Entrepreneurism around the world gets an alternative look in photo book
The Other Hundred Entrepreneurs covers 95 countries
Who wants to be a millionaire? Gholam Hossein has probably never considered the possibility, but he is a typical entrepreneur. He found a solution to a problem and is making a living out of it.
Hossein is a farmer in the remote mountains of northwestern Iran, whose land was trampled twice a year by nomadic herders on a 500km journey with hundreds of hungry sheep and goats. To save his crops, and provide the nomads with a shortcut, Hossein and his seven sons built a steel cableway across a nearby river, charging the herders a small sum for each animal.
Hossein’s is one in a diverse spectrum of stories from 95 countries in a new photojournalism book, The Other Hundred Entrepreneurs, which celebrates the everyday people who create the majority of the world’s jobs and hold the global economy together.
It also aims to challenge the stereotype. The book’s subjects didn’t go to business school, have never written a business plan, and are highly unlikely to launch an initial public offering.
A lot of people achieve a great deal, live enjoyable lives, have all the same trials and tribulations as the richest people, but aspire to very different things
“So much of the mainstream coverage of entrepreneurship is how to get rich, how to make a fast buck, IPO this, do a franchise,” says Chandran Nair, the book’s project director, and founder and CEO of Hong Kong-based independent think tank the Global Institute for Tomorrow (Gift).
