BIO

My background is in forest resources management and international rural development and I am interested in community empowerment that addresses poverty in an environmentally sustainable and socially acceptable way. Currently, I am developing a research portfolio around social business. Social entrepreneurship is a strategy to build social capital that enables rural communities to be more engaged in and economically benefit from community-based eco-tourism, micro-entrepreneurship, value-adding activities, and poverty alleviation projects. It can improve both society and environmental wellbeing. Identifying barriers to and solutions for sustainable development in the rural sector, particularly in developing countries, is the first step. This type of research is strongly inter-disciplinary and I am building my networks for collaboration with universities both in NZ (Auckland University) and overseas (Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam). My aims are to raise awareness and confidence among students of entrepreneurship as a career path – becoming job-creators than job-seekers. At the same time, I would like to mainstream the concept of social business by collaborating with government and private sectors. I am based at the Yunus Centre for Social Business at Lincoln University.

LINCOLN UNIVERSITY APPOINTMENTS

• Director of the Yunus Centre for Social Business

DEGREES

• PhD - Lincoln University, Lincoln, New Zealand
• MPhil - Cambridge University, UK
• BSc (Hons) - Bogor Agricultural University, Bogor, Indonesia