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When I’ve asked those who are active at the BoP what skills are needed in the space, the answer I receive is deceptively simple: “everything.” Perhaps this is because, as long time BoP entrepreneur Patrick Donohue explained, BoP is really about the “creation of markets.”

After spending many months trying to determine what I “should” do in the field, I realized that I had asked myself the wrong question. The right question is, “What do I want I want to do in the field?” Even better, “What am I good at?” This, as Patrick pointed out, is the difference between causation, or allowing goals to determine means, and effectuation, or enabling the means to define the goals. As a result, what is needed comes down to what you can give and what lens you will use to examine the problem. Nonetheless, we can still agree that there are a number of practical skills that are particularly useful at the BoP.

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This Investor Feature is based on a recent interview with Yeung Hau Man, founder of Envirovision. Hau Man is dedicating his career to creating sound, standardized sustainability reporting at a time when such reporting is frequently ambiguous, unreliable, and extremely easy to manipulate for the purposes of company "greenwashing."

"We don't find companies, says Yeung Hau Man of the environmental monitoring and due diligence firm he helped to create, "We find people." Through eighteen years of experience in the intersection between environmental issues and business concerns, Hau Man has learned that the long-term sustainability and market viability of any company is not so much about the business itself as the people behind it. He realized this as a manager of green fund LESS Limited, where he saw company after company that had poor sustainability standards due to a lack of commitment at the management level. He took this experience to heart when the LESS Limited team charged him with creating a monitoring and due diligence vehicle that would generate a deal flow of truly sustainable companies. This project came to fruition as Envirovision, a consulting firm dedicated to providing a quality portfolio of sustainable companies to ‘green' funds and angel investors.

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Jane Nelson, who wears many hats (IBLF, Kennedy School, Brookings), spoke yesterday at a meeting of the Global Poverty Roundtable at the GlobalWorks Foundation here in Washington. Jane offered a wide-ranging, yet concise summary of all of the ways business can engage in development. Jane said [and, Jane, I beg your forgiveness in advance for this shallow and truncated version of your presentation] that the activities fall in three general categories: core business activities, competence-led philanthropy, and influence on the enabling environment for business.

On Core Business: Two broad areas: First, practice responsible business (human rights, environment, labor, compliance, accountability, etc); second, increase economic opportunities -- innovate for new markets. How? By leveraging global value chains, increasing local content purchases, creating business linkages, creative financing mechanisms which draw on core businesss knowledge and skills, and perhaps most promisingly, through more and more effective collective business initiatives -- industry-wide efforts that both set standards and create healthy and friendly competition to succeed within these new standards.

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Last week, I sat in a conference room full of DC development-types over lunch, listening to a presentation sponsored by the Society for International Development.  It was standard stuff - the woman next to me was reading the New York Times as folks shuffled in, and I spotted a few people I know who work for DAI, Chemonics, and other development contractors.

As the event was gearing up, however, it became clear that it was no regular brownbag lunch.  First, the room was totally full - no offense, but these sort of events aren't usually so compelling as to attract 50 people on a Wednesday.  Secondly, I started to see people I know from outside the "development" world.  Fred Tipson, Microsoft's Senior Policy Counsel here in DC, slipped quietly into a chair towards the back of the room.  Then Eric Gundersen and Alex Barth of Development Seed, a local website development firm, sat in my row.  Not the usual lunchtime crowd for a SID event.

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Andrew Mack is a former World Bank official and Principal of AMGlobal Consulting. He previously blogged for NextBillion .net about Rwanda's IT development and leapfrog technologies, in January 2007.

By Andrew Mack

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I attended an all-day workshop at the IFC yesterday on their Grassroots Business Initiative (GBI). A half dozen of the Initiative's enterprises from Africa, Asia, and Latin America, and 30 or so GBI partners also attended, along with their program staff. The meeting was conducted under "Chatham House" rules, which means that I can't report on who said what, but allow me to share with you a few general observations, and a bit about one talk.

First, no surprise here, it's remarkable how many of the issues that are of concern to these quite small enterprises (and intermediaries helping them) are exactly those that big organizations must contend with —finding and succeeding in markets, managing for growth, balancing objectives. It's no solace to these small, struggling social entrepreneurs, but things don’t get easier when you get bigger.

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In my old age I’ve come to understand that points of ideological contention can be very eye-opening. My friend Akwasi and I considered each other relatively liberal, like-minded urbanites until we had the “gender role” conversation. Yes, that one —the quintessential Mars/Venus debate. According to Akwasi, women have certain roles such as housekeeping and child-rearing and that they are obliged to fulfill. My view is somewhat more fluid: each party should perform the duties to which he or she is best suited, traditional expectations notwithstanding. I will spare you the details of the tete a tete, but I will share my rather rudimentary analysis of the subject.

After much hand-wringing and a rather ad-hoc consultation with my uncle in Lagos, I concluded that from a “historical” perspective, gender roles had (what I considered to be) relatively unambiguous utility. I reasoned that early man was suited to hunting and gathering due to his greater physical strength and size while early woman, as the child bearer, remained at home out of harm’s way. In my narrow rendering of the world, gender roles were simply a sensible expression of the division of labor. As the capitalist system developed, however, traditionally male roles became recognized by the market and female roles did not. Because we are pushing the boundaries that dictate gender roles, who does what, when, and for whom is now a much more complex question.

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Yesterday, I had the privilege of introducing our BOP market report, The Next 4 Billion: Market Size and Business Strategy at the Base of the Pyramid, to nearly 100 people at the US Agency for International Development. The day before, I did the same for a more academic audience at the Mortara Center at Georgetown University. Both groups had lots of interesting questions:

Q: What other kinds of data would empower business investment, and were we going to gather that too?
A: Very fine grain market data are needed, but at present we are not working with them.
Q: What about local merchants or producers in the informal economy that might be pushed aside by more efficient formal businesses?
A: A market-based approach will have winners and losers, but will, we believe, improve opportunities for both producers and consumers.
Q: What is the role for governments in creating the enabling environment for business investment?
A: See the IFC/World Bank Doing Business reports.

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I have to admit, when I first encountered Karnani’s initial critique of BoP, entitled “Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid: A Mirage” I was beside myself with excitement. Although I had read much of NextBillion’s content with interest and hope, I couldn’t help but wonder, “Where is the other side of the debate?” Karnani introduced a dissenting opinion, which is invaluable. However, Karnani’s use of inductive reasoning via case study method, while illustrative, limits the degree to which his assertions are generalizable.

As a result, I’ve decided to dedicate my blogging activities to constructing, facilitating and fomenting (heavy emphasis on the latter), a multi-faceted debate. I truly believe that BOP business development is on to something. But defining that “something” is a continual process to which I intend to contribute. Right now, the “who, what, where, why and how” of BOP thinking is coming into focus, due in no small part to the work of your friendly neighborhood NextBillionaires. What I’d like to explore are alternate forms of those questions: “What for, who for, why so, and how the heck is that possible, really?”

“How will you do that?” you ask. Great question! I knew that you readers were a smart bunch. There are several questions that I’d like to tackle over the course of this blogquest, but I am not foolhardy enough to believe that I have the answers. That’s where you come in. Each week I will pose a question and attempt (note the word ATTEMPT) to answer it. I welcome those of you who have an opinion, an insight, a complaint, or a completely random yet witty comment, to chime in. With no further ado, the questions are as follows. Let’s get ready to rumble.

• How do you define success in the BoP? Increase in GDP per capita? Access to $3600 plasma TVs? Winning the Millennium Challenge?
  
• How do you quantify it? Are the benefits of BOP regarding MNC profitability, environmentally sustainable technologies, scalable, replicable business models real? New technologies for environmental sustainability, new business models, etc.?
• To produce or to consume? That is the question, now what is the answer? Can the consumption element of BOP really contribute to the reduction of poverty?
• Is BOP MNC neocolonialism all over again? Will MNCs behave differently in this space than they have in the past? Can power be successfully decentralized and distributed?
• Must there be a trade-off between doing well and “doing good”? How close does BOP come to closing that gap?
• What skill sets are critically needed in BOP business development? Consumer insight? Operations management? Investment management?
• Where does BOP fit along the public/private sector continuum? Does CSR, PPP, social enterprise, social entrepreneurship, venture philanthropy = BOP
• Is this really about devising a hybrid system that works better for everyone?

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