Thanks everyone, for your e-mails about NextBillion.net.  No, we haven't stopped blogging - far from it, in fact.  Actually, we're in the very late stages of a site re-design process, and we're working out the final few kinks with our servers and whatnot.

We've decided to hold off posting new content until we launch the new site, because we can't keep migrating our entire database over and over.  This SHOULD happen by Friday of this week, hopefully earlier.

When the new site goes live, expect to see a completely new user interface, a design overhaul, a new brand/logo (sneak preview above!) and some great features like popularity rating, easier commenting, related articles and dynamic search.  We've also eliminated some unpopular sections and added new ones - like Research, Career Center and Take Action - that you've been asking for.

More as we know it.  But for now, don't give up on us!  We're still blogging - just waiting for the new platform on which to continue the conversation.

Thanks!
Rob, Francisco and the NextBillion.net Team

My friend David, NextBillion reader and BOPreneur, pinged me last night and rightly asked why NextBillion.net has been slower than usual these days, missing a few of big news pieces that relate to the base of the pyramid and development through enterprise. He's right. The truth is Rob and I have been with our hair on fire testing and working on what will very soon be the new face of this website.

In fact, if everything goes according to plan, this will be the last post I publish in NextBillion as it looks and feels now! Anyhow, it's Friday and I do want to take the opportunity to point you to a couple of relevant media pieces for you to catch up with this weekend, in case you haven't yet.

The first (hat tip, David) is a 14-page special report about the middle classes published in The Economist last week. Why is this relevant to our readers? Well, NextBillion.net is based on the premise that business, enterprise and the profit motive can serve the poor enhancing their dignity and choice so they can climb the ladder up to that level of the pyramid.

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iBoP Asia recently announced the winners of their first small grants competition and the second competition is coming up soon. I wanted to highlight the grants program for our readers at NextBillion, as I know that many of you have the ideas they are looking for.

A joint collaboration between the Ateneo School of Government (ASoG) in the Philippines and the International Development Research Centre (IDRC) in Canada, iBoP Asia seeks to advance the research agenda on science and technological innovations for the base of the pyramid in SouthEast Asia and does so through policy advocacy, conferences, small grants competitions, and more.

The winners from the first call for proposals can be found on iBoP's website and include Niti Bhan's Emerging Futures Lab, which, as a consultancy for BoP markets, will be looking at payment strategies and practices of the BoP with limited and irregular income. Several of the winners focus on improving farming practices, including the Sub-Plant Protection Department of Angiang Province in Vietnam and the Philippine Rice Research Institute, which focuses on building and sustaining the rice economy in the Philippines, through policy advocacy and providing farmers with greater access to technology.

As a BOPreneur living in Nepal, I was grateful to learn about iBoP Asia; an Asian entity such as ASoG that focuses specifically on the BoP in Asia, bringing together multidisciplinary actors across the region, is a welcome addition. I tend to be skeptical of organizations that focus largely on research, but iBoP Asia wants to bridge the research-practice divide with a focus on engaging the public, private, and non-profit sectors in research that leads to better innovations for the BoP.

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Position: Innovative Finance Role

Location: Geneva, Switzerland

Organization: The Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition (GAIN)'s mission is to reduce malnutrition through the use of food fortification and other strategies aimed at improving the health and nutrition of populations at risk. GAIN has set itself the target of reaching 1 billion people of whom 500 million are in target groups most vulnerable to malnutrition. GAIN builds alliances between public and private partners around common objectives, and provides financial support and technical expertise.

Description: The Innovative Finance position will be part of the Investment and Partnership Program team within GAIN based in Geneva, Switzerland. This key position will contribute to GAIN’s key business development initiatives by utilising understanding of the key drivers of international development finance from both public and private sector perspectives to generate innovative ideas applying the related international best practices.  Roles include:

• Assessing Investment Opportunities
• Transaction Execution
• Business Development/Fundraising
• Relationship Building & Stakeholder Management
• Management and Communications

See the attached job description for details, including required skills and instructions on how to apply.

Position: Business Development Manager - Marketing

Location: New York, NY

Organization: Acumen Fund is a global non-profit venture capital fund, focused on supporting the delivery of critical services – water, health, housing, energy – at affordable prices to the four billion people earning less than four dollars a day in India, Pakistan, and East Africa.  Acumen Fund seeks to prove that small amounts of philanthropic capital, combined with large doses of business acumen, can build thriving enterprises that serve vast numbers of the poor.  Acumen Fund has successfully impacted over 10 million lives so far, through over $30 million invested in South Asia and Africa. Its country offices in India, Pakistan and Kenya work closely with the New York team to identify and support local social enterprises.   Through our investments we address problems of poverty using market based approaches, demonstrating that there is a role for patient capital, intensive management assistance, and knowledge sharing at the base of the pyramid.  Since 2001, Acumen Fund has functioned under a philanthropic capital model, raising donations to fund investments in enterprises that deliver health, water, housing or energy to the poor.

Description: Acumen Fund’s Business Development team is responsible for raising philanthropic capital for Acumen Fund and for managing relationships across our extended community of Partners (donors), Advisors and supporters.

Acumen Fund is looking to create a step change in terms of awareness, excitement, and membership in our community of supporters and advocates – from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands, and someday millions of people who believe that markets and entrepreneurship have a central role to play in the global fight on poverty.

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As I was perusing my Sunday New York Times this past week, two stories stood out to me. Both mentioned migrants struggling to keep jobs in the developed nations where they were working. One article profiled Alexandrina Ciurea, a Romanian cleaning woman working in Rome; the other described Ignace Abdulx, a laid-off Senegalese metalworker worker in Paris.

Both Ciurea and Abdulx had been sending considerable remittances back to their families; Abdulx’s amounted to 200 euros per month for his wife and three children, yet neither knew if their adopted homelands would provide them with continued opportunity. I found their stories to be very interesting, and began to ponder the effects of slowing remittances and potential reverse migration to developing nations.

As many families living at the Base of the Pyramid are dependent on remittances, shifts in remittances and migration are both very timely and potentially worrisome trends. As Manuel pointed out when he wrote on two leading reports on remittances in 2008, "Remittances are estimated to have more than tripled as a share of GDP since the 1980s, rising from 1.1% of GDP to 3.6% of GDP in 2005."

While open borders have meant more choice for the economically disenfranchised, individuals who have migrated based on the promise of better opportunity may be waking up today to rising debt, diminishing job prospects, and fewer dollars or Euros to send back home to wives, husbands, and children who depend on them.

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Editor's note: In December, Professor Aneel Karnani published an article in the Stanford Social Innovation Review entitled, "Romanticizing the Poor."  At the time, we posted about it here on NextBillion.net and suggested that our review of the article would be forthcoming; it has not, and for that, we apologize.

In the meantime, Staff Writer Moses Lee has provided his analysis of the article in his post, "Are the Poor Really Entrepreneurial?" 

What's more, Professor Karnani and Staff Writer Al Hammond have engaged in a lively e-mail debate about the article.  Both Karnani and Hammond have been kind enough to give permission to NextBillion.net to post the content of their debate here.  The first installment - a post by Al Hammond - is available here.  This is the second installment is Aneel Karnani's response to Hammond's post.

By Aneel Karnani

Al, I am sorry that you are not happy with my article on the BOP — that certainly was not my intention.   I do appreciate your sending me your critique in advance of publication.  Incidentally, I too had sent you my first working paper arguing against BOP way back in 2006, well in advance of publication.  I had send the same paper at the same time to CK Prahalad, and he did respond publicly on nextbillion.net.

I take scholarship seriously, and would appreciate it if you would substantiate the charge of “questionable scholarship.”  If I have misquoted you I will be happy to publish a retraction.  Please let me know specifically the misquotation.

(Editor's note: At this point, Hammond sent Karnani a marked-up version of the paper, which I will not reproduce in full here due to copyright restrictions.  What follows are Karnani's responses to Hammond's specific critiques.)

The article text appears in boldface; Hammond and Karnani's responses are indicated by parentheses.

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Editor's note: In December, Professor Aneel Karnani published an article in the Stanford Social Innovation Review entitled, "Romanticizing the Poor."  At the time, we posted about it here on NextBillion.net and suggested that our review of the article would be forthcoming; it has not, and for that, we apologize.

In the meantime, Staff Writer Moses Lee has provided his analysis of the article in his post, "Are the Poor Really Entrepreneurial?" 

What's more, Professor Karnani and Staff Writer Al Hammond have engaged in a lively e-mail debate about the article.  Both Karnani and Hammond have been kind enough to give permission to NextBillion.net to post the content of their debate here.  The first installment - a post by Al Hammond - follows.

By Al Hammond

I'm writing this in India, having just spent the day in a rural part of Punjab seeing how a market-based strategy is bringing clean drinking water to villages that have had none. The point of the trip is to plan in detail how we leverage this successful BOP business to bring modern healthcare, as well as clean water, to low-income rural communities.

From this perspective, most of what Mr. Karnani says seems just silly—armchair theorizing. His numbers are wrong—as we have already explained in detail elsewhere, although he does not acknowledge the criticism.  And he misquotes me and attributes words to me that I’ve never spoken, thus underscoring his questionable scholarship and the sloppy editorial work of the journal that published him. But it is his larger critique that is more troubling.

The poor make bad choices?

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Last month, Aneel Karnani wrote in the Stanford Social Innovation Review an article entitled, "Romanticizing the Poor."  In it, he states, " ...romanticized views of BoP people as value-conscious consumers and resilient entrepreneurs are not only false, but also harmful." In the article, Karnani spends a lot of time debunking the view that people in dire straits are well-informed and rational economic actors. In the end, he exhorts governments and policy makers to get more involved in the fight against poverty.

Personally, I think a lot of what Karnani says in the article is true.  Particularly on the topic of entrepreneurship, (which is what I'd like to focus on in this entry). It's just wrong to assume that the majority of those living at the BoP are entrepreneurial. Recently, I spoke to a friend who is working on a BoP project that seeks to help the poor start microenterprises.  The project selects a handful of people from a poor community and puts them through an entrepreneurship training program.  I asked her what was one of the biggest challenges of the project.  She responded, "That we're trying to train a lot of people to be entrepreneurial who are simply not."

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When Muhammad Yunus, Ingrid Munro and other microfinance pioneers, got together in the first Microfinance Summit in 1997, they adopted what for many was an impossible goal: to reach 100 million people living with less than $1 per day by 2005.  Although the deadline was missed, the 100 million mark was reached in 2007, an incredible feat nonetheless.

The Microcredit Summit Campaign groups microfinance institutions with the common goals of reaching the poorest and of empowering women. In their State of the Microcredit Summit Campaign Report 2009, they confirm that, having double-checked 80% of the figures of their member microfinance organizations (totaling 3,552 organizations in 2007), the 100-million-poor mark was reached by the end of 2007. Just to get a feeling of the figures involved: it is estimated that these 3,552 microfinance organizations reached more than 150 million clients, of which more 106 million were "poor."

Of these poor clients, 83.4% were women (or nearly 89 million). Assuming five persons per family (a relatively low family size in many developing countries), the more than 106 million poorest clients in turn had an effect on around 533 million family members. More than half a billion. Talk about the scalability of a business model.

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D.Light, the renewable energy organization that distributes clean sources of light in the developing world, is looking for its first class of Fellows.

D.Light, which has often been mentioned on NextBillion, is an incredible start-up that was founded by savvy Stanford MBA graduates Sam Goldman and Nedjip Tozun. The organization is growing quickly, and, as Kiva and Acumen Fund have exemplified, highly-talented Fellows could be a key part of that growth.

Position: Available positions include: Business Development, Marketing, Product Design, International Business Development, Marketing & Communications, Reliability & Testing, Research & Development, and Supply Chain & Operations

Location: New Delhi, India and Shenzhen, China

Application Deadline: Feb 15th for most, March 1st for some

Description: "Fellows will be able to use their unique skills and experiences to contribute in a significant way to our mission of replacing kerosene lanterns with safe and bright light. We are committed to providing our fellows with a uniquely invigorating, challenging, and life-changing experience...

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There has been a lot of buzz about new models of foreign aid and the role of social entrepreneurs since our post on President Obama and the NextBillion.net Agenda for the Base of the Pyramid. Guest blogger Apoorva Shah also shared some great points about the important actors in aid reform, including the American Enterprise Institute. 

Iqbal Qadir, a noted social entrepreneur and Founder of MIT's Legatum Center for Development and Entrepreneurship, argued effectively in his opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal for the overhaul of America's current model of international aid and a renewed focus on supporting entrepreneurs in developing countries. Qadir details America's earlier motives in pouring aid into other countries as a way to cement alliance and allegiance to the U.S. and he points out that such models are now sterile and in fact often inhibit the true democratic development of aid recipient countries. While Qadir offers a historical perspective on why such models are in dire need of re-shaping and re-doing, other noted journalists and bloggers have also been focusing on the link between Obama, sustainability, foreign policy, and international aid.

I came across some important materials and entrepreneurs for the NextBillion.net community to ponder and discuss and I hope you'll join in on the dialogue. I will also echo Apoorva's central  question: What role can the NextBillion.net community play in the debate and formation of President Obama's policies on foreign aid? What do you think is the role of entrepreneurs in development and in helping America better support international development?

First, I was thrilled to read in the attached Obama Campaign policy statement that he has plans to create an entitiy that provides seed capital to SMEs and even build "SME Universities" in partnership with American business schools. Based on this policy statement alone, there is clearly thought being put into new approaches to development, including an understanding that the private sector plays a critical role.

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Editor's note: Al Hammond, entrepreneur in residence at Ashoka, will write a series of reports documenting his experiences and the learning involved in started a "base of the pyramid" (BoP) healthcare venture to serve developing countries. This is his first report in the "Notes From the Field" series.

There I was, looking over the shoulder of a woman physician, in a unique 400+ seat medical call center in India, as she dealt with a female patient with abdominal pains. The patient was calling from her home on a mobile, had been initially engaged by a trained lay health worker, and then passed on to the doctor. 

As the doctor asked questions--guided by a software tool called a clinical decision support system--and selected the patient’s answers, the questions on the doctor’s computer screen changed. Within a few minutes, the doctor had isolated the problem, decided that she didn’t need to dispatch an ambulance, selected a medicine, and clicked on another tab that sent an e-prescription by text message to the patient’s phone. 

The patient can take that message on her mobile to a pharmacy and fill her prescription. The whole process took 3-4 minutes for the patient, and was free (subsidized by the state government). But it also didn’t cost the state much, because it only used a few minutes of the doctor’s time, so that she can deal with more than 100 patients in an 8-hour shift. No clinical office to rent or equip. No patient travel involved. Available when needed, 24-7. And trained lay health workers, paid perhaps a fifth of a doctor’s salary, handle 80% of the calls, so only 20% get passed on to doctors.

Thus, in economic terms, a single doctor is in effect overseeing the treatment of more than 500 patients per day. Of course, not all patients have problems treatable remotely—trauma, cancer, heart attacks and others will be referred to hospitals. But for many primary care problems, this is high quality, and very cost-effective, care.

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Last Friday Rob wrote news about new Base of the Pyramid conversations taking place, this time in Davos. Great news indeed. For those who can attend, venues like that of Davos (or the one starting tomorrow in Long Beach) are the time of the year when they allow their brains get picked by new trends, challenges and ideas. Connections take place, not only in the form of business card exchanges but most importantly inside their minds, among concepts and issues, dots that previously seemed somewhat disconnected.

Rob also promised a more in depth analysis of the content of the Next Billions reports on our behalf. However, I've decided not to focus my scarce bandwidth on that tonight. The reports are available for everyone to read and I encourage you to do so. I encourage interested readers to leave their comments and raise particular aspects of interest for discussion.

I don't think the impact of WEF's reports (or any book/ report for that matter) will come from their detailed contents, hence my choice not to write detailed analysis tonight. They are valuable but not how-to manuals. The reports become significant as long as they're able to spark curiosity in readers, which may eventually drive them to continue exploring relationships between seemingly disconnected dots --development and enterprise in this case-- by reading further into them, looking for other sources, or taking action.

Just as part of the Davos-and-beyond WEF audiences are beginning to explore the connection between development and enterprise (and food security and enterprise through their second report), I am myself starting to to wonder and explore into what I think will be the defining "connection" during our generation and for the development community in particular: that between climate change and poverty.

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The American Enterprise Institute recently convened a two-day symposium on the future of U.S. development policy and foreign assistance. The nexus between development and enterprise was a recurring theme at the event, and participants discussed how entrepreneurial philanthropy, social entrepreneurship, and base-of-the-pyramid approaches to development will influence U.S. engagement in the developing world. We invite NextBillion.net readers to join the dialogue about foreign assistance under a new U.S. administration.

Guest blogger Apoorva Shah is a research assistant in Foreign and Defense Policy Studies at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington D.C.

By Apoorva Shah

Jenara Nerenberg's timely post on President Obama and the NextBillion.net agenda reminded readers that the new administration will make substantial changes in America's foreign assistance policies. Obama and his colleagues in Congress, most prominently Rep. Howard Berman (D-CA), chairman of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, have promised an ambitious and large-scale reform of the U.S. foreign aid system.

In this effort, will they consider the growing influence of entrepreneurial philanthropy, social entrepreneurship, and private sector based development in U.S. policies for engagement with the developing world?  And what role can the NextBillion community play in influencing these decisions?

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