(For the record, Pablo took himself out of the running when McKinsey offered him a job; as for me, I rescinded my application when I was offered a full-time gig here at Acumen Fund. That should also serve as a full disclosure, but if not: I work for Acumen Fund.)
Back to the topic at hand...if you read this site regularly and care about market-based approaches to poverty alleviation, then this might be your dream job. Seriously - how else can you spend a full year living and working at the nexus of development and enterprise, unless you're already doing it or on the verge of starting your own company.
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The product is something people everywhere need, but is often costly or – for more than a billion people worldwide – simply unavailable. It has to be produced locally on a daily basis. And the market price, in rural India, is less than $20 per household per year. An impossible business? I say no; in fact, I'd argue that this is a classic base of the pyramid business opportunity: low-margin, high volume; leveraging advanced technology; scalable; and potentially very profitable.
I'm talking, of course, about clean water for drinking and cooking. And two of the businesses I've been mentoring at Santa Clara University's Global Social Benefit Incubator have already achieved proof of concept for this market. Environmental Planning Group Limited (EPGL) is a fully commercial entity operating in Gujarat state. The Naandi Foundation is an NGO that partners with the government but operates with business-like efficiency and is already starting to scale in several states outside its Andhra Pradesh base. Both deploy reverse osmosis water treatment plants, primarily in rural villages that do not now have access to clean water.
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Organization:Growing Inclusive Markets Initiative, United Nations Development Programme. The new flagship UNDP multi-stakeholder Initiative on "Growing Inclusive Markets" is UNDP's most visible strategic and sustained global advocacy tool for the important role of the private sector in achieving the Millennium Development Goals.
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Zipporah is one of the 16 entrepreneurs that took part in this year's Global Social Benefit Incubator, at Santa Clara University. Her project is a great example of how rural communities can be empowered and brought into the value chain of products that are key to the dignity, health, and productivity of poor women in Kenya.
Binti Africa Foundation creates microenterprises with women in rural Kenya to produce safe and affordable sanitary pads that are sold to schools and distributed to girls throughout the country. Thereby it fulfills the goals of empowering rural communities through enterprise and income generation, as well as girls in the poorer areas of the country who, thanks to Binti's sanitary pads and educational campaigns, no longer see significant changes in their routines and productivity during their menstrual periods.
Zipporah's primary objective while attending GSBI was to build a business plan to strengthen Binti's product development ability and expand it's operations into new markets like Sudan and Congo, among others.
Stay tuned for more GSBI entrepreneurs this week as well as an upcoming post looking in retrospect at this visionary and highly impactful initiative.
NextBillion ally and friend Kevin Jones passed along word that the Good Business Network is hosting an interesting event next week in San Francisco about social investing and low-income markets. If you're in town, be sure to check it out.
If you are currently located in/ can re-locate to Hyderabad, have a strong interest in the acceleration of sustainable SMEs and their role as a driver for sustainable development, or know someone who fulfills these characteristics, please read on and see the attached file for a full job description. Applications are due next September 19.
Position Summary: The World Resources Institute (WRI) and CII-Sohrabji Godrej Green Business Centre (CII- Godrej GBC) is seeking an entrepreneurial and dynamic Country Director for its New Ventures India program with a background in business/finance and an interest in sustainable business and investment.
New Ventures is a business accelerator that works toward long-term, sustainable natural resource use by supporting environmentally- and socially-responsible enterprises in emerging economies. We identify profitable small and medium-size enterprises (SMEs) that generate unique social and environmental benefits and provide them with business advisory services and access to capital. Additionally, we work with local and international investment communities and networks to help further develop capital resources available to these enterprises. Since its inception in 1999, New Ventures has supported 178 sustainable enterprises worldwide and helped facilitate over US $120 million in investment into these enterprises. In collaboration with local partners, New Ventures operates non-profit centers of sustainable entrepreneurship in Brazil, Mexico, Colombia, China, Indonesia and India.
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"...you can have the very best technology in the world, and if you don't get it out there and market it, if you don't have a distribution network, then it doesn't have any impact."
Creating markets at the base of the pyramid is hard work. This theme that has resurfaced again and again in my recent work, whether at a gathering of budding BoP-focused entrepreneurs or during a conversation with established social innovators.
What do we mean by 'market creation'? What role does it play in BoP venture creation? And why is it so often overlooked by entrepreneurs, investors, policymakers and pundits? In this post, I'll touch on these issues by citing examples that have surfaced recently in my work, including insights from the Acumen Fund portfolio.
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Tendai used to be a teacher in his native Zimbabwe, until he saw one of his students died for reasons related to poor water quality. That event changed his life's direction and led him to become one of the founding members of Pump Aid, an NGO that has brought safe drinking water to thousands of villages in Africa by designing and manufacturing Elephant Pumps based on a centuries-old Chinese technology.
Pump Aid is experiencing an interesting transition that explains Tendai's presence at this year's GSBI. In the midst of the difficult and unstable situation in Zimbabwe, it recently re-located to Malawi where the elephant pump has been very successful since its introduction as a pilot project a few years ago. It has also experienced growing demand from households and is moving towards creating a fee-based social enterprise called WISH (Water, Irrigation, Sanitation and Hygiene) that will partner with microfinance institutions to offer the "WISH Package", a comprehensive solution for clusters of households that incorporates clean water (through the Elephant Pump), sanitation (through the Elephant Toilet) and nutrition (through nutrition gardens).
So here is Tendai, whose next steps I look forward to tracking and sharing through NextBillion.net.
One in eight people on the planet lives in an Indian village. That's 775 million people, about half of whom live on less than $1 per day.
To Drishtee and its founder, Satyan Mishra, these numbers aren't daunting; rather, they represent an incredible opportunity. Drishtee is franchisor that helps Indian entrepreneurs set up internet-enabled kiosks to provide basic services in their villages. (Full disclosure: Drishtee is an Acumen Fund investee; I work for Acumen Fund.)
Since 2000, Drishtee's network has grown to encompass nearly 1,900 villages, bringing goods and services to about 2 million customers.
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Some time ago, we at NextBillion had the pleasure of facilitating a debate about how - and how much - bottom of the pyramid strategy can improve the plight of the poor. The University of Michigan's Aneel Karnani wrote a very insightful paper critiquing various points about the BoP proposition. This paper then received a response by Michigan's C.K. Prahalad and Al Hammond (then at WRI; now at Ashoka).
As I read his paper, I found myself agreeing with many of his points, similar to when I read Karnani’s publication. This is because Jaiswal, like Karnani, doesn't refute BoP strategies as a means to approaching poverty problems, but rather contends that reality is sometimes more complex than theory, which is why I find it refreshing to read such articles.
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The last 10 days have been truly exciting ones. I have had the amazing opportunity to participate in this year's Global Social Benefit Incubator at Santa Clara University, a two-week in-residence mentoring program with social entrepreneurs from around the world.
Over the next few days I'll be sharing a few thoughts about the program, its amazing potential and some of the specific challenges that these entrepreneurs face. I will also introduce the entrepreneurs that are participating in the program through a series of short video clips.
Today I want you to meet David Okello, who runs Coast Coconut Farms in Kenya and is improving the lives of rural farmers by adding value to the coconut crop and producing high quality, extra virgin coconut oil. So without further ado, I leave you in the company of David.
It's pretty intense, the process Francisco and I are engaged in this past week and the coming one. Take 16 social entrepreneurs from a dozen countries on three continents, some very knowledgeable faculty, and more than a high-powered dozen mentors and guest lecturers from Silicon Valley companies, and stir well. Throw in 12-14 hour days, hard work improving business plans and elevator pitches, instruction on strategies, etc.
That's the Santa Clara University's Global Social Benefit Incubator. And we are both embedded, as the war journalists say--we talk to the entrepreneurs non-stop, we eat with them, we sleep in the same dorms, we go drinking together.
But even more interesting than the formal program are the informal interactions and unexpected discoveries. These are, after all, entrepreneurs, quick to seize on new ideas and used to thinking outside the box. So the cross learning is amazing. I can only give you my own subset of that, but it's happening all across the entrepreneur group.
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The Center for Sustainable Global Enterprise at Cornell University's Johnson Graduate School of Management is accepting submissions for its 2008 Base of the Pyramid (BoP) Narrative Competition. This short-essay competition seeks to highlight the challenges of implementing business in underserved markets and identify innovative business initiatives or solutions to those challenges.
The 2008 BoP Narrative Competition (PDF) has been created to help identify cutting-edge experiences of business innovation in underserved or marginalized communities.
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NextBillion.net brings together the community of business leaders, social entrepreneurs, NGOs, policy makers, and academics who want to explore the connection between development and enterprise. Read more...
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One in eight people on the planet lives in an Indian village. That's 775 million people, about half of whom live on less than $1 per day.
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