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"All Biofuels Aren't Created Equal" noted Tom Schueneman over at Triple Pundit yesterday. A solid point that brings some perspective to the ongoing discussion over the viability of biofuels. There is a significant difference between the moral issues raised by, say, a huge American corporation jacking up global corn prices by converting food products into fuel and a small company producing biofuel from crop waste.

In fact, I just posted a Rising Ventures article profiling a Chinese company that is characterized by the latter. Shengchang Bioenergy produces biofuels from what they call "crop waste," a much better source than ethanol from corn as it does not convert crops that would be used for food into fuel.

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For those of us who spend most of our waking hours thinking about BOP news and activities, who already know the buzz words, the acronyms, and the fact that microcredit is only the tip of the iceberg… well, sometimes we lose sight of one of the most important audiences: the business and government decision-makers who are just starting to explore the value of these ideas as they begin to crop up on mainstream radars.

That’s why I’m very happy to see that the WBCSD (World Business Council for Sustainable Development) has done an admirable, concise, and smooth job of presenting all this "new" thinking on the role of business in development in its recent report, "Doing Business with the World – The New Role of Corporate Leadership in Global Development." (Nicole Goldin over at Changing the Pyramid has provided a solid review of its main tenets).

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NextBillion ally and Timbuktu Chronicles author Emeka Okafor sent me a note today, asking me to post the attached job description.  Emeka - a Nigerian ex-pat - is working with Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala and the Small Enterprise Assistance Fund to launch a new private equity fund based in Lagos called the Makeda Fund:

Responsible for full-time management of the Makeda Fund in Lagos, Nigeria, a $50 million equity investment fund. The Fund will focus on making investments of $1-5 million in SMEs that are women-owned or led.

By Rob Katz and Mareike Hussels

At World Resources Institute, our New Ventures team tends to think about the "next big thing" as far as small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) are concerned. This morning, I had a great discussion with my colleague Mareike Hussels about the emergence of SMEs as an investment-worthy asset class.

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Acumen Fund is currently seeking highly qualified applicants for the position of Portfolio Associate.

Location: New York, NY

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.

Co-ops are big in Brazil. They are how small communities organize to help themselves, given that they are often overlooked by large companies. Recently I had the opportunity to visit just such a coop in Valente, a town deep in Bahia in Brazil's Northeast.

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The co-op helps its members produce and market sisal, a tough fiber used in rope and in many other products, and it provides microfinance services to its members. The co-op is technologically sophisticated--it uses modern computerized accounting systems and even has Voice over Internet Protocol phone links to it branches in 6 other nearby towns. The co-op has used that expertise to help establish an Internet center in Valente, which provides both computer training for students and free access to the community.

The problem is that the co-op pays a huge amount for its Internet access and to lease lines connecting its branches. This is a common problem in rural Brazil--Internet access, when its available, is very expensive; bulk bandwidth typically costs 5-10 times what it does in the United States.

So I was there on behalf of the Network for Inclusive Markets--WRI and its partners the AVINA Foundation and FUNDES Internacional-- and the Inter-American Development Bank to explore whether the co-op could, in effect, become its own Internet Service Provider and specifically to find out whether it could make use of new, low-cost wireless technology to improve connectivity in rural Bahia. Because the coop is part of a well-organized network of some 1500 rural co-ops, the potential opportunity might reach into every corner of Brazil and benefit thousands of small communities and millions of people.

We don't know the bottom line yet--the analysis is still underway. A quick look at the numbers and distances involved suggests that building their own WiFi network (using some advanced Intel-backed WiFi equipment that you'll hear more about in the near future) would be feasible, and that providing better Internet service to the surrounding communities as well as to the coop and its members might well be economically viable--especially when the avoided cost of leased lines is included. If you're interested in how it comes out, stay tuned to this space.

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A WalMart-type logistics system, tracking every sale of every item at every outlet? Surely that's overkill for a base of the pyramid (BOP) business--or is it?

Last week Julia Tran--WRI's BOP health sector specialist--and I visited Mi Farmacita, a franchise pharmacy that provides low cost, certified generic drugs and other essential services to many low income communities in Mexico. We've written previously about Mi Farmacita, which is also supported by WRI's New Ventures/Mexico enterprise development activity.

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"If we did all the things we are capable of doing, we would literally astound ourselves.”
-- Thomas Edison

If you haven't already, be sure to check out the Global Social Enterprise Program at Colorado State University's School of Business.  When I applied to the Johnson School at Cornell, I assumed that I knew which schools had reputable programs in sustainable global enterprise.  The Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan, and the Kenan-Flagler Business School at UNC, were among these, but I still managed to find slightly “off the radar” programs like the MBA in Sustainable Management at the Presidio School of Management. 

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Cornell University has been at the heart of the base of the pyramid (BoP) discussion since Stu Hart became a professor there in 2003. The school's programs study growth opportunities that address the needs of the world's poorest communities and drive business success.

The next logical step? Move the discussion to developing markets, and gain live insights from BoP experiences gleaned from around the world.

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Boston Consulting Group has been conducting extensive primary research into the spending habits and lifestyle of a segment of the population it identifies as the "next billion." The "next billion" are economically better off than the poorest of the poor, but earn just less than the current customer base of the formal economy.

BCG discusses business strategies to tap the next billion market segment and provides some data on the segment's population size, income, spending, and lifestyle in two papers released last week, New Rules for the Next Billion, and The Next Billion Consumers: A Road Map for Accelerating Telecommunications Growth in Brazil. The former is a shorter and broader summary piece that contains much of the information presented in the latter report, a more in-depth treatment of the next billion telecom market in Brazil. Both focus on the next billion's untapped potential as a market for telecom companies but also present some tantalizing data that hint at BCG's depth of market research.  These reports come 4 months after two other short "next billion" pieces BCG released earlier this summer, The Next Billion and The Next Billion Banking Consumers.

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