Guest blogger Francisco Mejía is a Principal in the Opportunities for the Majority Office at the Inter-American Development Bank (IADB), based in Washington DC. He currently leads the preparation of various transactions involving the financing of BoP projects in leading and innovative companies in Latin America and the Caribbean. Prior to joining the Bank, Francisco was the Director of the Center for Economic Development at the Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá, the leading economic think tank and research institution in Colombia, and consulted for various international organizations.

Autor's note: The views expressed in this blog contribution do not necessarily reflect those of the IADB.

In this post, Mejía 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 Francisco Mejía

The "sector approach to scale" that Al Hammond is advocating is entirely consistent with the fact that needs are "sector specific": we all have housing, health or education needs. And it is also consistent with the idea that scale can be achieved by taking advantage of the notion that similarities in sector specific market conditions and industry structures might validate "easy" translation of business models from one place to another.

But this approach has shortcomings, one of which we could dub the "lost in translation" challenge. If one tried to replicate the CEMEX Patrimonio Hoy self-construction model from Mexico to Chile or Argentina, one would find that in those markets, self construction is virtually non existent.

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I received an e-mail today from the Stanford Social Innovation Review, one of my favorite journals in the 'third sector' space. The e-mail was to inform subscribers that SSIR has added 5 new writers to its influential Opinion Blog - including NextBillion.net's very own Grace Augustine!

Congratulations, Grace. You will be in good company at SSIR's Opinion Blog, including Benetech founder and MacArthur Genius Jim Fruchterman, Philanthropy 2173's Lucy Bernholz and SSIR founder Perla Ni.

Here's the full e-mail I received today (since SSIR has not blogged this news, ironically):

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