Contemporary South Asia: Entrepreneurial Solutions To Intractable Social & Economic Problems

Instructor: Tarun Khanna (Harvard Business School)
Ongoing course offering

South Asia is home to two of the world’s seven billion people. The primary objective of the course is to engage students with the modern day challenges affecting South Asia, and to examine a range of entrepreneurial attempts to solve these problems. The course focuses on several categories of social and economic problems faced by the countries of South Asia, with specific focus on the realms of Education, Health, Financial Inclusion, and Urbanization. The goal is to understand ways in which entrepreneurial action can effectively tackle major socioeconomic problems in South Asia, by combining knowledge of historical causes, qualitative and quantitative evidence, and context-specific knowledge of the commonalities and differences across South Asian countries. No prior knowledge of South Asia is required.

Sample projects from last semester include:

– MOBILIZE! A project group working to encourage literary and technological knowledge by increasing the availability of modern library services to remote Indian villages by building mobile digital libraries (Team from FAS & HGSE)

– South Asia Education Finance group which focused on becoming a pioneer specialized service provider to both public and private sector lenders in the educational loan market; enabling South Asian students to meet their financial needs through a larger, more streamlined and democratic system. (Team from HBS, HGSE & MIT)