(via iPienso)

Position: Director of Program Innovation/ Interim COO, One Acre Fund

Wanted: Early-career (3-10 years post-undergrad experience), “elite” business professional to work in Africa

Work in Africa for One Acre Fund, an exciting non-profit that runs like a start-up business!

Organization Description: One Acre Fund is a start-up initiative in Kenya and Rwanda which works with persistently hungry farm families. Instead of giving handouts to families, One Acre invests in farm families to generate a permanent gain in farm income. Its "investment bundle" includes education, financing, inputs, and export market access.

One Acre Fund has been operating for 20 months, and currently serves 500 farm families (2,500 children). It will grow to change the lives of 30,000 families (150,000 children) within the next three years, scaling at a 50-100% growth rate thereafter.

Job Description: The Director of Program Innovation is the first "major" full-time hire for the organization, and will be essentially a partner to the founder, in laying the organization's foundation. One Acre Fund's day-to-day operations are currently run by 30+ (growing quickly) local field staff; the Director conversely, will be responsible for new program innovation and for laying infrastructure for long-term growth.

For details about the position and for application instructions, please see the attached file.

It has been an exciting week in the "base of the pyramid" (BOP) world, at least from my vantage point.  From mainstream media coverage of key BOP issues to off-the-radar developments in organizations like Endeavor and Acumen Fund, a lot is going on.  A brief wrap-up:

On Sunday, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman weighed in on India's low-cost car debate.  His column - which Ethan Arpi and I reviewed on Tuesday - demonstrates how the environmental pressures business will face when operating in low-income markets.  Irresponsible product development, distribution and marketing (however unintentional) can threaten firms' right to operate in these greenfield markets, losing BOP trust before they know it.  Even more, companies whose products and services turn environmental risk into business opportunity (think distributed energy or water) are poised to succeed as never before in markets like India.

On Wednesday, I traveled to New York to meet with some truly world-changing individuals: the 2008 class of Acumen Fund Fellows.  This group of seven was selected from more than 500 applicants - a 1.4% acceptance rate.  To better understand the scale here, Harvard's acceptance rate for its newest class was a comparatively generous 9%.

I spent two hours with the Fellows, discussing base of the pyramid concepts, trends, research, definitions and communications.  I was excited to learn that the Fellows will have a blog this year, and that each is going into the field with a video camera.  (Side note: Check out Jocelyn Wyatt's excellent blog posts from her time as an Acumen Fund Fellow last year.)  Remember these names (I've listed the companies they're working for as well as where they're heading):

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Yesterday, I attended a presentation by Madhav Pai, who was visiting WRI to tell us about a system developed by an organization he has worked with called Mapunity, that is linking together MIS, GIS, and SMS technologies to enhance transportation access and planning in Bangalore.

If this sounds only mildly related to poverty, or particularly technical, it’s only because describing it in other terms seemed insane, trite, or both (other titles for this posting included: "Democracy in Density," "Beam Me Something Useful" and "Cell Phones in Motion").

Basically, the original idea for Mapunity was to come up with an open-source system for Bangalore that would perform functions similar to those provided by Google Maps. Mapunity now offers the SMS-driven Bangalore Traffic Information System, which provides extensive information about bus routes, locations, and traffic congestion in real time, deliverable to cell phones, for free (or at minimal cost, if you’re not with Airtel).

The system works by collecting information on cell phone signal density, and using that as an indicator of congestion at different intersections.

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