D.Light, the renewable energy organization that distributes clean sources of light in the developing world, is looking for its first class of Fellows.

D.Light, which has often been mentioned on NextBillion, is an incredible start-up that was founded by savvy Stanford MBA graduates Sam Goldman and Nedjip Tozun. The organization is growing quickly, and, as Kiva and Acumen Fund have exemplified, highly-talented Fellows could be a key part of that growth.

Position: Available positions include: Business Development, Marketing, Product Design, International Business Development, Marketing & Communications, Reliability & Testing, Research & Development, and Supply Chain & Operations

Location: New Delhi, India and Shenzhen, China

Application Deadline: Feb 15th for most, March 1st for some

Description: "Fellows will be able to use their unique skills and experiences to contribute in a significant way to our mission of replacing kerosene lanterns with safe and bright light. We are committed to providing our fellows with a uniquely invigorating, challenging, and life-changing experience...

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Sankalp (English translation: Pledge or Determination) is a South Asia Social Enterprise and Investment Forum with the primary goal of bringing together various stakeholders sharing a common conviction that capital should be invested to create multiple bottom-line returns (financial, social and environmental) and not exclusively financial (profit-maximizing) or social (philanthropic) returns.

Sankalp 2009 is an effort to discover, connect and support the most investible social MSMEs (Micro, Small and Medium enterprises) operating in agriculture, energy, education, healthcare and "scalable models".  Organized by the India Development Gateway and sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation, Rural Innovations Network, NABARD and Aavishkaar, this promises to be a high-profile forum for the latest generation of base of the pyramid companies in South Asia.

If you have a company that should be considered for the Sankalp Award, or know of one, the deadline for nominations is February 15, 2009.  More information on the awards, process, program, events and sponsors is available on the web site.  We'll be keeping an eye on Sankalp and will look to post updates as we hear them from our friends at the India Development Gateway.

Energy poverty in the developing world is a complex and ongoing problem with serious impacts on health, economic growth, and the overall environment.  The impact on the poor is particularly felt in their day to day needs for cooking fuel – much of it coming from either oil or gas - or from the decreasing availability of freely collected fuels such as firewood or its derivative, charcoal.  

Growing price volatility for these products has created shortages of fuel and increasing uncertainty around meeting basic needs.  Indoor pollution from smoke contributes to health problems such as cardiovascular and respiratory diseases, cancers and eye diseases, and of course there are ongoing risks or burns and fire from unstable cooking pots and stoves. 

As I have learned more about these issues and cooking fuel in particular, I was surprised at both just how complex they are and the number of organizations trying to find "better stove solutions," including giants such as the FAO, Oxfam, and Shell Foundation  to much smaller organizations such as Mayan Families, The Escorts Foundation, Envirofit, and the Chimp-n-Sea Wildlife Conservation Fund.

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Like Rob mentioned in his post yesterday, I do think this is the year of ANDE. More precisely, I believe that thanks to forums like ANDE this will be a year in which companies and intermediaries serving low income markets will start to work in a more collaborative and coherent way, leveraging each other's innovations, successes and failures, and finding effective distribution mechanisms so that a more effective "knowledge brokerage" across boundaries is possible.

This may be the first step in building global supply chains for products aimed at low income markets, connecting the dots between existing supply (known to work at addressing specific needs) and existing demand. As far as the supply side is concerned, it is easy to see that most of the business models highlighted in BoP/ social enterprise literature, conferences and forums like this one are usually concerned with the design and commercialization of products and services that address very specific needs of the poor. Kickstart or IDE are examples in the case of irrigation. They have both developed products that work and serve their purpose in the context of small scale agriculture.

The quality and effectiveness of their products have been commented time and again; stats and success stories of their use abound. However, neither KickStart nor IDE have reached a truly global scale, the way, say, iPods have. Lack of demand for their products is not the reason, of course -- whether The Next 4 Billion or Aneel Karnani is right about the size of the markets at the base of the pyramid. Demand exists. The reason is that the marketing and distribution infrastructure to make a global reach and scale possible is not (yet) in place for the markets at the base of the pyramid. In other words there isn't someone that, like a retail outlet, aggregates products of several manufacturers (those that address needs like water management or energy or health), markets and makes them available and accessible to local communities.   

This is the opportunity that PowerMundo identified. Mike Callahan, its founder, traveled extensively through the poorest regions of Peru after learning that a vast portion of the population lacked electricity and/or used expensive, dirty and unhealthy fossil fuels for cooking and lighting.

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I'm writing from Cartagena, Colombia, where "The Business of Inclusion" conference will take place later this week. The conference is organized by the Inter-American Development Bank, and the Multilateral Investment Fund (FOMIN) and NextBillion has been invited to cover the discussions that will take place during the next few days as a media sponsor. As someone whose interest is contributing to a stronger and more maningful development-through-enterprise movement in Latin America, I am grateful for this opportunity.

There are two aspects of the conference I am particularly excited about. First, WRI will co-host a panel on Friday, in which we want to highlight creative and entrepreneurial solutions to some of the most pressing challenges faced by our society. Also hosting the panel will be AVINA, one of the largest private foundations in the region, and FUNDES, a key actor in the local enterprise development space.

The three organizations form the Network for Inclusive Markets, through which we intend to identify scalable business models serving the base of the pyramid in key sectors and mobilize key actors for their implementation in Latin America.

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Guest blogger Katherine Yue is a second-year MBA student at Thunderbird School of Global Management where she has assisted in research on business and capacity growth in microfinance and health microfranchises. She interned for FINCA Jordan in its founding year, strengthening business risk management disciplines.

Prior to Thunderbird, Katherine was a project manager at the largest health care organization in the US, leading process redesign and enterprise risk management systems. She graduated from UC Berkeley with a degree in economics with a focus on society and technology.

By Katherine Yue

The second day of the 2008 Net Impact Conference took me from an interactive workshop on scaling enterprises at the base of pyramid to a session on strategic philanthropy.  Bringing it all home was a session called Social Entrepreneurship At Work, Moderated by Mark Milstein from Cornell University, with panelists Jordan Kassalow, Co-Founder and Chairman of Vision Spring, Christine Eibs Singer, Co-Founder and Executive Vice President of E+Co, Nand Kishore Chaudhary, Founder of Jaipur Rugs Company and Jaipur Rugs Foundation.

In the audience, Jordan Kassalow pointed out Neil Blumenthal and Jocelyn Wyatt's attendance and their instrumental participation in the initial growth of VisionSpring.  Tal Dahtier, who started MBAs Without Borders, was also on hand to encourage MBAs to pursue their passion in social entrepreneurship.

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I had the opportunity to attend the Tech Museum Awards ceremony last week in San Jose, California.  What's interesting about this annual event is not just the social entrepreneurs and their sometimes quite remarkable innovations, but also the way Silicon Valley turns out to honor them and, at least for an evening, to focus on applying entrepreneurial skills to benefit poor people. This year the event was attended by some 1,500 people including many of the Valley's wealthiest and most powerful Venture Capitalists, CEOs, and networkers.

The mix of enterprises changes every year.This year was especially rich in BoP energy enterprises with seven entries. The prize winner was Distributed Energy Systems India, or DESI Power (desi means land or village in Hindi), which builds biomass power plants to generate electricity in villages that lack access to it. DESI trains locals to run the plants and also incubates local businesses that need power and enlarge the customer base for the model.

A wearable solar lighting system that stores up power in a cellphone battery and yields several hours of light in the evenings and technology for modifying diesel engines to run on virtually any plant oil were also intriguing.   

Highlights of a health cluster were Medmira, which has developed inexpensive rapid diagnostics for HIV and Hepatitis, and Star Syringe, the prize-winner, which develops syringes that only allow one use, thus preventing disease transmission by needle reuse.

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Last month, NextBillion ally and BOPreneur Paul Hudnut reported on his blog that Envirofit, a company he helped start, had already sold 10,000 high-efficiency cookstoves to BoP consumers in India.

This week, Envirofit announced that it was ramping up production to meet demand - though not on Paul's blog.  Was this higher profile?  Judge for yourself:


And there's more:


Congrats to Paul and the Envirofit team.  I'm sure their friends at Shell are pleased, as is their sales team.

Position: Research Intern

Location: Amsterdam or Bloomfield, NJ

Organization: E+Co, a non-profit investment firm focusing on clean energy enterprises in developing countries, is seeking a qualified graduate level (Masters) student for research and writing assignments. The internship will last 3-6 months with flexible degrees of workload. E+Co cannot offer any remuneration. The intern can be based near one of E+Co's offices in Amsterdam (NL) or Bloomfield, New Jersey (USA) or the work can be conducted remotely supported by e-mail and phone calls.

E+Co is non-profit investment company that invests business support services and capital in energy businesses in Africa, Asia and Latin America. With almost 15 years of experience and offices in 10 countries, E+Co's innovative business model provides lasting solutions to climate change and poverty.

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Chip Ransler is the co-founder of Husk Power Systems (HPS), a for-profit company that cost-effectively converts rice husks into electricity. HPS utilizes a proprietary technology to run 35-100 kilowatt mini power plants, delivering pay-for-use electricity to un-electrified villages in India's "Rice Belt." HPS' five pilot projects have become operationally profitable within six months, delivering sustainable, environmentally-friendly, low-cost energy that is dramatically improving the lives of rural Indians.

Chip is also a Pop!Tech Social Innovation Fellow.  We sat down this week at the conference for an interview.  For more context on Husk Power Systems, check out their profiles in Virginia Business (Chip and his business partner, Manoj Sinha, are MBA candidates at the University of Virginia) and Rediff.com.

Rob Katz, NextBillion.net: Tell me briefly – what is Husk Power Systems?

Chip Ransler, Husk Power Systems: Husk Power Systems is a rural electrification company.  We go where the inputs are cheap and where electricity is most needed and valued.  In practice, that means rural villages – places where 3 or 4 thousand people live.  Our systems are truly community based – we don’t have to truck in wires from all over the place.  It’s a relatively small, off-grid system.  There are 350 million people in India without power living in small villages; and those communities harvest 92 million tons of rice harvested every year – we’re meeting the need and using the best, local materials.  Also, this is not a dream – we’re in 5 villages, power 12,000 people’s homes. Our goal is to build 100 as quickly as we can – then scale our model throughout the developing world.

NextBillion.net: Tell me about rice husk – what is it, how much is there, where do you find them?  What do farmers do with them now?

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Guest blogger Peter Moers is economist and the regional coordinator for the Social Trade Organization in Central America. He has worked in several countries in Central America, West Africa and in The Netherlands in small enterprise, cooperative, rural and local economic development. He believes that local production for local markets is an underexplored development strategy and that biofuels offer a unique opportunity to many rural areas to create strong, diversified and stable local economies.

By Peter Moers

Paris Hilton and biofuels may have more in common than you think.  After all, they have both experienced the ups and downs of fame lately. After having been presented for several years by the media as the ultimate solution for many energy and environmental problems, biofuels' star has fallen to the point of being the main culprit of food shortages, high food prices, deforestation and even pollution.

Of course, there is neither a simple solution nor a single culprit. In the meantime, the generalizations that lead to biofuels’ Paris Hilton moments – the ups and downs – lead to a negative image for many initiatives that DO contribute to positive social and environmental change.

This article explores the food-fuel relationship in the specific context of rural development project in Honduras, Gota Verde. The project uses small-scale biofuel production for local consumption as a strategy to create employment, stabilize income sources for small farmers, reduce their dependence on loan sharks, avoid soil erosion, protect water sources and increase food production.

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