Last week I had the pleasure of attending the Entrepreneurship and Development Reception, which marked the launch of the ANDE Network in Washington DC. My biggest takeaway: nothing says more about the bridging spirit of this initiative than the event being co-hosted by organizations representing the government, the donor community and the entrepreneurs working in the field -- as described below.

I asked Katherine Samuels -- Summer Associate at Agora Partnerships and co-host of this great venue -- to share her insights on the event and the network with the NextBillion.net community, to which she kindly agreed. Katherine is a candidate for a Masters of Public Affairs at the University of Texas, Austin.

By Katherine Samuels

Something was in the air, a buzz, a special energy. It was the feeling that I was witnessing the start of something new, something important for the development community. Following the Aspen Institute's initial launch of the Aspen Network of Development Entrepreneurs (ANDE) in Colorado, the Rockefeller Foundation sponsored an Entrepreneurship and Development reception last week, officially marking the launch of ANDE in Washington, D.C.

ANDE is a network of social entrepreneurial leaders who provide management assistance to Small and Growing Businesses (SGBs) in the developing world as well as foundations and investors who fund and support these efforts. ANDE organizations intend to pool their efforts to catalyze a movement that will unleash the resources needed to start, grow, and finance hundreds of thousands of small businesses in the developing world.

ANDE seeks to provide structure and encourage support for the SGB sector - the development community's answer to the issue of the "missing middle"; that is, assisting those businesses that are not served by local commercial financial institutions but are too large for microfinance programs and too small for traditional venture capital. Antony Bugg-Levine, from the Rockefeller Foundation, described this new movement afoot in the SGB sector of development that prompted the formation of ANDE.

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