Outsourcing Trends: Social Entrepreneurship

I just found a great example of social entrepreneurship in the latest issue or Red Herring. It tells about emerging global outsourcing Hot Spots.

Red Herring magazine Sept 2005
When American entrepreneur and philanthropist Howard Jonas visited
Jerusalem at the height of the intifada, he was struck by the large
number of highly educated unemployed people.

Rather than give charity, Mr. Jonas launched IDT Global Services, a
Jerusalem-based subsidiary of IDT, the fourth-largest telecom provider
in the United States. It began operations in 2002 with 20 employees and
has since grown to around 700 on six floors in a newly opened building
in the Har Hotzvim high-tech industrial park. ?We?re aiming to reach
1,000 by the end of the year and double or triple our work force by the
end of 2006,? says Michael Barnett, IDT Global?s marketing director.

Now StartUp Jerusalem (SUJ), a nonprofit organization seeking to
revitalize Jerusalem and create jobs in all communities by attracting
investments to the city, is determined to build upon IDT Global?s
success and turn Jerusalem into a world-class center for outsourcing.

The Israeli capital currently has about 1,000 people working at call
centers and that figure could more than triple by the end of 2006.

?Jerusalem has a pool of tens of thousands of people speaking foreign
languages at mother-tongue level, which is unmatched anywhere else in
the world,? says Eli Kazhdan, CEO of StartUp Jerusalem