HBS Renews Womens’ Program

Goldman Sachs, in partnership with Harvard Business School (HBS) and 15 other business schools across the globe, has announced the creation of a new program to provide impoverished women in developing countries with business and management education.

Goldman’s $100 million initiative, “10,000 Women,” will provide economic support for HBS’s own “Colloquium for Participant-Centered Learning”—a program that brings faculty from around the world to Cambridge to study HBS’s famous case method.

Senior HBS lecturer Michael Chu, whose research focuses on the intersection of business and market mechanisms with low-income populations, described women as an “underutilized resource” for powering economic development.

“In the big scheme of ‘10,000 Women,’ the role of the Business School is to affect the content and delivery side of the management education that these 10,000 women will receive,” he said.

Goldman’s role in the project will be to provide scholarships to faculty members from Indian business schools participating in the HBS program, Chu added.

While HBS has previously worked in China and Latin America, Goldman’s funding will help the program to expand into India, according to Kerry L. Cietanno, director of donor relations at HBS,

“The goal of this program is to strengthen the capacity of business teaching and practice globally,” she said.

According to Cietanno, about five participants from each business school, including administrators and faculty members, will come to HBS to participate in the Colloquium.

“[The participants] will in turn train other professors at their schools in the case method of teaching and will be able to better utilize this pedagogy at their schools,” Cietanno said. “And this will have a multiplier effect in terms of building capacity in these regions.”

Some of the other institutions that have partnered with the Wall Street firm include Brown University, the Indian School of Business, the University of Dar es Salaam, and the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.

The initiative was launched by Goldman after the investment bank published a recent research report, called “Women Hold Up Half the Sky,” that argued that improving female education would not only result in higher economic growth, but would also benefit future generations.

The study also claimed that closing the current gender gap in the labor market could increase income per capita by 10 to 14 percent in these countries by 2020.

—Staff Writer Prateek kumar can be reached at kumar@fas.harvard.edu.