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Babson Alumni Business, Greensole, Featured at Global Entrepreneurship Summit

Greensole

Shriyans Bhandari MS ’16 is the founder of Greensole, a business based in India that recycles discarded running shoes to create comfortable footwear for communities in need. Greensole is featured among 100 other innovations at the Global Entrepreneurship Summit.

GES is the preeminent annual entrepreneurship gathering that convenes emerging entrepreneurs, investors, and supporters from around the world. This year, it will be held in Hyderbad, India, November 28-30, 2017.

Greensole will be a part of “India Edge” where India based start-up will share their innovations.

About Greensole

More than 350 million pairs of shoes are discarded each year and when incinerated each pair generates on average 30 lbs of emissions into the air. While these shoes are being thrown away, there are 1.5 billion people in the world that are infected by disease contracted through unprotected feet. As runners themselves, Greensole saw an opportunity to fix these problems.

Greensole refurbishes discarded shoes into comfortable footwear and provides them to people most in need. They have been recognized by President Obama, Sir Ratan Tata and have been featured in many media outlets.

Their vision is to recycle discarded shoes with an absolutely minimum carbon footprint, to give livelihood to the underprivileged sections of society and to ensure that everyone in the world will have shoes by 2023.

Recent Media Coverage: The News Minute, Telangana Today.

About the Global Entrepreneurship Summit

Seven years ago, President Obama committed to holding Global Entrepreneurship Summits each year across the globe as part of a landmark speech in Cairo, where he said that the world needed to “create a new corps of business volunteers to partner with counterparts … to identify how we can deepen ties between business leaders, foundations and social entrepreneurs in the United States and … around the world.” Since 2010, an estimated 17,000 entrepreneurs, investors, foundations, and entrepreneurship ecosystem stakeholders have participated in Global Entrepreneurship Summits in Washington, Istanbul, Dubai, Kuala Lumpur, Marrakesh, and Nairobi.

This year is the first time GES will be hosted in South Asia. Hyderabad, the capital of Telangana state, has a strong presence of major U.S. tech firms, a robust startup ecosystem, premier academic institutions, top-notch talent, and supportive government policies in place. Prime Minister of India Mr. Narendra Modi will be inaugurating the Summit, and Ivanka Trump, Advisor to the President of the United States, will lead the U.S. delegation. More than 140 countries will be represented.

Through two-and-a-half days of networking, mentoring, and workshops, the 2017 Global Entrepreneurship Summit will empower  women entrepreneurs to pitch their ideas, build partnerships, secure funding, innovate, and find their target customers — creating new goods and services that will transform societies.