Afzal Habib – Undergrads student: Business with a conscience

-Excerpt- This year marks the first time York has had a waiting list for courses teaching the management of so-called “social enterprises,” where there may or may not be a profit motive, says Prof. Brenda Gainer, who specializes in nonprofit expertise at Schulich.

Hundreds of businessmen and women like LeVert-Chiasson have come back to school for the training. Younger students like Sarah Katyal and Afzal Habib, both 21, are among the 20 per cent of Schulich’s business undergrads studying either non-profit management or social enterprise.

“This is an extraordinary upward trend from 10 years ago, when almost no one chose to do this,” Gainer notes.

Katyal and Habib were recently on a team that came third in a prestigious competition for social enterprise business plans held at Harvard University.

Placing behind teams from Harvard and Stanford, the Schulich squad proposed a micro-franchise social enterprise called DrinKup — a bicycle pulling a trailer with a filtered-water tank on it, designed for use in Africa.

“In many countries, women and children spend six or eight hours a day getting water,” says Habib, noting the time could be better spent earning or learning. “It takes up a lot of productive time.”

via Today’s lesson: business with a conscience – thestar.com.