Lehman, Lee & Xu has become involved in World Bank’s new initiative: China Development Marketplace.  LLX both provided donations to the project and helped judge some of the 1,000 ideas proposed by civil society groups to alleviate poverty and improve the standard of living in China.

The China branch of World Bank has proposed an idea to help the Chinese help themselves.  The idea behind China Development Marketplace is to ask Chinese civil society groups/social entrepreneurs to come up with solutions to poverty and social issues.  An example would be an entrepreneur with a plan to provide clean water in his village.  He would create a plan to install the water system and submit his plan to World Bank.  But only 100 of the 1,000 ideas will be funded, so World Bank has asked local and international groups to help choose which ideas are the most suitable and most likely to succeed.  World Bank has also asked these groups to provide monetary donations to support the winning ideas.

Lehman, Lee & Xu helped in both of these areas.  As a result, Mr. Lehman and Sandy Lin, the member of our firm most involved with the project, have been invited to attend the China Development Marketplace Event.

Here’s a very long link to China World Bank: http://web.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/COUNTRIES/EASTASIAPACIFICEXT/CHINAEXTN/0,,menuPK:318956~pagePK:141159~piPK:141110~theSitePK:318950,00.html

This is a picture of Sandy Lin with the trophy given to our firm by Mr. Dollar, the head of China World Bank.