Position: Innovative Finance Role

Location: Geneva, Switzerland

Organization: The Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition (GAIN)'s mission is to reduce malnutrition through the use of food fortification and other strategies aimed at improving the health and nutrition of populations at risk. GAIN has set itself the target of reaching 1 billion people of whom 500 million are in target groups most vulnerable to malnutrition. GAIN builds alliances between public and private partners around common objectives, and provides financial support and technical expertise.

Description: The Innovative Finance position will be part of the Investment and Partnership Program team within GAIN based in Geneva, Switzerland. This key position will contribute to GAIN’s key business development initiatives by utilising understanding of the key drivers of international development finance from both public and private sector perspectives to generate innovative ideas applying the related international best practices.  Roles include:

• Assessing Investment Opportunities
• Transaction Execution
• Business Development/Fundraising
• Relationship Building & Stakeholder Management
• Management and Communications

See the attached job description for details, including required skills and instructions on how to apply.

Editor's note: Al Hammond, entrepreneur in residence at Ashoka, will write a series of reports documenting his experiences and the learning involved in started a "base of the pyramid" (BoP) healthcare venture to serve developing countries. This is his first report in the "Notes From the Field" series.

There I was, looking over the shoulder of a woman physician, in a unique 400+ seat medical call center in India, as she dealt with a female patient with abdominal pains. The patient was calling from her home on a mobile, had been initially engaged by a trained lay health worker, and then passed on to the doctor. 

As the doctor asked questions--guided by a software tool called a clinical decision support system--and selected the patient’s answers, the questions on the doctor’s computer screen changed. Within a few minutes, the doctor had isolated the problem, decided that she didn’t need to dispatch an ambulance, selected a medicine, and clicked on another tab that sent an e-prescription by text message to the patient’s phone. 

The patient can take that message on her mobile to a pharmacy and fill her prescription. The whole process took 3-4 minutes for the patient, and was free (subsidized by the state government). But it also didn’t cost the state much, because it only used a few minutes of the doctor’s time, so that she can deal with more than 100 patients in an 8-hour shift. No clinical office to rent or equip. No patient travel involved. Available when needed, 24-7. And trained lay health workers, paid perhaps a fifth of a doctor’s salary, handle 80% of the calls, so only 20% get passed on to doctors.

Thus, in economic terms, a single doctor is in effect overseeing the treatment of more than 500 patients per day. Of course, not all patients have problems treatable remotely—trauma, cancer, heart attacks and others will be referred to hospitals. But for many primary care problems, this is high quality, and very cost-effective, care.

(This post continues past the break; click "Read More" to continue)

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.

Position: Consultant

Location: Nyanza Province, Kenya

Organization: The Safe Water and AIDS Project (SWAP) is an organization that provides women with HIV/AIDS a range of services (counseling, emotional support, paralegal assistance, health and nutrition education) as well as income generating activities.  SWAP also provides support to AIDS orphans.

Description: SWAP has received significant financial support; the Rotary Club of Atlanta and Rotary District 9200 of Kenya began supporting SWAP over 3 years ago with the goal of reducing waterborne disease and providing SWAP members with the means of earning much needed income.  In this program, local SWAP groups are trained about safe water, health, and good business practices, and are offered the opportunity to obtain microcredit.  The women become "Avon Ladies" for health, selling WaterGuard, PUR, modified clay pots, insecticide treated bednets, condoms, protein fortified flour, skin antiseptic, birth control pills, and other products, and keep a small commission.  This project enables the women to improve the health of their neighbors while earning money to support their families.  There are approximately 400 SWAP groups, mainly women, who sell health products throughout Nyanza Province.  Promotion and marketing of the products primarily occurs by word of mouth through the various group members in their respective communities.

(This post continues past the break; click "Read More" to continue)

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.

(This post continues past the break; click "Read More" to continue)

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.

Al Hammond - a NextBillion.net Staff Writer and one of the site's progenitors - is featured in a short video produced by his new employer, Ashoka. In it, Al describes why he moved over to Ashoka and what he's doing there - specifically, he tells viewers about his work mentoring 7 pharmacy franchise startups around the world. Al's been a mentor and a friend for many years, and it's good to see him doing well. Click here or view below.

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. 

(This post continues past the break; click "Read More" to continue)

Zipporah is one of the 16 entrepreneurs that took part in this year's Global Social Benefit Incubator, at Santa Clara University. Her project is a great example of how rural communities can be empowered and brought into the value chain of products that are key to the dignity, health, and productivity of poor women in Kenya.

Binti Africa Foundation creates microenterprises with women in rural Kenya to produce safe and affordable sanitary pads that are sold to schools and distributed to girls throughout the country. Thereby it fulfills the goals of empowering rural communities through enterprise and income generation, as well as girls in the poorer areas of the country who, thanks to Binti's sanitary pads and educational campaigns, no longer see significant changes in their routines and productivity during their menstrual periods.

Zipporah's primary objective while attending GSBI was to build a business plan to strengthen Binti's product development ability and expand it's operations into new markets like Sudan and Congo, among others.   

Stay tuned for more GSBI entrepreneurs this week as well as an upcoming post looking in retrospect at this visionary and highly impactful initiative.

"...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.

(This post continues past the break; click "Read More" to continue)

One in eight people on the planet lives in an Indian village. That's 775 million people, about half of whom live on less than $1 per day.

To Drishtee and its founder, Satyan Mishra, these numbers aren't daunting; rather, they represent an incredible opportunity. Drishtee is franchisor that helps Indian entrepreneurs set up internet-enabled kiosks to provide basic services in their villages. (Full disclosure: Drishtee is an Acumen Fund investee; I work for Acumen Fund.)

Since 2000, Drishtee's network has grown to encompass nearly 1,900 villages, bringing goods and services to about 2 million customers.

(This post continues past the break; click "Read More" to continue)