Acumen Fund is currently seeking highly qualified applicants for the position of Executive Assistant to the CEO.

Location: New York, NY

Organization: Acumen Fund is a global non-profit venture capital fund serving the four billion people living on less than $4 a day. Its objective is to create a blueprint for building financially sustainable and scalable organizations that deliver affordable, critical goods and services that elevate the lives of the poor. Acumen Fund invests debt and equity in enterprises delivering critical goods and services to the poor in South Asia and East Africa.

Position description: The Executive Assistant will serve as point person for the Chief Executive Officer, with primary responsibility for all aspects of supporting the CEO through strategic relationship management and communications. This will include the handling of all scheduling, domestic and international travel logistics, meeting preparation, meeting follow up, and internal meeting representation. In addition, the Executive Assistant will be responsible for managing a substantial portion of the CEO’s inbound and outbound communication, often serving as a key liaison for communication with the global staff, Board of Directors, Advisory Council, Acumen Fund Partners, and other members of the Acumen Fund community.

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Acumen Fund's Pakistan Office is currently seeking highly qualified applicants for the position of Business Development Manager.

Location: Karachi, Pakistan

Organization: Acumen Fund is a global non-profit venture capital fund serving the four billion people living on less than $4 a day. Its objective is to create a blueprint for building financially sustainable and scalable organizations that deliver affordable, critical goods and services that elevate the lives of the poor. Acumen Fund invests debt and equity in enterprises delivering critical goods and services to the poor in South Asia and East Africa.

Position description: The Pakistan Business Development Manager will play a senior role within the Acumen Pakistan office in Karachi, working closely with the Pakistan Country Director to develop and manage Acumen Fund’s fundraising, community building, knowledge-sharing and talent management activities in Pakistan. The Business Development Manager will also work with other members of Acumen Fund’s global business development, portfolio strategies and talent teams to position Acumen Fund to maximize outreach in the community and support the portfolio teams in building pipeline. The Business Development Manager will report to the Country Director.

To download the full position description, qualifications, and information about how to apply, please visit the Acumen Fund Opportunities website.

Acumen Fund's India Office is currently seeking highly qualified applicants for the positions of Portfolio Associate and Legal Associate.

Location: Hyderabad, India

Organization: Acumen Fund is a global non-profit venture capital fund serving the four billion people living on less than $4 a day. Its objective is to create a blueprint for building financially sustainable and scalable organizations that deliver affordable, critical goods and services that elevate the lives of the poor. Acumen Fund invests debt and equity in enterprises delivering critical goods and services to the poor in South Asia and East Africa.

Position descriptions:

India Legal Associate: The legal associate at Acumen Fund’s country office in India will provide a wide range of support to the investment, fundraising, operations and finance teams. Reporting to the country business manager, but working closely with the NY-based General Counsel and Legal Counsel and the entire portfolio team, the legal associate will function as a corporate and commercial generalist. He/she will work closely with the New York legal team on a project to develop term sheets and standard legal templates for all Acumen investments as well as training in respect of same. He/she will coordinate outside legal involvement in the transactions and the activities of Acumen Fund’s office in India, in consultation with the General Counsel. The Legal Counsel will advise on general organizational and commercial matters including intellectual property, contract, immigration, employment and governance matters.

India Portfolio Associate: Acumen Fund has four portfolios: health, water, housing and energy.

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Position: Research Associate, Growing Inclusive Markets (UNDP)

Location: New York

Duration: Two-month consultancy, early April through the end of May 2008.

Organization: "Growing Inclusive Markets" is a new multi-stakeholder initiative, led by the United Nations Development Programme, which strives to identify and examine the vast unmet potential at the base of the world economic pyramid. Growing Inclusive Markets seeks to gather information, disseminate knowledge and inspire action. It uses the UN’s convening power and presence around the world to move the agenda of the poor and concomitant business opportunities into a new space. Our network of partners—from Southern business leaders and policy makers, to local entrepreneurs, multinational corporations, academic communities and development organizations—will champion the messages and opportunities for action on the ground.

Position Description: A key work stream of the Initiative is the creation of an initial corpus of data and information that will underpin further analysis for the GIM Report and will be included in a web-based storehouse of data. Under the over-all supervision of the Programme Manager of the Growing Inclusive Markets Initiative, the Research Associate will be working with key experts and members of the Initiative Team in the gathering, production and online presentation of data and information for the Growing Inclusive Markets Initiative; UNDP’s most visible strategic and sustained global advocacy tool for the important role of the private sector in achieving the MDGs. The Initiative will launch two specific knowledge outputs/products in 2008: a Case Studies Bank, and an Innovations Bank.

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Over the last few months, there’s been plenty of discussion about the growing importance of building talent in the area of BoP business/social enterprise. Moses Lee has mentioned talent often – in one recent post, he described how a BoP business scheme failed when a group of experienced managers believed they could run the venture from afar and had no interest in taking talent into the field to do the "heavy lifting." Related to this is a recent post on the Acumen Fund Fellows' blog, where Tricia Morente - who is working with a chain of low-cost, high quality maternal care hospitals in India - placed talent ahead of money as the biggest challenge to scaling up a social enterprise.

These discussions about talent reflect maturation within the sector. There’s increasing recognition that, while entrepreneurs remain the keystone of BoP success, without the permanent building blocks of specialized skills and long-term management processes, the bridge will not stand for long, no matter how brilliant the idea. Building the sustainability of a sustainable business is becoming as important, if still not as sexy, as scouting out the next pro-poor business model or innovative product design.

It's great news, then, that NextBillion ally Agora Partnerships is launching the Agora Fellows Program. The program will link skilled professionals who have an interest in sustainable business with emerging enterprises chosen from Agora's portfolio of promising entrepreneurs. The first portfolio enterprise to receive a Fellow is Bambucasa ("Bamboo-house"), a start-up in Nicaragua that aims to build an environmentally sustainable and profitable bamboo construction business while also helping to alleviate a serious shortage of affordable housing. (For more information about this Fellowship, and how to apply, click here.)

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NextBillion readers, the time has come for me also to bid you goodbye as a daily contributor to NextBillion.net. It's been a great six-month run for me here at the World Resources Institute, and I will greatly miss sharing the interest of hundreds of you out there who are watching BoP models grow by the day!

Over the coming months I will continue to contribute as a Staff Writer, with musings and new experiences from New York City (Rob Katz, that was my idea first!), where I will working in the BoP space. Stay tuned for more, and I'll be updating my profile soon!

So far, 2008 has been a great year in terms of attention to BoP and market-based solutions to poverty. Out of Poverty, a new book by Paul Polak, founder of International Development Enterprises (IDE), just hit the shelves this month and will certainly add to this momentum. IDE's recent receipt of a $27 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation only makes Polak's book timelier, as widespread recognition grows for his leadership role in the BoP space and his innovative design solutions (including the treadle pump and micro-drip irrigation) that have increased the incomes of over 2.5 million dollar-a-day families living in rural areas and subsisting from small farms.

I've now had the opportunity to read through Out of Poverty, and am impressed that the book truly reflects the down to earth style and substance of Polak and his work. In fact, what's most striking about Polak's approach to attacking poverty is its straightforward, flexible, and results-based orientation.

The book covers a lot of ground quickly, challenging leading development theorists (Jeff Sachs, Bill Easterly, and even C.K. Prahalad), explaining why markets are not serving the poor, and demonstrating, piece by piece, why for-profit mechanisms have and will continue to trump charity in terms of lifting people out of poverty.

On NextBillion.net, we have chronicled these arguments many times before, but I was pleasantly surprised at Polak's ability to connect them, on the level of tomatoes and cucumbers, with the nuts and bolts of his years spent, literally, in the field. Out of Poverty strikes a good balance between economic calculations and human anecdotes, staying true to the author's principal beliefs that one must "go to where the action is" and "talk to the people who have the problem and listen to what they say," while also pursuing only approaches that "can reach at least a million people and make their lives measurably better."

The book is certainly worth a read, and I hope to see it appear on the development academics' reading lists soon. Out of Poverty gets beyond the fractious discussions of "what's gone wrong?" or "which approach is right?" and offers a welcome dose of common sense for getting people out of poverty, quickly and permanently.

Position: Chief Operating Officer

Location: Hyderabad, India with frequent international travel to the US, China, Africa and Latin America (30%)

Organization: Scojo Foundation is a global social enterprise, currently operating in 13 countries, which creates jobs and sustains livelihoods through the sale of affordable reading glasses to the 700 million people who require clear, up-close vision to read and work.

Scojo Foundation trains low-income men and women as "Scojo Vision Entrepreneurs" to start microfranchises that conduct vision screenings within local communities, sell affordable reading glasses, and refer those who require advanced eye care to reputable clinics.

Position Description: The COO is responsible for the leadership and management of Scojo Foundation’s global operations team and the achievement of Scojo Foundation’s operational and sales objectives. The position is a key member of the senior management team and is actively involved in shaping the future direction of the organization.

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Yesterday, I attended a panel discussion entitled "Creative Capitalism: Can It Meet the Needs of the World's Poor?" The panel of experienced practitioners and academics was convened to respond to Bill Gates' recent speech at Davos where he encouraged "an approach where governments, business, and nonprofits work together to stretch the reach of market forces so that more people can make a profit, or gain recognition, doing work that eases the world's inequities." A big thanks to The Bradley Center for Philanthropy and Civic Renewal at the Hudson Institute for bringing together the panelists and hosting this timely discussion.

With an interesting assortment of panelists, and a variety of interpretations of Gates' speech, the discussion included a little bit of everything - from economic theory and political ideology to technological developments and field results. The central contention that seemed to emerge was whether or not market-based solutions are a viable method of poverty reduction, given that existing markets are not already targeting to poor, and have, in fact, exacerbated inequalities in many instances.

William Easterly, distinguished scholar in the development field and well-known for his book The White Man's Burden: How the West's Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done so Much Ill and So Little Good, was the first to take on ‘creative capitalism.'

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Position: Director, TED Fellowship Program

Location: New York, NY

Organization: TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design. It started out (in 1984) as a conference bringing together people from those three worlds. Since then its scope has become ever broader.

The annual conference now brings together the world's most fascinating thinkers and doers, who are challenged to give the talk of their lives (in 18 minutes).

Position: TED is planning a new, expanded fellowship program, and we're looking for an experienced, global-minded candidate to lead it.

Qualifications: You should have exceptional management skills and a proven track record of starting and running programs at this scale. Experience in education, leadership-training, and event-production all helpful. Curiosity and a broad interest in the world -- including science/technology, business, the arts, global development -- are also key.

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Today, Bill Gates' speech at Davos has thrown the spotlight on "creative capitalism" and an emerging groundswell of interest in market-based solutions and business models that can drive positive social and environmental change. The excitement around these ideas to create self-sustaining, scalable options for development at the bottom of the economic pyramid (BoP) is encouraging, and the potential for a snowball effect of increased action is huge.

Yet all of the grand words and fanfare remind me that what is most riveting - what really seems to capture attention and combat ingrained suspicions (about "development aid" and about "capitalism") - are the actual stories of the models themselves.

So, today I'd like to provide a brief vignette of pieces that NextBillion has posted over the last few years that give direct windows onto how "creative capitalism" works, and what it looks like in action:

Large companies serving the BoP:
Casas Bahia
Codensa
Cemex
ITC's e-Choupal
ICICI Bank
Intel's World Ahead
MicroPlace
Smart Communications
Vodafone's M-PESA

Small entrepreneurs serving the BoP:
DESI Power
Drishtee
Gram Mooligai
Healthstore (SHEF/CFW)
Landwasher
Mi Farmacita
Scojo Foundation
Solar Electric Light Fund
Water Health International

Non-profits using market-based models:
Envirofit
International Development Enterprises (IDE)
Kiva

Patient Capita/Venture Philanthropy:
Acumen Fund
Aavishkaar

Design and Technology for the BoP:
MIT's D-Lab
Mobile Phones
One Laptop Per Child
RIOS Institute

For more organizations, case-studies, and current information related to the BoP space, search our resource library, follow the latest news, and subscribe to our RSS to keep up-to-date on our latest blogs!

If you've been to Bogotá in the last seven years, you've probably noticed a city that is distinctly different from the metropolises of many other Latin American countries. It's cleaner, more efficient and easier to navigate. Not only that, many of the city's public spaces exist alongside, not in spite of, vehicle transit networks.

This is no accident. Bogotá's hugely successful Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) system, the Transmilenio, has been the centerpiece of the city's urban regeneration. (Sidenote: I spent much of July/August 2006 traveling to Bogotá and other cities in Latin America, conducting independent research on urban transportation reform).

The Transmilenio system now attracts visits by city planners, engineers, development institutions, and politicians from the world over, all of whom come to learn about innovations in urban transportation. As many cities' privately operated, informal systems become increasingly inefficient, unsafe, and environmentally disastrous, Bogotá has been inundated with city planners looking for new answers.

It's not surprising, then, that Bogotá's BRT system was featured heavily in the annual "Transforming Transportation" Conference, hosted by WRI's EMBARQ program in Washington, DC last week. I had a great opportunity to listen in as experts from Bogotá gave updates on Transmilenio and discussed the continuing challenges that the system faces as it enters its eighth year of operation.

While participating in the conference, though, I was struck by the lack of discussion of Transmilenio as a BoP system. In fact, in all the discussion about Bogotá's successes and challenges, Transmilenio is rarely analyzed specifically in terms of its focus on and relevance to the BoP. According to Dario Hidalgo, a BRT and urban mobility expert who was deeply involved with the development of Bogotá's BRT system and who is now a member of the EMBARQ team, Transmilenio was intended to be a BoP solution from its inception.

For Enrique Peñalosa, the mayor of Bogotá who drove the initial planning and implementation of Transmilenio, making high quality transportation accessible to Bogotá's low-income population was central to the project. By attacking the public transportation crisis, characterized by "penny wars," gaps in service, unequal pricing, high levels of pollution, and serious traffic congestion, the new BRT system aimed to reduce inequality. This included not only disparities in the quality of transportation services, but also long-term economic and educational inequities perpetuated by a lack of mobility and access between high and low-income areas of the city.

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The January 10th edition of the Economist takes note, in two separate pieces, of the huge successes of a handful of large MNCs. It highlights how these firms have successfully shaken up their industries and acquired well-known brands in their efforts to capture large swaths of global market share. Usually this wouldn't mean much for the BoP. In fact, what does the potential acquisition of a luxury brand like Jaguar, or a deal for a steel giant, "cooked up... [by father and son] during their annual skiing holiday in St Moritz," have to do with the BoP?

Maybe not much, but maybe the Economist is on to something. What the magazine was so interested in reporting was not the private sector's search for growth, but rather that all of these MNCs are from "poorer countries" (India, Brazil, China), and each one is making major headway in capturing rich markets. They have also done well in their home markets, meaning that while we are definitely talking about an internationalized business elite, we are talking about one that does business at home, too.

The emergence of ‘developing country' MNCs - Embraer, Mittal, Tata Motors, Cemex, and others - seems to turn on its head the anti-globalization movement's typical characterization of MNCs as Western neocolonial forces working to suck developing countries dry. One wonders if soon the "Western" element will be conveniently dropped from those arguments about capitalist imperialism, or if the arguments will have to be re-defined altogether.

But rhetoric aside, these articles and this trend pose interesting questions about how these MNCs will be viewed by the very large BoP populations in their home countries. Will these MNCs be viewed as a source of national pride, of the hope of a more prosperous future for all? Or will they be seen as profiting from an abundance of cheap labor to make their fortunes abroad and become focal points of social agitation? Will they be icons of the "haves" to the have-nots, or will they be seen as job-creators and leaders of national growth?

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On Wednesday, I attended a presentation by Jessica Cohen on her doctoral research experiment (co-authored with Pascaline Dupas) about distribution schemes for anti-malarial long-lasting bednets. The randomized experiment, conducted in rural, western Kenya, aimed to test the difference between free distribution and cost-sharing schemes in terms of their direct impact on malaria prevention in pregnant women and their infants. A draft of their paper is available through the Brookings Institution.

In the past, I have been an advocate for the continued use of social marketing (cost-sharing) and for profit-based BoP business models to produce and distribute insecticide treated nets (ITNs). Because of this history, I was a little apprehensive about what Cohen's presentation would reveal. After all, the report's summary stated clearly that the experiment produced "no evidence that cost-sharing reduces wastage on those that will not use the product: women who received free ITNs [insecticide-treated nets] are not less likely to use them than those who paid subsidized positive prices."

It turns out, though, that the real conclusion of the experiment in no way supports any blanket claims, such as those made to the New York Times by Dr. Arata Kochi, Director of the WHO's malaria program: "Virtually the only way to get the nets to poor people is to hand out millions free." Instead, the study arrives at this cautious and tempered conclusion: free distribution of bednets is not the way but also a way, in some cases, for lowering malaria rates in a cost-effective manner.

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William Easterly, respected for his contributions to the development debate and widely know for his opposition to the Jeff Sachs camp, recently published an interesting piece entitled How the Millennium Development Goals are Unfair to Africa. The article reveals specific statistical misrepresentations and non-standard methods of calculating progress toward the MDGs, ultimately concluding that such methods "paint an unfairly bleak portrait of Africa."

Easterly identifies a number of decisions regarding data selection and representation, all of which seem to downplay Africa's progress and throw its development shortcomings into even sharper relief against improvements made by other regions. These statistics involve the selected benchmark year, absolute vs. percentage changes, change targets vs. level targets, and the use of positive vs. negative indicators to compare improvements.

Even for someone - such as myself - with limited exposure to advanced statistics, (most) of Easterly's arguments immediately register as common sense, and raise some important questions. These are questions not just for development agencies pursuing the MDG grail, but also for investors, markets, and governments who make use of development data (and overall conclusions).

They are also some of the same questions that crossed my mind when I read an editorial last month arguing that, due to the "large statistical glitch" of using outdated calculations of purchasing power parity in China, the number of Chinese living below the World Bank's poverty line ($1 a day) may in fact be 3 times more than previously thought - 300 million, not 100 million.

Now, if you were a sizeable MNC and suddenly found that your market had shrunk or expanded by two thirds, what would you do?

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