The billionaire financier Vinod Khosla says he will pump the approximately $117-million he made in the recent public offering of the Indian lender SKS Microfinance into other for-profit ventures that seek to fight poverty in the developing world, says The New York Times.

The India-born, Silicon Valley-based Mr. Khosla, who co-founded Sun Microsystems, plans to start a venture-capital fund to finance businesses providing health, energy, and education to the poor in India, Africa, and elsewhere.

“There needs to be more experiments in building sustainable businesses going after the market for the poor,” he said.

In Seattle, a group of local investors and institutions have contributed $20-million to a fund that capitalizes small lenders in Latin America, reports The Seattle Times.

Seattle University and the Seattle Foundation are among the backers of the Social Investment Fund 2010, administered by Global Partnerships. The “microfinance plus” fund offers investors a 4-percent annual return over five years and requires most of its Latin American partners to offer services such as health education and business training.

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