Guest blogger Jocelyn Wyatt leads IDEO's base of the pyramid design efforts. Before joining IDEO, Jocelyn was a member of the inaugural class of Acumen Fund Fellows. As a Fellow, Jocelyn worked for Advanced Bio-Extracts (ABE), a leading manufacturer and cultivator of artemisinin, a key ingredient in the most effective treatment against malaria. She holds a MBA from the Thunderbird School of Global Management.

By Jocelyn Wyatt

Recently I participated in the Base of the Pyramid Learning Lab at Cornell University. The Learning Lab, chaired by Stu Hart, brings together companies and non-profits interested in working at the Base of the Pyramid. Attendees included IBM, SC Johnson, dob Foundation, Sesame Street, Oxfam, and IDEO.

Stu and the team at Cornell are thinking about co-creation and BoP 2.0. I agree with this approach of encouraging companies to work closely with local communities to design new technologies and new business models to support them. Let's not take our existing technologies and try to make them fit someplace else. Let's start with identifying wants and needs and then work together to make something that’s good for everyone.

Stu mentioned the need to "approach this work with humility." I couldn’t agree with that more and believe we need to stop thinking of ourselves as experts ready to deliver solutions to the poor. We need to learn how to listen better and move to a place of believing we have something to learn from people living in the slums of Nairobi or the villages in Andhra Pradesh.

Guest blogger Mareike Hussels is Latin America Manager for New Ventures. Prior to joining WRI, Mareike worked with the United Nations Environment Programme Finance Initiative (UNEP FI), where she was responsible for outreach to financial institutions in Latin America. Mareike pursued her undergraduate studies at the University of Passau in Germany and holds an MA in International Relations and Development Studies from the University of East Anglia in the UK.

By Mareike Hussels

"I feel like a hamster in a wheel, trying to respond to all kinds of different reporting templates for environmental, economic and social impact." This quote is from Ben Ripple, founder of Big Tree Farms, a specialty ingredients company sourcing from farmers in Bali. He feels that the pile of data that his company has to collect for aid agencies, international NGOs, investors, and other sponsors is never-ending.

Ben was speaking last week at the Triple Bottom Line Conference in Paris, where WRI organized a panel on monitoring and evaluating non-financial impacts.

Collectively, his staff spends 60 hours per week on data collection and reporting to donors and sponsors. There are internal benefits for the company in all this, he concedes: it allows him to stay on top of the organizational stability of his farmer network and provides meaning for the employees who know that they work for a company that does good. But Ben is doubtful that these benefits are offsetting the cost of monitoring and reporting. 

Emma Staub from E+Co, an investor providing seed funding to energy entrepreneurs in developing countries, and Mildred Callear from SEAF, the Small Enterprise Assistance Fund, also spoke to the cost and labor of reporting. However, for both of them, monitoring and evaluation makes sense. It allows their companies to become more and more deliberate in making investments that maximize non-financial benefits, and it helps fundraise with international financial institutions, foundations and philanthropic investors.

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Genesis is a social entrepreneurship competition that aims to bring together social entrepreneurs, students, NGOs, innovators, incubators, corporations and financiers and encourage them to come up with innovative ideas which are socially relevant and feasible.

The competition is hosted by the India chapter of Asia-Pacific Student Entrepreneurship Society at IIT Madras.

The competition is open to all students and working professionals (including NGOs) who have ideas that are innovative, feasible and can benefit society. 50% of the registered members of every team that enters this competition should be students. Rs. 300,000 will be awarded as seed funding to winning teams to start their ventures.

Last year's edition began with an impressive series of workshops from social entrepreneurs from organisations such as Aavishkaar, Infrasys and The Spark Group.

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