User:Wickersong

About me
I am an undergraduate student studying Materials Science and Nanoengineering with minors in Global Health Technologies and Environmental Science. I am interested in the intersection of technology and global development. I am seeking to develop new materials and devices that address problems related to health, energy, and water purification.

Another one of my passions is entrepreneurship, and I am currently planning on writing an article about either Female Entrepreneurship in Africa (Sub-Saharan Africa is where I'm most interested currently) or Social Entrepreneurship in South Asia (focusing largely on India, might just write about India).

Plans for Social Entrepreneurship in South Asia/India
Social entrepreneurship has become a buzzword in the United States and represents a growing movement of businesses that can capitalize on social good. While exciting to see here, I feel like we often don’t hear about its existence in other parts of the world. South Asian countries represent a rapidly developing market, where entrepreneurship, specifically social entrepreneurship, is being adopted in wide numbers. These social entrepreneurial businesses are focused on solving social problems in a meaningful way. They are also helping to catalyze a people-centric economy, focused on developing capabilities first before making a profit. South Asia is also not a newcomer to social entrepreneurship. Unbeknownst to a larger Western audience, the pioneer of microcredit, Muhammad Yunus, founder of Grameen Bank and Nobel Peace Prize winner, is from Bangladesh. Therefore, there is a lot of history in the region, and I’d like to explore that along with the current climate and the challenges of social entrepreneurship.

Key areas of my current proposal can be found on my Sandbox page.

Plans for Female Entrepreneurship in Africa/Sub-Saharan Africa
I plan on creating a new article to focus specifically on Female Entrepreneurship in Africa, with a strong focus on Sub-Saharan Africa. This interest was sparked after reading the Amartya Sen’s work on Missing Women, where I saw that Sub-Saharan Africa, despite extreme hunger and poverty, had not a deficit of women but an excess. Usually this is due to some focus on capability building for women in that region. I did some further digging, and found that 25.9% of women in Sub-Saharan Africa are involved in some early stage entrepreneurial venture. That’s a notable number, and something I think is deserving of coverage. When I checked Wikipedia, I saw that the article for Female Entrepreneurs existed, and does briefly touch upon Sub-Saharan Africa but not to the degree that I feel like I’d want to cover the topic. The article is considered Start Class by both WikiProjects it is a part of, and needs some edits to improve the flow, which I might work on beyond the scope of my course.

I will likely begin working on this after revising the parent article, Female Entrepreneurs.