We received the following story via e-mail from guest blogger Gretchen Ruethling, a first year Master of Public Administration student focusing on international development at Cornell University. She has worked as a journalist and for an environmental organization and an agricultural research organization in the U.S. and Latin America. She is interested in the private sector's role in development and capacity building among small and medium enterprises.

By Gretchen Ruethling

Entrepreneur and self-described "ideas man" Frank Taylor moved from Cape Town, South Africa to Botswana seeking a challenge, trading game skins and leading archaeology, ethnology and botany exhibitions for a museum in South Africa. "I was living on the smell of an oil rag," Taylor said. "A jack of all trades, master of none."

43 years later, Taylor still lives in Botswana and recently started a natural food products company called WildFoods that he says is the only company in southern Africa to produce dried snacks made from native foods that are grown in the wild including nuts, fruits and melons on a commercial scale.

With a staff of 11 that has no formal training in marketing or management and no financing but plenty of passion and business acumen, Taylor aims to market these products to the country's burgeoning tourism industry to improve the livelihoods of rural communities in Botswana.

For the next week, three students and an applied economics and management professor from Cornell University will be working with Taylor on developing marketing strategies to increase distribution of the company's products locally. Cornell's Emerging Markets program has been organizing such trips for students who are interested in hands on business development experience in southern Africa for the past few years.

Currently, another group of students is working with a chemical inputs company in Kenya on developing strategies to better reach smallholder farmers.

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"Who are they?" Melanie Edwards asks us.  Frankly, we don't know – and neither does the government.  These are the people of Morro de Macacoes – Portuguese for "Hill of the Monkeys" – and they are among the 1 billion people worldwide whose existence has no official record.  

Imperfect or non-existent information characterizes base of the pyramid markets worldwide.  When Edwards began working in Morro de Macacoes (a slum near Rio), she asked government officials how many people lived there.  The answer ranged from 5,000 to 60,000.  She saw this disparity as a business opportunity; after all, how can businesses, banks, governments and NGOs serve people's basic needs if they don't know who they are?  Edwards' company, Mobile Metrix, is founded on a simple principle: that accurate information on the invisible is the first step to solving poverty.  Or, as she told me, "[We are] not just about changing lives and counting lives, but about making those lives count."

Melanie Edwards launched Mobile Metrix to identify and serve the world's one billion "invisible" people after a career with J.P. Morgan and the United Nations, among others. The market research and distribution company connects those at the base of the pyramid to critical products and services – including pharmaceuticals, telecommunications, voting registration, and job training.  Mobile Metrix accomplishes this by hiring, training and equipping local youth – in Brazil and other developing nations – with hand-held mobile technology that is used to gather demographic data, door-to-door. The company also develops, administers and analyzes surveys for corporations, governments, NGOs, foundations and local communities.

At the recent Pop!Tech conference, I had the chance to sit down with Melanie – a 2008 Pop!Tech Social Innovation Fellow – for a short interview.

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You're sick, so you go to the doctor.  He prescribes you drugs.  The medicine makes you better, right?  Unfortunately, that's not always the case – especially for the billions of people living at the base of the economic pyramid. 

Taylor Thompson and Nathan Sigworth are on a mission to make sure medicine makes patients better, every time.  They are the co-founders of PharmaSecure, a for-profit startup targeting the problem of global pharmaceutical counterfeiting – which kills millions each year.  PharmaSecure will soon launch a cell phone-based system that allows healthcare professionals and consumers to easily confirm the validity of purchased drugs, bridging the information gap that allows counterfeiters to sell more than $50 billion worth of fake drugs every year.

Thompson and Sigworth are Pop!Tech Social Innovation Fellows; they presented their work earlier today at the conference.  Prior to their presentation, I had the opportunity to sit down with then for an interview.  After their presentation, the guys were featured on the Wired Science blog (20-Somethings Take on a $50 Billion Counterfeit Drug Biz) – so be sure to check out Alexis Madrigal's excellent write-up for context before reading on below. 

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Guest blogger Champa Gujjanudu is an 1st-year MBA student at the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley with an emphasis in social impact consulting and community development. Prior to Haas, Champa was a Strategy Consultant with BearingPoint in the Bay Area and in New Zealand. She has held consulting positions in various industries such as Financial Services, Healthcare and Technology. She graduated with a degree from the University of Auckland with degrees in Computer Science, Mathematics and Business Information Systems.

By Champa Gujjanudu

Today, I was privileged enough to attend not one but two great panel discussions on a topic close to my heart, Fair Trade. While being familiar with some of the local and regional Fair Trade associations and retailers, I was blown away by the breadth of experiences and the passion that the various panelists brought to the discussions.

The first panel addressed one of the major challenges in the mainstreaming of Fair Trade - how do we influence the large untapped proportion of consumers to affect long lasting change in preferences? The other important question was how do we compete in the market with other non-Fair Trade products?

The next panel was focused on attracting investment in Fair Trade - tracing the supply chain of Fair Trade and discussing some of the key attributes of Fair Trade that deter traditional financiers and limit micro-financiers such as lack of collateral and the scale of Fair Trade.

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Jocelyn Wyatt leads the Design for Social Impact initiative at IDEO (a global design consultancy). Prior to IDEO, Jocelyn worked as an Acumen Fund fellow in Kenya and served as Interim Country Director for VisionSpring in India. Jocelyn has an MBA from Thunderbird and a BA in Anthropology from Grinnell College. She blogs (periodically) on www.jocelynwyatt.com.

By Jocelyn Wyatt

Fully admitting my bias here, I did think the Design in the Developing World panel was an especially interesting conversation between a top-notch set of designers and practitioners. Caroline Balerin launched the panel with the question "What would it look like to design for the other 90%?" I fully expected the panelists, who have traditionally designed products, to respond with something about appropriately designed technologies. I was pleasantly surprised to hear each of them respond with the need to design not only the products, but the systems around them.

Paul Polak noted that the design of tools is trivial compared to designing how to mass market them. Tim Brown followed up with the need for us to design the distribution channels, supply chains and marketing strategies to ensure they get to market and scale. "Breakthrough innovation in the developing world is happening by designing systems." Kristen Peterson built on this with a story about how Inveneo started by designing hardware, but realizing that wasn’t enough, has moved to building partnerships with local entrepreneurs who can distribute the IT services.  

The second point, which was made by Paul Hudnut, was the importance of empathy and the need to speak to your customers in a way that makes sense to them.

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"...you can have the very best technology in the world, and if you don't get it out there and market it, if you don't have a distribution network, then it doesn't have any impact."

Martin Fisher, Co-Founder and CEO, KickStart

Creating markets at the base of the pyramid is hard work.  This theme that has resurfaced again and again in my recent work, whether at a gathering of budding BoP-focused entrepreneurs or during a conversation with established social innovators.

What do we mean by 'market creation'?  What role does it play in BoP venture creation?  And why is it so often overlooked by entrepreneurs, investors, policymakers and pundits?  In this post, I'll touch on these issues by citing examples that have surfaced recently in my work, including insights from the Acumen Fund portfolio.

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