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Lighting the path of profitability for base-of-the-pyramid enterprises
It’s every small business’s dream to be profiled not only by mainstream media flagships like the New York Times and The Economist but also trendsetting outlets like “The Colbert Report” and Fast Company. And by this measure of media attention, d.light design, provider of solar light and power products for the developing world, is a resounding success. But as any enterprise knows, generating buzz about your product is not the same as having customers actually buy it. d.light represents that most ambitious of social enterprises: One that aims to turn a profit while solving a social problem. Dubbed “hybrid” organizations by Harvard Business School professor Julie Battilana, these businesses differ from other social enterprises, who often rely on grant-based funding, rather than revenue, to sustain operations.
- Categories
- Energy
- Tags
- Base of the Pyramid, solar
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The global health crisis you’ve never heard of
When we talk about global health challenges, we often cite the ones that receive the most attention or funding. AIDS and malaria come to mind. You probably don’t think about injuries sustained from cooking fires or acid attacks. But the truth is, severe burns are a leading cause of mortality and morbidity in developing countries — a crisis afflicting the poor that hardly anyone is talking about.In resource-strained parts of the world, open fires and kerosene cookstoves are relied upon for cooking, heating and lighting. Add in to the mix overcrowded living conditions, lack of proper fire safety measures, loose clothing worn by women and insufficient supervision of children. Suddenly, it’s not hard to see why someone is severely burned every three seconds in a developing country.That’s more than 10 million people each year. For those burn survivors around the world who do not have access to basic medical care, burns are left to heal by themselves, creating a permanent tightening of the skin as the burn wound heals. As a result, even a minor burn can restrict one’s ability to walk or cause a working hand to become an unusable fist.
- Categories
- Health Care
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
- Tags
- public health
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A Social Entrepreneur’s Inspiration For Solar-Powered Lighting
Solar-powered light bulbs for the poor: A growing number of social enterprises are selling such technology to bottom of the pyramid households in Africa, India and other countries. One of the first to do so, Denver-based Nokero (for No Kerosene) just introduced its next generation of products, as it works to make the company’s management more professional–and able to grow the enterprise even more.A little more background on the issue: Around 1.3 billion of world’s population lacks access to reliable electricity. Most of them use kerosene lamps, which are very very very expensive compared to incandescent lamps, (people spend as much as 30% of their income on kerosene-based fuels, according to Nokero), cause deadly fires (If you live without electricity, you’re seven times more likely to die by fire than someone with electricity, according to Katsaros), and contribute to air pollution. They don’t produce a whole heck of a lot of light, either
- Categories
- Energy
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The High Cost, for the Poor, of Using a Bank
There have been a lot of reports lately on the growing numbers of people without bank accounts, and on those who have accounts but continue to use alternative financial services such as payday loans. All this has convinced policy makers and many consumer advocates that low- and moderate-income people are victims of “financial exclusion.” They have therefore concentrated on moving these people to banks.The numbers of “unbanked” and “underbanked” people are indeed growing. Seventeen million people nationwide are unbanked, up from ten million in 2002; forty-three million are underbanked.
- Categories
- Uncategorized
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Africa: The Next Great Growth Story for Visa and MasterCard?
Africa's role in the global economy is visibly changing. It is no longer the world's tip jar, but rather a formidable growth pillar.Kenyan telecom company Safaricom, for instance, is the world leader in mobile payments. More than 17 million of Kenya's 40 million citizens use Safaricom's mobile payment service, M-PESA. In addition, close to 25% of Kenya's Gross National Product flows through the service.
- Categories
- Uncategorized
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
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The Future of Health Care Access
For generations, the model of how people in the developed world access health care services has involved face-to-face encounters between doctors and patients in brick-and-mortar medical facilities. The contours of that model are well known: A patient arrives in a clinic, registers her insurance at the front desk, and waits. Then a nurse or an aide ushers her into a sterile room, takes her vital signs, and hands her a paper gown. Some minutes later, a doctor in a white coat enters the room, asks her questions for 10 minutes or so, and conducts a brief physical examination. The doctor issues a diagnosis, writes a prescription, and sends the patient off to make a copayment. Afterward, the patient will drive to a local pharmacy to purchase medication. She is one of 40 patients whom the doctor will see that day.
- Categories
- Health Care
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Building public-private partnerships for better access to health products
Improving health outcomes for the most vulnerable people requires global funding and collaboration – but neither will have an impact without effective systems for delivering health products and care. Strong supply chains, while critical for improving lives, are rarely the focus of programmes that aim to achieve the millennium development goals or end deaths from preventable disease. As World Health Organisation director-general Dr. Margaret Chan has said, "All the donated drugs in the world won't do any good without an infrastructure for their delivery."
- Categories
- Health Care
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Social entrepreneurship: More complex than ‘start a business, save the world’
Gauging the impact of a social entrepreneurship is not a hard science, but there are clear signs of when such an effort is on the right track.The highest level of impact can be based on whether the entrepreneur changed a system, said Simon Stumpf, regional representative of Ashoka East Africa. A small operation in organic fertilizer or microhydro might not look as efficient as it could be, but an entrepreneur may have worked to get power purchase agreements so others can sell power to grid, for example.
- Categories
- Uncategorized
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