And the nominees for the Socially responsible organisation award are...

The award
Created last year, this prize is awarded to a business, association or NGO that has placed values of citizenship and social and environmental responsibility at the heart of its activity. Open to everyone, it promotes active solidarity. The winning organisation’s commitment will have had a strong impact on its staff, boosting their performance and their motivation. The manager of the winning entity does not have to be an Edhec alumnus but there must be at least one Edhec alumnus on the staff.
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The nominees

ADIE - Association pour le droit à l'initiative économique
Maria Nowak, Présidente Fondatrice et Emmanuel Landais (GE 1989) - Directeur Général

Adie helps people excluded from the labour market and the conventional banking system create their own companies and thus work for themselves through microfinance and mentoring suited to their needs. Adie has 450 employees and more than 1 200 volunteers in charge of examining loan applications, following up on projects and mentoring micro-entrepreneurs. Since its founding in 1989, Adie has enabled the creation of 86 000 companies.

It is to Maria Nowak, an economist specialising in microfinance, that we owe the founding of the Association pour le droit à l'initiative économique (ADIE, a non-profit micro-lender). In 1985, Maria Nowak met a Bangladeshi economist, Professor Muhammad Yunus, founder of the Grameen Bank and future winner (2006) of the Nobel Peace Prize. She decided to bring this microfinance model to France ‘to give the excluded an opportunity.’2 In 1989, she founded, with the moral support of Prof. Yunus, the Association pour le droit à l’initiative économique, which she became president of. In 1991 she was seconded to the World Bank in Washington to participate in the development of microfinance programmes in Central Europe. She also co-founded the Centre de la microfinance de l'Europe centrale et orientale (Central and Eastern Europe Microfinance Centre). From 2000 to 2002, she was special advisor to Laurent Fabius, socialist minister of finance. In 2003, she formed the Réseau européen de la microfinance (REM, European Microfinance Network), the presidency of which she held until 2008. In March 2011, she left the presidency of Adie, the board of which chose Catherine Barbaroux to succeed her. She retains the title of founding president and is still on the board. Maria Nowak is a knight in the Legion of Honour (1998) and commander in the French National Order of Merit (2011).

Emmanuel Landais, a 1989 graduate of EDHEC, began his career with various experiences in the for-profit sector. He then moved into the non-profit sector, becoming an officer at an association providing aid to people of foreign origin. In 1992 he became counsellor to Adie and then head of fundraising. He became president in 1986.

More information: www.adie.org

Green Bio Energy
Alexandre Laure (GE 2009) – Directeur

Alexandre Laure was on EDHEC’s apprenticeship track for NGO management from 2007 to 2009. After his graduation, he worked for the United Nations in Ethiopia and then, as development projects manager, for the French embassy in Uganda.

In 2011, with Vincent Kienzler, he founded Green Bio Energy, a company specialising in the transformation of waste in Uganda. By turning organic residue into charcoal, Green Bio Energy has become the market leader for renewable household fuels in Uganda.
Two years after its creation, this small company employs about twenty people and sells three hundred kilos of charcoal a day, all while using clean energy and local resources.In 2012, Green Bio Energy was awarded the Suez Environnement Initiatives prize.

Green Bio Energy website: www.greenbioenergy.org
Briketi website: briketi.co.ug

One Laptop Per Child
Satish Jha (MBA 1990)

Satish Jha, a graduate of the EDHEC in 1990, is the Chairman of OLPC India Foundation. One Laptot Per Child is a worldwide educational project centered around a laptop computer named XO.
The foundation has the mission to improve the education of the poorest children by supplying to every child a laptop computer endowed with a rugged, low-cost, low power (1 watt), with contents and software designed for collaboration, enjoyable and self-learning . Children with access OLPC find learning about learning enjoyable and become committed to their own education. They learn, teach, share, create and collaborate together and become critical thinkers and problem solvers. For Satish Jha, distributing to the Indian children an economic, sustainable and enjoyable laptop computer began at first in a collaboration with the Indian State Governments and the states of Kerala, Manipur, Himachal, Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan included it in their education policy.
He began with the vision "If a country could buy 8 million mobile phones in one month, they can buy 3 million laptop computers in one year ".Satish Jha has recently supported this project at a TED conference (Technology, Entertainment and Design). The TED conferences aim to disseminate "ideas worth spreading"To see the TED Conference of Satish Jha 

More information : one.laptop.org

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