Guest Blogger Lesley Pories is a Deshpande Foundation Sandbox Fellow, working with the Water Literacy Foundation in India.

Before taking on this role, Lesley worked as a Research Analyst with the People and Ecosystems Program at the World Resources Institute. A graduate of Emory University, she double-majored in International Studies and English and minored in French.

By Lesley Pories

The real "meat" of the action kicked off this morning in Hubli, when the 250+ participants separated into small groups to read and discuss case studies that highlighted challenges faced by the participating NGOs.  While each NGO prepared their case study based on their own challenges, the problems brought forward were indicative of many other organizations. 

The one I had prepared for WLF, for example, outlined the difficulties in management of an organization as it tries to make the important step from small to medium-size.  Each case study has 2 opportunities to be the topic of a small-group discussion, and note-takers are provided to capture all the feedback.  I wasn't there last year, but this "case study session" idea was a direct result of suggestions from last year's conference.

After the first session, participants returned to the auditorium for the official "lighting of the lamp" ceremony (a tradition in India) and opening remarks from Desh.  It seemed like he was reading my mind, as the bulk of his speech was about the management challenges faced by many of the NGOs that the Deshpande Foundation supports. 

"Innovation is the lifeblood of an organization," he emphasized, and advocated for infusion of corporate-style management into the social sector. "[We need to] combine the passion of the NGO sector with the discipline and Darwinian nature of the for-proft sector," Deshpande commented.

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Guest Blogger Lesley Pories is a Deshpande Foundation Sandbox Fellow, working with the Water Literacy Foundation in India.

Before taking on this role, Lesley worked as a Research Analyst with the People and Ecosystems Program at the World Resources Institute. A graduate of Emory University, she double-majored in International Studies and English and minored in French.

By Lesley Pories
 

Small excited confusion abounds as people scan the collection of buses for the signs that designate which program each bus is going to see: livelihoods, education, health or agriculture.  But soon enough, people are generally settled in and the still-inevitable puffs of smoke let everyone know the buses are moving and the day has officially begun.

I write from Day 1 of Deshpande Foundation's Development Dialogue, their second annual collection of NGOs, academics, businesspeople and socially-minded others who share an interest in the development of Northern Karnataka (nicknamed the "Sandbox" by the Deshpande Foundation), India.  In an earlier guest blog post, I described the work of the Deshpande Foundation and its commitment to promoting development through entrepreneurship. 

As a Sandbox Fellow working at local water conservation NGO Water Literacy Foundation (WLF), courtesy of the Deshpande Foundation, I'd been hearing about this event for months. It was both exhilarating as and exhausting to help it take off.

The morning started with the 250+ participants piling into buses that spent the morning visiting one or two sites of Deshpande-funded NGO work in the nearby area.

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Santa Clara University is known in social entrepreneurial circles for its work helping to organize and judge the Tech Museum Awards – a showcase for social entrepreneurs, mostly from developing countries. Less well-known about the school is the Global Social Benefit Incubator, run by SCU's Center for Science, Technology, and Society and a host of Silicon Valley volunteers.

The GSBI, under the guidance of Professor Jim Koch, selects 15-20 enterprises from developing countries and provides an 8-month mentoring process. The mentoring culminates with an intensive 10-day process in Santa Clara, where entrepreneurs work with their mentors, other experts, and each other to prepare themselves to succeed upon their return home.  Applications for the fully-funded 2009 class of entrepreneurs are available now over at Social Edge.

Note: The first application exercise is due this Friday, January 16 - don't delay, start your application today!

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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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Aneel Karnani, a Professor at the University of Michigan and a Managing Director at FSG Social Impact Advisors, is a long-time critic of market-based approaches to poverty alleviation and the "base of the pyramid" concept in general.

His latest article, Romanticizing the Poor, appears in the Winter 2009 issue of the Stanford Social Innovation Review.  A brief excerpt:

Market solutions to poverty are very much in vogue. These solutions, which include services and products targeting consumers at the "bottom of the pyramid," portray poor people as creative entrepreneurs and discerning consumers. Yet this rosy view of poverty-stricken people is not only wrong, but also harmful. It allows corporations, governments, and nonprofits to deny this vulnerable population the protections it needs. Romanticizing the poor also hobbles realistic interventions for alleviating poverty.

This article came across my desk last week, and I've been thinking about it since.  A formal response is in the works - to which I will invite Professor Karnani to respond here on NextBillion - but I wanted to make sure that everyone reading the site knew about the article and had the chance to read it themselves in the meantime.

Comments are open below if you have immediate thoughts; should this spark an interest, here are some of Professor Karnani's other critiques of the BoP concept:

• The Mirage of Marketing to the Bottom of the Pyramid
• Microfinance Misses its Mark
• Doing Well by Doing Good Case Study: Fair and Lovely Whitening Cream
• Help, Don't Romanticize, the Poor
  

Update 12/15/08: Aneel Karnani is not a Managing Director with FSG Social Impact Advisors, as I reported Friday.  The erroneous material was sourced from the Stanford Social Innovation Review web site; even so, I should have cross-checked it.  My apologies.

Although we in the BoP sector often talk about the role of the informal sector as an important factor (both as a competitor and as an ally) when crafting sustainable models for low income communities, precious little has gone into analyzing it. One of the most important reasons for this lack of analysis is because of the shortage of data referring to it. By definition, informal businesses are hidden from the eyes of the state and so most of what we have relies on estimations and very micro-level studies.

A recent cross-country report that appeared in the Brookings Papers on August 2008 aims to improve the understanding of the relationship between economic development and the informal economy. The report, entitled "The Unofficial Economy and Economic Development" is authored by Rafael La Porta and Andrei Schleifer, two renowned professors and scholars in the development studies field.

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Guest blogger Bree Olivari is a second-year MBA candidate at Thunderbird Global School of Management and is a leader of the Net Impact chapter. At Thunderbird, Bree integrates her interest in sustainable business with her degree in supply chain leadership. Her projects include mapping best practices of supplier codes of ethics, organizing Thunderbird's Sustainable Innovation Summit and greening procurement practices on campus.

During a recent internship Bree helped design the distribution of micronutrient sachets to undernourished children in Mexico.

By Bree Olivari

As I bit into an apple provided in my Net Impact lunch box, my mind wandered to the farm it came from and how this juicy treat related to a growing and global food crisis. It is expected that such a thought cross my mind especially since the details from the session I attended at the Net Impact National Conference hours earlier entitled "The Global Food Crisis: Business-Led Solutions to Alleviate Food Insecurity and Malnutrition" were still fresh.

Back to my thoughts of the apple farm. Much unlike the farms described in the session, which the world's poorest communities depend on, the apple farm probably uses technology developed over the past fifty years, can afford to use fertilizer and may even receive a subsidy from the US government. Furthermore, the apple farmer clearly has access to a reliable transportation infrastructure which affords her access to markets where she can make well-informed decisions on price and value for the customer.  

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Guest blogger Karen Lynn Vincent, a serial social benefit entrepreneur, is the co-founder and current chief operating officer at Resdida, a hybrid social business distributing content via mobile devices to the rural poor. She also works with the Global Social Benefit Incubator (GSBI) in the Center for Science, Technology and Society at Santa Clara University.

She sent us the following post from Santa Clara, California, where the Transformative Changes through Science and Technology: The Role for Social Benefit Entrepreneurs conference took place last week.

By Karen Lynn Vincent

During his morning address, 2006 Nobel Peace Prize winner, Muhammad Yunus of the Grameen Bank said that the integration of the many Grameen companies occurs not in structure or organization but with the woman in the village.  The Grameen companies are separate entities that converge in their compassion and empathy for the rural poor. 

Compassion and empathy were the recurrent themes of the day at the Transformative Changes through Science and Technology: The Role for Social Benefit Entrepreneurs conference, presented by the Center for Science, Technology and Society at Santa Clara University in on November 13, 2008.  This conference was held following and in conjunction with the Tech Awards Gala on the evening of November 12 at the Tech Museum in San Jose and brought the many sponsors and laureates together for a highly inspirational day.

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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 Saturday morning was gray, rainy and windy in Philadelphia, but it didn't keep the Net Impact conference from building momentum. I began the day attending a session led by the Base of the Pyramid Protocol team. It was interesting to get a closer feel of this tool; a detailed wrap up of the session will be posted here in NextBillion by its organizers (NextBillion co-founder John Paul, Patrick Donaheau, and others) so stay tuned for that.

Once the session wrapped up I walked down to prepare for the next panel "Unreasonable People: The Role of Entrepreneurs in Shaping Tomorrow's Markets". It was moderated by Virginia Barreiro, New Ventures global director at WRI, and featured panelists Agnes Dasewicz from the Grassroots Business Fund, Ben Powell from Agora Partnerships and John Elkington, co-founder of Volans Ventures and author of the book that inspired the panel's title.  

WRI's New Ventures team decided to host this panel and spark a conversation about the role of intermediaries like those represented by the panelists in supporting entrepreneurial solutions to the challenges of poverty and environmental degradation. We believe that the conversation was timely due to the critical stage that this "sector" and the world's economy as a whole is undergoing. As expected, the panelists and an audience of ca. 80 students and professionals delivered a dynamic and thought provoking session.

Following is a summary of the issues discussed. (By the way, several questions remained unanswered after the panel due to time constraints; if you are interested in following up with the panelists on any of the topics discussed, please comment below. We'd be glad to keep the conversation going here in NextBillion).

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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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"If people don't have a job, they don't have hope. And if you don't have hope, what do you really have?" (George Roberts of Kohlberg, Kravis Roberts & Co., the founder of REDF)

Recently Jocelyn Wyatt and I were fortunate to have Carla Javits, the President of REDF (originally named the Roberts Enterprise Development Fund), as a guest speaker in our class at Berekely's Haas School of Business.  REDF is a nonprofit based in San Francisco that creates job opportunities and pathways to employment for people with significant barriers to work.  It was also one of the first organizations to embrace the venture philanthropy approach, serving as both a model for others in this field, notably Acumen Fund, and a testing ground for Jed Emerson's ideas on measuring social returns.

For most people, even those who may be facing homelessness, having a job is one of life's top priorities, and creating opportunities for those who might otherwise be unemployable is the main focus of REDF's efforts.  According to Javits, REDF's approach falls squarely into the arena of venture philanthropy.  "We concentrate on achievement of an overall goal and deploy all the resources at our disposal to meet those goals.  We treat our activities as investments, and we expect to see a return on those investments measured by jobs, changed lives and reduced public costs."  And, like a venture capitalist, REDF has a high engagement, hands-on approach.

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