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Intel World Ahead: Education in Nigeria

Jason Lopez — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 03:38:11 +0000

Nigeria’s education system is one of the targets of the UN’s Millenium Development Goals. Some of those goals are to reduce infant mortality, combat AIDS, malaria & other diseases, and of course improve education worldwide. The millennium goal for education is to ensure, by 2015, that all boys and girls complete a full course of primary schooling. In Nigeria only about 6 out of 10 kids attends primary school. In the poorest bracket many children who do go to school start late in terms of their ages and end up chronically behind. Intel’s push to bring low cost laptops to school children in Nigeria is an effort to help the country meet the millenium development goals. PodTech’s Jason Lopez was in Abuja, Nigeria for Intel covering Chairman Craig Barrett’s visit and filed this podcast.

Startups in Bangalore: Babajob

Kamla Bhatt — Thu, 06 Sep 2007 00:48:42 +0000

Bangalore-based startup Babajob is a social networking site with a few interesting wrinkles. I recently met with Sean Blagsvedt, co-founder of Babalife in Bangalore, to find out about Babajob. A few weeks ago the company released its first private beta version of their service.

A kind of LinkedIn for villages is one way to describe what Sean and his team are working on. The startup wants to use the ubiquitous mobile phones and the Internet to connect people from the “informal sector” to their potential employees. The informal sector in India includes millions of cooks, maids, security guards, drivers, seamstresses, construction workers and others. How do you create a viable social network system in this space? That’s the challenge that Babajob faces.

For the moment, Babajob is using Bangalore as a test-bed, with plans to roll-out its services to other Indian towns and cities during the next few months.

You can also check out Babajob’s has a sister site, called Babalife.

Tags: Bangalore, Babajob, social networking, Sean Blagsvedt, informal sector, Babalife

McKinsey’s Rajat Gupta on India

Kamla Bhatt — Fri, 20 Jul 2007 20:17:06 +0000

I caught up with Rajat Gupta at the Pan IIT 2007 conference in Silicon Valley last week. Mr. Gupta is deeply passionate about health and education and those were the twin topics of this conversation.

In this interview, he talks about the connection between healthcare and the economy of India. What is the connection between citizens health and economic growth of a nation? How does poor and bad health of a nation’s population impact its productivity and economic growth? How do you institute good and effective health policy and healthcare in India? What are the the challenges that India faces in the area of healthcare? These are some of the issues that Mr. Gupta addresses in this interview.

Mr. Gupta is a senior partner and a former managing director of McKinsey & Company worldwide. Mr. Gupta sits on the advisory boards of Harvard Business School and Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management. He is on the board of trustees of the University of Chicago and is the Chairman of the Board of the Indian School of Business at Hyderabad.

He is Co-Chair of the American Indian Foundation and private sector representative to the Board of the Global Fund for Aids, Malaria and Tuberculosis.

Mr. Gupta is a trustee of the Rockefeller Foundation. Mr. Gupta advised McKinsey’s work with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. In 2006 he was appointed as an independent director at Goldman Sachs.

Mr. Gupta is a graduate of IIT, Delhi and Harvard Business School.