Author Details

Allen Hammond is senior entrepreneur and a member of the Leadership Group at Ashoka, where he is applying novel solutions to rural healthcare in emerging markets. Toward that same end, he is also serving as co-founder and chairman of a start-up company, Healthpoint Services, which is deploying eHealthPoint clinics in rural India and, soon, in other countries. Prior to joining Ashoka, he was VP for Innovation at the World Resources Institute. Hammond is also a serial social entrepreneur, serving as principal in five prior ventures in publishing and rural internet access. He is an expert in market-based solutions to poverty, a global leader in base of the pyramid (BoP) business strategies, and a widely-published author in the scientific, policy research, international development, and business literature, with 10 books and more than 150 articles to his credit—including, for example, “Serving the Poor, Profitably” (with C.K. Prahalad, Harvard Business Review, 2002), and “The Next 4 Billion: Market Size and Business Strategy for the Base of the Pyramid (World Resources Institute and International Finance Corporation, 2007). He holds degrees from Stanford and Harvard universities in engineering and applied mathematics.