$100 Million for 10,000 Women (cause marketing - part 1)

Now there's a title that grabs your attention!

On Mar. 5, Goldman Sachs (GS), the world's largest investment bank, announced in Business Week that it would be pumping $100 million into educational projects to help thousands of women entrepreneurs in developing countries start (and succesfully manage) their own businesses over the next five years. Many female entrepreneurs in developing countries have already received financial help from local microfinance banks and nonprofits that issued them small loans and financial support. Most of the women however, have little, if any, formal education and lack the management skills and financial savvy to take their business to the next level.

Goldman Sachs is hoping to create a new model of management education designed to help these women learn everything from how to write a business plan to market their own business. The company will be teaming up with some of the world's top business schools, including Wharton, Columbia, Harvard, and Cambridge University's Judge Business School, to develop management education certificate programs at universities in countries such as Nigeria, Rwanda, and Afghanistan. The programs will be flexible and of short duration, ranging from several weeks to several months.

Now that's a project that, as a 'marketeer to women', really warms my heart. What a wonderful, long overdue initiative! Not to mention that it's a great PR-able project that suddenly puts what we perceive to be a cold, distant financial behemoth such as Goldman Sachs in a completely new light!

Further reading: Here's a great article on how cause marketing can help improve marketing's bottom line.