Guest blogger Ben Powell is Managing Partner of Agora Partnerships. Last week, he traveled to Sao Paolo, Brazil, to attend Innovation for the Third Sector: Sustainability and Social Impact, and filed this report. Read below for Ben's observations of the rapidly growing Latin American social enterprise sector - including some poignant success stories as well as potential hang-ups.

Rob Katz asked me to report on the goings on of a major social enterprise conference that just concluded in Brazil - and because I'm a big fan of Rob's and of NextBillion.net, I agreed. As it turns out, the conference deserves some publicity in the US because what it accomplished was both remarkable and important.

Last week, nearly 300 people from 100+ civil society organizations (mostly South American, European, and American)  descended on Sao Paolo for three days of networking and learning. The conference was sponsored by the William Davidson Institute at the University of Michigan and GESC, a Brazilian think tank. For those who don't know WDI, they have quickly established themselves as a premier think tank for a range of global development and sustainability issues. They deserve a lot of credit for pulling off an incredibly complex, ambitious conference.
 
Innovation for the Third Sector: Sustainability and Social Impact was videotaped , translated into three languages, and can be found in its entirety on the web. The site contains archives of all the sessions and will be live for the next 4 months. I would especially encourage people interested in hearing directly from Latin American social entrepreneurs to check it out and see for themselves.

Big conferences like this one cost an enormous amount of time and money, and so it's fair to ask what of the conference lingers after the participants have all gone home. While mulling over this question instead of just sipping a caipirinha (thanks, Rob), I came to a few observations about what I really liked about the conference and where I think the sector - and its conferences - is still struggling.

What I liked best was that the conference celebrated the business approach to social enterprise in a region where the sector has enormous potential but is still driven largely by personality and serendipity instead of by organizations and strategy. My own view is that mission-driven organizations should be ruthlessly efficient, operating like a well managed business and not as a vehicle for personal self-fulfillment or expression. This was the message of the professors and students from Michigan - and their Brazilian counterparts - who led dozens of panels providing technical assistance on how to write a business plan, develop partnerships, apply strategy, implement governance best practices, and apply business tools for identifying and capturing opportunity.

So how did this now- familiar message of U.S. business schools fly in Brazil? I think fairly well with the younger generation, but and I am not so sure about the older generation. This was the general consensus, based on at least from the conversations I had and my discussions with a very sharp and energetic group of Michigan Business School students. There appeared to be general agreement (especially from the Brazilians who know their sector best) that, despite a lot of progress, the Brazilian social sector - the largest and most dynamic of any in Latin America - is still a long way from reaching its potential. Why?

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This Investor Feature is based on a recent interview with Pramod Shedde, a pioneer of India's venture capital sector. Pramod discusses problems and prospects for sustainable SME investment in India and explains why many of the country's green funds are getting it wrong.

PDF Version of this article available here.

To say that Pramod Shedde is one of the pioneers of venture capital in India is no overstatement. Mr. Shedde has over 30 years of experience in the financial sector, a career studded with impressive titles including a term as President of the Indian Venture Capital Association and a recent stint as a Managing Partner of BTS Investment Advisors, Pvt. Ltd. In 1988, he helped co-found ICICI Venture, an ambitious endeavor, Shedde notes, as there was “very little in the way of venture capital in India at the time.”

But in our interview, Shedde makes clear that he is much less interested in VC’s past as where the sector is going and the trends that are shaping its growth. During our discussion, this veteran of the Indian financial community explains why he thinks triple-bottom-line investing is becoming an increasingly attractive proposition for investors in India.

Shedde sees significant investment in India beginning to move toward sustainable sectors, a shift he describes as being largely driven by environmental and social ills, such as the challenge of rampant power shortages that especially afflict rural areas, or unwieldy amounts of urban waste generation. The demand this generates intersects with India’s comparative advantages such as a large endowment of locations suitable for wind power production or low production costs that ease scalability in the organic agriculture sector.

Yet even with the gradual mainstreaming of sustainable technologies, the current dearth of triple-bottom-line funds, and the obstinate barriers to growth facing many of the country’s green and BoP focused startups warrants some further exploration.

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