Guest blogger Sagar Gubbi is a technology graduate based in Bangalore with a deep interest in social and environmental sectors in India. He maintains a popular social entrepreneurship blog on Social Edge, and he is the co-founder of 'EcoForge', an investment advisory and consulting firm for social and environmental venture funds.

In this post, Gubbi responds to Allen Hammond's series on taking Base of the Pyramid models to scale. This week, NextBillion.net will publish responses from a number of BoP experts and practitioners, followed by a concluding post from Hammond.

By Sagar Gubbi

When I first read the BoP article by C.K. Prahalad and Stuart Hart three years ago, it triggered several thoughts in my mind and I remember having endless discussions with my friends on the ideas put forth in the article. Reading through Allen Hammond's posts this week on ‘Transformative Sector Strategies', I have experienced a sense of déjà vu, with a lot of thoughts being triggered in my mind all over again. If the work carried out by people like C.K. Prahalad, Stuart Hart and others was responsible for triggering widespread interest in the BoP, WRI's model, outlined in Al's posts, has the potential to take it to the next level.

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Guest blogger Sasha Dichter is Director of Business Development at Acumen Fund. Before joining Acumen, Dichter held senior positions in the corporate citizenship departments of GE Money and IBM. He earned a B.A., M.A., and M.B.A., all from Harvard University.

By Sasha Dichter

Today, we had the pleasure of meeting with the MicroDrip team to discuss their drip irrigation systems being rolled out in the Thar desert region of Pakistan. Dr. Sono is the visionary founder of the Thardeep Rural Development Program (TRDP), which is incubating MicroDrip as a for-profit to serve poor farmers living in the desert. TRDP, the non-profit, provides support services, like education and training, to these farmers.

This is my second chance to meet Dr. Sono, who spoke at Acumen Fund's 2007 Investor Gathering and Celebration last November. Dr. Sono was joined at the meeting by Saqib Khan, the COO of Micro Drip, and Javaid Chaudhry, MicroDrip's Technical Sales Manager.

MicroDrip is a for-profit company that sells and distributes drip irrigation systems to farmers in the Thar region. Acumen Fund has supported the formation of MicroDrip as a for-profit company and is making a US $500,000 loan to support their growth.

Acumen Fund has been working with drip irrigation since 2003, when we first funded International Development Enterprises India (IDEI), an NGO that had the ingenuity to engineer drip systems that were inexpensive enough to make economic sense for farmers making as little as $1 a day. MicroDrip now buys these systems from Global Easy Water Products (GEWP) in India, a recent Acumen Fund investment in scaling the domestic and international distribution of affordable irrigation technologies available to smallholder farmers. This is a powerful partnership across the India/Pakistan border.

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