Neal Peirce wrote an article following the Bellagio summit in August expressing great enthusiasm for the potential that grassroots collective action and micro financing tools have for producing changes in urban slums.

The thing that struck me most about Peirce’s article was his emphasis on the importance of community action and how much it resonates with my own observations from time spent in a housing project in El Salvador a few years ago - and how the only sort of "community action" inside the project was around the MaraSalvatrucha gang.

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Scojo Foundation requires an individual to manage the tremendous global growth opportunities within its Franchise Partner Channel.

The Franchise Partner Manager will be responsible for developing, managing, and ensuring successful relationships with potential and existing international Franchise Partners.

Location: NY, New York (with frequent travel, 30-50%)

How do we get more capital to the people who want to start their own SMEs? It is difficult to make a case for this "missing middle." NextBillion has identified this problem in the past, and it seems like now the issue is beginning to unfold in the development debate: the Clinton Global Initiative is now discussing this very issue.

SMEs are good for the economy - they create wealth, create jobs and usually need financing so they can grow to scale. The financing gap exists for a layer of potentially high-growth SMEs that occupy a space between large MNC projects and micro-entrepreneurs. The World Bank has found a connection between the number of SMEs in a country and a country's growth, and has posited that without SMEs, it’s difficult to sustain economic growth.

The following videocast is of a session entitled "Filling the Finance Gap" at the Clinton Global Initiative's Poverty Alleviation Working Group a couple weeks ago. The speakers: Alan Patricof, Sonal Shah and Hubertus van der Vaart, do an exceptional job of explaining the challenges of investing in entrepreneurs and SMEs in emerging markets; they debate about the financing gap, or the "mesofinance gap."

Watch the videocast here

I find what Patricof says about the companies in the United States very interesting. He mentions Staples as an example of a company that started small and then scaled up to become a big U.S. corporation, thanks to the existing capital structure in the United States. There are similar companies with great potential in a multitude of emerging economies, but most face a consistent challenge: lack of financing tools.

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Triple Jump currently is hiring for two positions: Investment Officer and Senior Investment Officer. Both positions are based in Amsterdam, and are initially for one year.

Triple Jump is a fund management company specializing in managing funds that invest in financial institutions offering financial services to micro- and small entrepreneurs (MFIs).

Please see the two position postings on their site for detailed job descriptions, qualifications, and application information.