty young social entrepreneurs and their potential supporters to meet each other and informally showcase their work.

(Images from Hakuna Matata Afternoon, Nepal)

We're planning on launching "Nepal Youth Enterprise for Sustainability Competition 2009" with the goal of sourcing and connecting to young social entreprneeurs across Nepal and systematically working with them. The prize of the competition would be the participation of the Youth Social Enterprise Capacity Building Workshops for the finalists and 3-5k startup grants as well as one year of incubation service for the winning teams.

For more information, please contact luna (at) changefusion.org