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Recently, I had the opportunity to sit down with Shilpa Shah, founder of the Piramal Fellowship Program, for a short interview.  The Fellowship, which places young professionals with social enterprises in India, is accepting applicants until September 15th.  It's not too late to apply!

Tell us about yourself - where you come from, your educational/professional background, etc.

I was born and raised in the Philadelphia suburbs - go Phillies!  I attended Boston University, where I received an undergraduate degree in Business Administration.  After graduating, I went on to the Vanguard Group for a few years, where I did some corporate strategy work.  In late 2006, I moved to India to be with my husband Anand Shah, co-founder of Indicorps.  I worked with the Indicorps staff for two years where I learned tremendous amounts about India's development, leadership development and the NGO landscape in India. 

Editor's note: Read Rob Katz's short story about Indicorps here.

I discovered that I was in a unique position to leverage my understanding of the social sector in India and my passion for business to create change in India.  So, I decided to brush up on my business skills and better understand my new home, India, by attending the Indian School of Business in Hyderabad.  I was fortunate to develop a network of peers, many of whom I believe will be the future leaders of India, at ISB.  Additionally, I was able to spend a semester at Wharton where I was able to learn more about the role of social enterprise in development from my professors and another strong network of peers. 

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As a field of study, social enterprise is crossing the threshold from young to established; as a practice, it has been around even longer. Despite the passage of time, there is still no single accepted best practice or body of literature defining success in social enterprise. Documenting and sharing learning is a key mechanism that moves the industry forward and ultimately helps more low income producers and consumers.

Enter the Social Enterprise Profiles. This is a joint initiative of Intellecap's Beyond Profit in India and the SEEP Network's Value Initiative, based in Washington, DC. Social Enterprise Profiles' focus is on stories about growth, scale, and transition that highlight organizational successes and challenges. This effort adds to broader base of how to utilize market mechanisms for social, community, environmental and cultural betterment.

Profiles are requested on enterprises that: 

• Are sustainable social enterprises (non‐profit, for‐profit, or hybrid legal entity)   
• Generated employment opportunities or wealth creation for low income people
• Achieved rapid growth, scaling up (and its process) 
• Completed a challenging transition 
• Are from developing countries (the "Global South") 

Stories will be posted online by the SEEP Network at www.seepnetwork.org, reaching thousands of web viewers. Beyond Profit, meanwhile, will publish the top three stories reaching more than 10,000 people in over 75 countries. Winners will receive a travel stipend to share their profiles at The SEEP Network Annual Conference in Washington, D.C., Nov. 1-5, 2010.

Check out The SEEP Network's Value Initiative and read up on the guidelines.

Submission deadline is September 24, 2010. 

This is a valuable opportunity to highlight the great work of international social enterprises. We welcome all interested parties and want to hear from you!

Fareed Zakaria is one of the most respected international journalists, and one with a clear sense of the direction the world is headed in our times. Author of The Post American World among other books, columnist, Editor of Newsweek International and host of CNN's Fareed Zakaria GPS, he's also a strong advocate of market-based approaches to poverty alleviation. He sits on the Board of Advisors of Acumen Fund and has interviewed Acumen's CEO Jacqueline Novogratz in the past.

On September 16, Zakaria will join the Board of Directors of VisionSpring to moderate a conversation titled Business Solutions for the Base of the Pyramid. He will be joined by VisionSpring Founder Dr. Jordan Kassalow and introduced by Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes. If you're in New York City, mark your calendar for this event and contact VisionSpring's Kelly R. Ricculli for more information . If not, stay tuned for our coverage of the event and a summary of the main takeaways.

This venue takes place days before New York hosts several discussions reviewing the progress towards the Millenium Development Goals. In addition to Gates Foundation's TEDxChange, the role of inclusive business in achieving the MDGs will be discussed in a feature event on September 21. The session will convene corporate leaders like MASISA's Roberto Salas, leading academics like Havard Kennedy School's Jane Nelson, and social entrepreneurs like LifeSpring Hospitals's Anant Kumar. NextBillion will also be there and provide a coverage of the discussions.

Lastly, and to round up this Friday's Roundup, I'd like to point you to some of the web reports on Maker Faire Africa, which concluded last week in Nairobi. Emeka Okafor's blog has several pieces covering MFA, and Afrigadget posted a great set of photographs that can be accessed here. Along these lines, I recently had a chance to read Making Do, by Steve Daniels, the mind behind the Better World By Design conference that we've covered here on NextBillion before. Making Do is a must-read for anyone interested in the informal economy and the fascinating social and economic dynamics that take place beneath it. I insist: it's a must, so here's the link again. Don't miss it. I may write an article with some musings that have stuck with me after reading the piece.

This is a holiday weekend in the United States so NextBillion will be back next Tuesday. Plenty of good content including profiles of the makers at MFA await us!

This post is the first of a series by the World Resources Institute and the Center for Development Finance - IFMR, introducing a new report on the market for clean energy for the base of the pyramid in India. It is co-authored by Saurabh Lall, of WRI, Sreyamsa Bairiganjan and Santosh Singh from CDF-IFMR. 

Just over a year ago, I was sipping tea at a roadside stall near the village of Thatulkod, in Himachal Pradesh, India. This small farming community lay far from the tourist trail in the Kullu valley, almost a hundred kilometers from the nearest town. I listened to Subhash Chand, a local apple farmer talk about the quality of electricity in his village:

"Most houses have electrical connections, but what is the use? We have power for a few hours a day. Even when there is electricity, it is barely enough to operate one or two light bulbs. We cannot rely on it."

Over more cups of tea, other villagers told their stories - a college student trying to study under the dim light of a kerosene lantern, a small hotel that relied on an expensive diesel generator because of the frequent power outages, and farmers who had no alternative but to use conventional fuels like kerosene, diesel and firewood for their energy needs. In addition to exposing these households to dangerous toxins and pollutantssuch as carbon monoxide, these fuel sources also contributed to pollution and environmental degradation. Not only did they suffer from the poor quality of electricity, but the residents of Thatulkod were also beginning to raise concerns about changes in the climate - many farmers complained about the warmer winters negatively affecting their apple harvests in recent years.

These stories repeat across thousands of Indian villages with little or no access to electricity. According to analysis from our forthcoming report, India's energy shortage is most acutely felt by its rural poor - the 114 million households that spend less than US$75 on goods and services per month (known as 'Base of the Pyramid.') About 40 percent of India's rural households do not have access to electricity, and more than 85 percent must depend on "dirty" kerosene for lighting and firewood for cooking.

Editor's note: This is the first entry of a two-part series focused on the promise of mobile payments, contributed by Ignacio Mas from the Financial Services for the Poor Program at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. 

Bridge International Academies is a new for-profit primary school franchise with big plans. It aims to build and manage low-cost schools, the kind that cost $4 per kid per month. And it hopes to build lots of them, ramping up eventually to one new school launched per day, first in Kenya, then elsewhere in Africa. Since its founding in 2007, it has opened 12 schools in Nairobi, through which they are testing their assumptions and refining their model.

To meet these admirably ambitious plans, they need to operate a very tight business model. Bridge International Academies works on a franchise-like model, in which school headmasters are engaged in a profit sharing relationship, with a high degree of standardization. They have developed highly detailed construction plans with simplified diagrams for how to build and assemble the school, allowing them to use standard supply contracts and relatively unskilled local construction labor, resulting in a cost of less than $1800 per classroom. They need to focus maniacally on automating their processes and developing systems for all aspects of their business, including in curriculum development and teaching. And to protect their revenue stream, they need to ensure that only students that are paid up each month remain in the class.

One thing Bridge International Academies co-founder Phil Frei doesn't want to handle is cash. He doesn't want school managers collecting cash from parents, as this creates logistical problems (how to keep the cash safe in the school, how to collect the cash from the schools) and raises trust issues (are school managers collecting side-payments, are teachers reporting accurately which parents are paid up). Equally, he wants to be able to pay all suppliers centrally against budgets his system has checked rather than from petty cash pots in each school.

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Editor's note: This is the first entry of a two-part series focused on the promise of mobile payments, contributed by Ignacio Mas from the Financial Services for the Poor Program at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. 

Imagine if every business or individual in a country had a convenient way of making small payments instantly to anyone, anywhere in the country. You might do so directly from your mobile phone, or, if you first need to load cash into your account, from one of several neighborhood stores. This service would be easy to use, affordable, and secure. Kind of how mobile prepaid works, but a lot more flexible: your stored prepaid balance would be freely transferable to anyone; it could be used to buy anything and not just airtime; and it could be converted back into cash at those same outlets where you load prepaid value.

Far-fetched? Not at all, remember that mobile operators have a version of that running in every country. In Kenya, for instance, by buying a prepaid card you can make a "deposit" of cash into your airtime account with value of as little as 15 US cents at any of 100,000+ outlets across the country. If such a narrow proposition centered exclusively around airtime works for mobile operators, why can't we build a broader, more flexible proposition that works for any type of payment?

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With a GDP per-capita of $4,477, Peru is a very poor country, and it is quite evident particularly as you explore the rural areas of the country.  Poverty is rampant and there is much work to be done to fix the issue.  

Enter microfinance; as we've discussed here on NextBillion, microfinance gives those who are unable to access typical banking services the ability to take on loans. 

Since clients in that situation rarely have sufficient collateral, microfinance organizations (MFIs) have developed a unique solution; group credit.  In other words, clients form groups and if one member of the group falls behind on payments, all members of the group are unable to take further loans.  As a result, peer pressure as well as communal support creates the reliability necessary for MFIs to disperse funds to clients without prior credit history.  MFIs have many sources of funds, one of which is Kiva.org.  Kiva allows individuals to make loans to the poor all over the world.  I'm a big fan of Kiva and I am currently travelling in Peru, so I decided to make some loans to micro-entrepreneurs in Cusco via Arariwa, a local MFI.

Upon arrival to Cusco, I set out to visit Arariwa just to say hello and to see an MFI in action.  Despite my 7 PM arrival, the team at Arariwa was delighted to see me and they promptly invited me into their office for a tour.  I was incredibly impressed by the organization of the office and the team.  They continually thanked me for having used Kiva to make loans to their clients while I tried to point out that really it was them who were doing all the spectacular work.  Arariwa partnered with Kiva two years ago, but has been in existence much longer than that, and less than 10% of their clients are featured on Kiva.  Despite that, they have a team of three people dedicated to managing the Kiva relationship and respective clients (a little known fact: in addition to providing capital, Kiva's existence has created jobs in MFIs). 

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Editor's Note: Last Friday, in our weekly roundup, we shared news about an article written by Asoka's Bill Drayton and Valeria Budinich, recently published by the Harvard Business Review. Our colleagues at Ashoka sent us the following Guest Post, which includes instructions on how to get a complimentary copy of the article, available only for subscribers on Friday's link.

By Bill Matassoni

Check out Ashoka's "A New Alliance for Global Change" article in the September, 2010 issue of Harvard Business Review, where Ashoka CEO Bill Drayton and Full Economic Citizenship's Chief Entrepreneur Valeria Budinich, argue that if you are responsible in any way for strategy formulation you should seriously consider new collaborative entreprenuership paradigms. In fact they say that you may be guilty of "strategic malfeasance" if you don't.

"Citizen sector" does not mean philanthropic. The article points to thousands of organizations worldwide that are effectively and productively making progress in healthcare, social, environmental, educational and other areas and are led by social entrepreneurs. These organizations, the authors show, can help companies find and create very attractive growth markets in a range of industries and customer segments. They can also help smaller players upset the competitive balance in a sector. And they can help senior managers find more genuine leadership talent than they will find among the graduates of top business schools.

Want a complimentary copy of the article courtesy of Ashoka? From now until September 6 (midnight EST) the first 100 people to enter will gain digital access for free!  Check out Full Economic Citizenship's Facebook Fan Page for contest directions!

From the District of Columbia, to Colombia and back to Columbia, my new home. It's from here that I write the first of what will be a weekly, Friday column offering a summary of noteworthy events, articles and resources for all of us into the Next Billion idea. It's also here that I expect to form a new community of friends and colleagues interested in the NextBillion idea.

I'll start today's with a couple of New York City events coming up soon. Te first one is the Columbia Business School Social Enterprise Conference. As usual, this year's conference will offer a wide array of speakers and panels, as well as a great convening for all of those in the New York area with an interest in social enterprise and innovation. NextBillion will be on campus covering the conference; we're looking for Guest Bloggers to help us on that purpose, so email me if you're interested. 

The second event I want to point your attention to is TEDxChange, themed "The Future We Make". Co-hosted by TED and the Gates Foundation, it will bring together thought leaders and practitioners to discuss the progress against the Millenium Development Goals. I'm especially excited to hear Melinda Gates and Hans Rosling among other speakers, as well as the follow up discussions curated by Chris Anderson himself (not usual in the smaller TEDx events, in case you're infamilar with this particular format).

I'm eager to hear a thorough discussion around the MDGs, which are not often brought up on these pages nor at the social enterprise events we usually attend; a wide, unfortunate gap exists between different development conversations, and this venue will hopefully give us an opportunity to frame the discussion of markets and entrepreneurship differently, using the lens of the MDGs. Make sure you register and watch the entire 90 minute program, which will be webcasted on September 20.

Lastly, I want to point your attention to an article on the latest issue of the Harvard Business Review. Written by Bill Drayton and Valeria Budinich, it goes in depth to explain Ashoka's work on hybrid value chains, illuminating many of the concepts and ideas that Staff Writers Stepanie Schmidt and Shivani Manaktala have brought up lately on NextBillion. It also serves as an introduction to the new and excellently designed Ashoka Full Economic Citizenship website, which will surely enrich the conversation on market-based approaches to poverty.

This post is the final entry in a series introducing iuMAP, focused on microfranchising.  There has been some great discussion of microfranchising recently (such as this SSIR article), and this series provides an overview of different types of microfranchising, profiling many enterprises that are employing the method, and providing information for both investors and entrepreneurs. This final post focuses on existing support for microfranchising models.

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For the last month or so, we've covered the different types of microfranchises as they exist today. The series has also included interviews with researchers and practitioners. In this final post, we'll cover existing support for microfranchising. 

As more businesses see the value in microfranchising, and as others try to learn more about the concept, building a support network will require information sharing, appropriate linkages, and fund efforts underway.  Often, there is talk of building an "ecosystem" for social enterprises to thrive; similarly, microfranchising will also require building blocks to propel it forward.

As practitioners and academics explore this concept, valuable pieces of research have helped identify trends and gaps, and upcoming publications promise to provide even more context.  For readers that want to dig deeper into this idea, there are a number of useful resources.  Jason Fairbourne, out of Brigham Young University, is leading the MicroFranchise Development Initiative, which aims to research and develop microfranchising as an economic development tool.  Dalberg's report on Franchising in Frontier Markets, covered by NextBillion here and discussed yesterday in Tayo's post, provides a critical, global outlook and raises pertinent questions for further research.  Acumen Fund reflected on the experiences and lessons learned from their investees, Drishtee and VisionSpring, through a working paper.

An upcoming book by Nick Sireau of Solar Aid is called Micofranchising: How Social Entrepreneurs are Building a New Road to Development and will focus on how microfranchising can be used as a tool for poverty reduction in Africa.  Kirk Magleby's book, Ending Global Poverty: The Microfranchise Solution, also focuses on microfranchising as the "most important business model on earth."  Books and papers like these not only serve to provide information and analysis, but are an important way to raise general awareness about microfranchise as a viable business option.

Others are filling in gaps on missing links in building businesses.  Milaap, for example, is developing an online platform that offers loans to help franchises with their start up costs - a major hurdle for an infrastructure based model, as we discussed before.  The Microfranchise Development Corporation also supports different initiatives in this arena by helping to build businesses using microfranchises.

Besides building knowledge and making links, money is always needed to fund efforts.  Several players have already started funding microfranchising projects.  The Clinton Global Initiative has a commitment focusing on market based solutions beyond microfinance, including microfranchise.  The World Bank Development Marketplace is another arena that has supported microfranchise models with IDE Cambodia.  Not surprisingly, there are not many funders in this space yet - whether this is due to the lack of viability of most models, high risk, or low levels of awareness amongst funders, without more sources of funding, microfranchise will see difficulty in moving forward.

The research is growing, but the case study options are limited.  If funders encourage the development of microfranchises, and organizations like Milaap provide the necessary linkages, we may see further implementation of this concept.  Perhaps the tendency to speak in a very general way about microfranchises or the common use of for profit examples, such as McDonald's, rather than successful hybrid models, points to the need for further support for microfranchising in the social enterprise sector.  As various stakeholders - universities, experts, umbrella organizations, corporations - get involved, we'll see an expanding support network for microfranchises, which will hopefully also lead to stronger, more established and replicable models.