I am just back from the BiD Challenge, described by Rob in his post from last week. Several programs from WRI participated in the Challenge event - ourselves and New Ventures. The day of events included a number of well-produced and well thought-out interchanges, including conversations with a number of the corporate and institutional underwriters and competition judges, a "talk show" style review of some of the judges' favorite projects (not all were winners, by the way), an interview of past winners, and on-the-ground videos highlighting entrants. Well done.

Winners have been posted already to the Challenge site. At the end of the day, Thierry Sanders, head of NCDO, announced plans for the 2007 competition, and it creates a two-tiered system - one for start-ups, and a second for more mature enterprises. As was pointed out by several of the judges, the start-up nature of the event sets some limits on the possible impacts. NCDO has been remarkably successful in getting big banks and companies involved, and the new plan will, I think, make the BiD Challenge more meaningful to their sponsors. (BTW, a mild correction to Rob's previous post; NCDO is set up as an NGO, but it is almost entirely funded by the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs; its purpose is to engage Dutch businesses in emerging economies). At the same time, it will also allow WRI to engage more fully with their processes. Look for some announcements along these lines in the next few months.

The Columbia Business School will hold its annual social enterprise conference this coming Friday in New York, featuring speakers from a wide range of companies and organizations. There will be a bottom-of-the-pyramid panel, where Sasha Dichter, Diana Yousef, and Erik Simanis will hold court under the watchful eye of moderator Murray Low.

Registration is reasonable; if you can make it to New York this Friday, it would be well worth your while to check out the proceedings. If anyone is going and would like to blog about it as a guest poster here at NextBillion, please drop us a line.

Social Enterprise Conference 2006: Raising the Bar will bring together industry leaders, students, academics and practitioners to discuss strategies and challenges in three areas: Social and Environmental Impact, Leadership and Ethics, and Social Capital Markets. Panels will feature speakers from all sectors to challenge and deepen current understanding of topics such as global health and business, corporate social responsibility, community development finance, bottom of the pyramid business strategy, climate change and renewable energy, private equity in emerging markets, multinational and corruption and education.

Christine Bowers of PSD Blog reports that C.K. Prahalad delivered his standard bottom of the pyramid talk to an audience at World Bank headquarters yesterday.  According to her post, Prahalad took a not-so-subtle shot at the Sachs/Easterly school of development, and failed to cite any non-Indian examples – a flaw with which Bowers takes issue.  Her analysis is well worth a read; excerpted below:

Hard to believe that someone in the concrete industry of all places would have a social conscience in addition to well-honed business acumen, but that is indeed the spirit in which the EcoCreto company’s founders operate. New Ventures’ Sara Standish interviewed Nestor de Buen about his company recently and he had this to say about his motivations:

“When someone invites me to talk about EcoCreto, I spend most of my time talking about the water problem, because it’s what really scares me. I think of my sons and daughters and the kind of country they are going to have if we don’t take action.”

Guest blogger Rhys Thom is an intern with WRI's EarthTrends project. Originally from Albuquerque, New Mexico, Rhys comes to WRI with an extensive background in development, having worked in Honduras, Namibia, and Nigeria. He also owns his own multimedia marketing firm.

As the ideas of corporate social responsibility and the triple bottom line become more pervasive in the private sector, new questions and obstacles are bound to arise. At Columbia Business School's Social Enterprise Conference 2006 last Friday, three themes resonated throughout the conference: the need for metrics to quantify social and environmental profits, the need for NGOs and public sector entities to be professional and accountable for public/private partnerships to work, and bringing Corporate Social Responsibility out of the proverbial ghetto.

The day started off with a panel on Creative Approaches to Global Health Problems. I arrived half way through (who knew that the Upper West Side is an hour-plus subway ride from Park Slope?) but was still in time to catch a few salient remarks from leaders in the public health arena. New approaches to philanthropy, market mechanisms for drug distribution to developing markets, and obstacles to creating and providing vaccines for AIDS and malaria were among the new ideas being kicked around. Patricia Duquette, the Director of Women's Health and Global HIV/AIDS Initiative at Bristol-Meyers Squibb Foundation, discussed new trends in philanthropy including donating expertise and intellectual property to non-profit health organizations, citing Merck and BMS's in-kind donation to the International Partnership for Microbicides of a royalty-free license to develop, manufacture, and distribute their microbicide compounds in developing countries.

Continue reading past the break as Rhys discusses greenwashing, CSR as PR, Costco, private equity in development, and the environmental implications of the BOP Protocol:

With more than a few mentions on NextBillion during its development, it was nice to see LifeStraw covered in today's New York Times.

The LifeStraw sells for $3, is approximately the size of a paper towel tube (i.e. 25cm long by 29mm in diameter), and filters out 99.99% of bacteria, the main cause of water-borne diseases such as Typhoid, Cholera, Dysentery and Diarrhoea that kill 6,000 people a day.

Q. What do young social innovators do for fun?

A. Hang out at StartingBloc’s fall seminar, of course.

 

About two months ago, while I was waiting for a phenomenally delayed plane at the Dulles Airport, I picked up a copy of the summer edition of Fast Company. Beyond the excellent article about the “Rise of the Aerotropolis”, a short description of StartingBloc caught my eye. It was a fellowship for college students and young professionals who were interested in the intersection of the private sector, sustainability and social change. My first thought was “Wow, this is fantastic, where do I sign up?”

The Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania will convene a 1-day conference on November 11 in Philadelphia. Africa: Building New Partnerships, Impacting the Global Economy features panel sessions on a slew of NextBillion-related topics: consumer goods, private equity, information technology, housing markets, and more. Keynote speakers include Apex Capital’s Alan Patricof.

While I realize that this conference will be held on a Saturday, it only costs $50 to attend ($65 at the door) and it’s being held in the City of Brotherly Love. Talk about a perfect storm.

Unfortunately, I won’t be able to attend myself. If you’re planning to be there, and would like to have your work featured on NextBillion.net, contact us about guest blogger opportunities. It worked well for Rhys; it can work for you too.

HT: Pablo H via IPEG

We’re happy to introduce Seema Patel, who has joined the NextBillion.net team as a part-time intern.  When she’s not working with us here at WRI, Seema is a senior project manager at ITF consulting.  She received her master’s degree in International Relations and Environmental Policy from Boston University and continued on there working as the assistant to the Director of the International Relations Program.  She also worked in Kenya, East Africa for the United Nations Environment Program in their Division of Environmental Policy Implementation focusing on environmental law and policy, environmental consulting, and writing and editing publications dealing with wildlife law enforcement, African constitutional agendas, and judicial publications.  

What role do information technologies play in economic development? We’ve been trying to answer that question ever since the Digital Dividends conference way back in 2002, first as an IT-focused research team and now as Development through Enterprise and NextBillion.net. There are no simple answers – which suggests to me that we should keep asking.

One group that does a lot of good asking is the RiOS Institute, whose upcoming e-conference and summit are worth checking out. The e-conference, co-organized with the World Bank Institute, is entitled "ICT for Economic Development: Exploring Possibilities for Multisector Technology Collaborations" and begins on October 23.

The Silicon Valley Challenge Summit will discuss the uses of information and communication technologies for global development and what steps Silicon Valley institutions have been and can continue to take to create sustainable development initiatives that address poverty. The summit is co-presented by the Center for Science, Technology and Society (CSTS) and will be held on November 16 at Santa Clara University.

The crop duster crashing and dumping pesticides into the Los Mochis water supply was bad enough. But when a warehouse blaze released toxic agrochemicals into the air, causing respiratory illnesses among farmers and their families in the area, Jorge Berni knew there had to be a better way.

Jorge had twenty years of experience as an organic farmer but in the wake of this series of ecological disasters, he decided to apply his chemical expertise and his principled stance on sustainable practices to form Berni Labs and create a pesticide alternative.

Muhammad Yunus, who developed the idea of microfinance and later founded the Grameen Bank, is the 2006 winner of the Nobel Peace Prize. It is not his first peace prize. The Wikipedia entry is already updated to reflect today’s news; I suspect the mainstream media will be saturated with coverage over the next few days.

I’m thrilled to see a pioneer like Yunus receive an award of this caliber; it will probably mainstream microfinance in a way that we’ve never before seen. Maybe now the press will stop its often cookie-cutter coverage of the topic, and instead focus on more cutting-edge news. How about stories on interest rate caps, the underserved gap between microfinance and venture capital, and the role informality plays in keeping businesses micro, just for starters?

Regardless of how this story is covered, however, it can only be a good thing. Congratulations to Dr. Yunus and the Grameen Bank, and to all the people working hard every day to bring financial services to the BOP.

Thanks to a commenter’s suggestion from Munyaradzi Musamba, I checked out a new report from InfoDev about the role of private sector finance in small- and medium-sized enterprise development. The report, Scaling Up Innovation and Entrepreneurship in Developing Countries: The Role of Private Sector Finance, contains the preliminary findings of a workshop held last April; I’m still trying to find the summary findings (post-workshop), but this is pretty good reading for now. At only nineteen pages, it’s digestible and very valuable, if a bit technical. An excerpt from the foreword suggests what’s to come:

I was in Karachi this past weekend, where I addressed a packed seminar, Improving Access to Financial Services: Mobile Money Transfer and Beyond, convened by the Asian Development Bank and the State Bank of Pakistan. If audience enthusiasm is any indication, financial service provision over mobile phones continues to gain momentum in both development and private sector circles.

The topic of my talk was low-cost networks and their role in providing all kinds of services – not just financial – to rural communities where there is currently no coverage. I believe that connectivity is a key enabler to all kinds of business development, and that the other important ingredient is microfinance. Despite the rapid spread of mobile phone coverage and the exponential growth of microfinance (legitimized by Muhammad Yunus’ Nobel Peace Prize), there are still millions – billions – of rural, low-income villagers who remain off the network. Connectivity and microfinance can jump-start the latent economic potential of these billions – by giving them access to finance, markets, information, customers, suppliers, government tenders, large companies...the list goes on.

Another presenter at the seminar was a team from Globe Telecom (Philippines) who spoke about their G-Cash platform (previously noted on NextBillion). They now claim it can be implemented on any mobile system – a not-so-subtle indication that G-Cash is going to scale up, and soon. I am beginning to wonder if G-Cash is going to be one of the first BOP innovations to blow back to the West/North, and if we’ll be using the system here in the United States sooner than expected.

For NextBillion readers interested in China, Knowledge @ Wharton has a special section out this month that will be of interest. Selling in China is the third in a series of reports on the world’s most populous nation; this issue covers a range of topics, including the dichotomy between rich and poor consumers, sales and distribution, and competition between Western and local manufacturing firms. A glance through the first article demonstrates that K@W understands and addresses BOP challenges:

But once multinational companies get past the excitement of imagining the opportunities offered by the world's largest consumer market -- growing richer and more status conscious with each passing year -- there is the sobering thought of figuring out how to go about unlocking the secrets to selling to all of these people. Who are they? How much money do they have? What do they want to buy? What motivates their purchases? What are the peculiarities of the Chinese consumer?