This post is part 3 in a 5 part series.

A.H.: What’s next, and is there a way to pay for technical assistance as part of the investment process, so that an SME fund could be fully self-financing and sustainable?

K.H.: Once we had shown the model worked, and that it could generate a competitive rate of return, we found significant appetite to scale these funds among regional banks and national development funds who did due diligence on our track record. The East Africa Fund was coming together with $20-$25 million, but we found there was still additional interest. So we enlarged the effort to a $100 million fund that will invest in SMEs, including those working outside of the energy sector—that’s what we announced last month in connection with the G-8 meeting. The fund will be structured regionally, initially set up in East Africa, and then scaled to both West and South Africa.

A month ago, I posted some information about housing technologies for the BOP. This week, a colleague of mine emailed me to tell me about some of her research in the area.

One thing her team has discovered is that the choice of technology may not be as important as the choice of business model. This applies to materials and also applies to a certain extent to design. Quality (safety, durability) are issues but even more important is desirability. Nobody wants to live in a house that looks different, that brands him or her as a poor person; they may also be averse to taking the risk of investing in an unfamiliar material or design that they, or their buddy they hire to do the work for them, may not be able to fix or build onto later.