January 6, 2009 | Read Time: 1 minute
Google.org, the charitable arm of the technology company, will no longer support efforts to help entrepreneurs in poor regions of the world as part of changes in its international-development work.
Instead, Google will focus on its Inform and Empower program, which seeks to improve developing nations by organizing vital information and making it accessible to the public, writes Sonal Shah, Google.org’s director of global development, on its blog.
“We still strongly believe that growing small businesses will help the poor, but one of Google’s ten organizing principles is, ‘it’s best to do one thing really, really well,’” she writes. “As we evaluated our efforts this past year, it became clear that given Google.org’s unique strengths — including the ability to tap Google engineers to build and link better pathways to information — we could have a greater impact on the lives of the poor by focusing our efforts on Inform and Empower.”
She says the organization would fulfill monetary commitments it has already made to help small and medium-sized business overseas.
Last year, Google.org teamed up with the philanthropists George Soros and Pierre Omidyar to establish an investment fund for businesses in India.
What do you think of Google’s decision?
