Guest blogger Liliana Valle is an MBA candidate at Duke University's Fuqua School of Business. She recently worked as a Summer Associate with Agora Partnerships in Managua, Nicaragua.

By Liliana Valle

The time had finally come,  I knew some day I would be back.  This summer I had the opportunity to work for Agora Partnerships in Managua, Nicaragua.  Although I left Peru, where I'm originally from, at the age of 10 and was raised in the USA, I always had a strong connection to my roots.  I knew some day I would be back in Latin America to help its growth and development, but I didn't know when or how.  Prior to starting at the Duke's Fuqua School of Business, I had a vision of how my personal and professional experience could be of value to developing countries. 

Now, thanks to my MBA experience and summer internship, this vision is becoming a reality and my passion for ensuring the social, economic, and environmental development of emerging countries through the Small and Growing Business (SGB) sector has grown even stronger.

Agora Partnerships is a non-profit that operates in Nicaragua and is expanding throughout Central America.  It provides consulting, management tools, market linkages, and access to networks and capital to selected entrepreneurs in order to launch or grow successful, socially responsible businesses.  Their philosophy is to fight poverty through entrepreneurship.

As part of their model, Agora manages a for-profit venture fund that makes debt and equity investments in SGBs.  This is the tool used to provide needed growth capital.  My main role this summer was to develop a scaling strategy for the organization to expand into other Central American countries and have a greater impact. 

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Most estimates of the size of the BoP population sit between 3 and 4 billion people. The original population figure of 4 billion by CK Prahalad in his "Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid" has been criticized as an over estimation. It is true that, for scientific analysis, exactness is something we should always aim for.

However, from the point of view of the colossal opportunity that BoP markets represent for the private sector, the exactness of our measurements of the BoP population is not crucial. That is why, in the past few years, the lessons taught in his book have been taken to heart and developed by BoP entrepreneurs, investors and researchers alike.

According to WRI and IFC's publication, "The Next 4 Billion", the number of people at the BoP is estimated at 4 billion, representing a market size of $5 trillion, in purchasing power parity (about the GDP of the UK and Germany together). If the actual population of the BoP was 3 billion people we would estimate the actual size of this market to be between $4 trillion (slightly less than Japan's GDP) and $3 trillion (more than India's GDP).

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