A couple of quick reads, especially if you're recovering from Independence Day celebrations in the United States.

First, over at Acumen Fund blog, Fellow Nadaa Taiyab writes about her experiences working with Medicine Shoppe India and its new spinoff, Sehat Clinic.  The post is a fascinating take on what BOP business models mean from the ground up.  For instance, Taiyab reflects on the tremendous change a business model undergoes from concept to launch:

When I arrived in December, we opened the first Sehat Clinic. Last weekend we opened the seventh, with an eight shortly underway. The model has undergone a tremendous evolution in the past six months. We shifted our site selection strategy from relatively affluent areas with a slum nearby to locating the clinics right inside slums. We redesigned the process through which we recruit doctors and created an employment package that allows us to hire experienced doctors at a salary we can afford. We also implemented an entirely new concept for Medicine Shoppe called community marketing outreach. Through this program, we hire local women in each area to make daily home visits, refer sick patients to the clinic, spread health education and awareness, and promote our free health camps and health clinics. In the past four months we have held over 35 health-plus-vision-testing camps, serving over 4,000 people. We have also made some changes to the look and feel of the clinics and shops and put all our marketing materials in local language, to make our services more appealing to low-income markets.

Second is an article in the Business-Standard by BOP critic Aneel Karnani.  He writes that the BOP market is overestimated by C.K. Prahalad and by WRI (full disclosure - WRI runs NextBillion.net, and many of the authors of this blog authored the report that Karnani calls into question.)  His argument is worth reading - I'm working on a formal response, and can't say more at this time.  Regardless, read it.  An excerpt:

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The Financial Times today released an insightful series of reports on corporate citizenship and philanthropy. It's especially worth taking a look at the articles on social investment and social entrepreneurship as they explore the trend of increasing convergence between the non-profit and private sectors. I'll refrain from a debate on the possible ethical issues with these interminglings, and instead focus on this development as a sign that entrepreneurs and investors alike are taking triple-bottom-line impacts seriously not just in word but in deed as well.

How much the times have changed as the old antagonists of the environmental movement are becoming our best friends - witness the Angel Investor meeting that our New Ventures partners in Brazil held last week. For the first time, São Paulo has an official angel investor network, the São Paulo Anjos (SPA), bringing together wealthy and socially-minded financiers to channel their investment toward philanthropreneur-type enterprises. New Ventures Brazil at FGV hosted the SPA as they announced a "soft launch" of the network - a pretty good example of why in the same report, the Financial Times ranked our parent group, WRI, 3^rd among global organizations for private-sector partnerships.

Environmental NGOs as a whole have come a long way in their ability to form these crucial linkages; working relationships that only endure because of the mutual benefit our partners in the business and financial communities are receiving. The investor event last week evidenced the increasingly interweaving objectives of our work and with attendees like Rio Bravo Investimentos and Novarum, there is plenty of reason to believe that the TBL movement is becoming mainstreamed (hopefully for good).