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Kevin Jones is a principal with Good Capital. He has extensive entrepreneurial and private investment experience in a range of technology and social enterprises. Kevin has also been a columnist for Forbes and Business 2.0. He attended this week’s Skoll World Forum on Social Entrepreneurship, and has checked in with the following report:

How is attending Skoll World Forum on Social Entrepreneurship like alien abduction experience? I’m glad you asked.

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The March meeting of DC's International Private Enterprise Group is tomorrow, March 29.  We'll be meeting upstairs at Zorba's Cafe in DuPont Circle (map) at 6:00 - we have the whole space reserved, so it should be a good space to hear speakers while having a bite to eat.

This month's topic is Climate Change and International Development, and we are happy to welcome Keith Dennis of the Cadmus Group and Britt Childs of World Resources Institute as our speakers. 

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In Uganda, there is a small business whose model is based on manufacturing and selling products made from indigenous tree bark. The bark can be sustainably collected as this particular species of tree has the property of easily regrowing bark after being stripped bare. The material is fashioned into bags, accessories and other products where it is sold on the international market for a decent profit.

So, sustainable production of a desirable product fused with BoP ingenuity. Innovative enough for you? The Business in Development (BiD) network apparently agrees. The company is African Skin, and they were the winners of last year's BiD Challenge.

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The Next 4 Billion includes a whole chapter on a topic for which we were unable to present a single, real number from our analysis of household surveys. Not surprisingly, the chapter is short. So, why did we include it, if we couldn’t report any numbers? And why do we recommend it to you?

Well, as these pages have shown numerous times, we believe that financial services are a breakout sector - for the BOP, for business, and for the development community. For the BOP, access to financial services means new jobs and income; the creation of formal identity (perhaps for the first time); the reduction of physical risk (it’s dangerous to carry cash on your person, or store it in your home, in many parts of the world); the economic empowerment of women, perhaps the single most critical element of development; among other positive impacts.

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The innovative peer-to-peer microlending site Kiva.org received a new round of PR today when Nicholas Kristof featured the site in his New York Times column.  Check out an excerpt at the NB Newsroom or Times Select for the full column (subscription required).  Readers have also been chiming in over at Kristof's blog on the Times site.

In light of this story, I would like to point readers to a two-part interview (Part 1; Part 2) that our own Sara Standish did with Kiva founder Matt Flannery and CEO Premal Shah last year.  There are MP3 files available as well as transcripts.  Woth a listen and/or a read.  Here's a quick excerpt:

NB: How do you weigh in on the current microfinance debates?  And what is Kiva’s role in the greater micro credit community?
Matt Flannery: I just want to contribute to the field.  I want every MFI that works with Kiva to come out in a better place than where they started, whether it’s an NGO, a development organization or an actual bank.  If they work with Kiva I want to help them own it.  I hope that the money we provide furthers them along the path to being self sustainable and that is my personal view on where the industry is going for microfinance.

Premal Shah: What is the role of subsidization?  There are 10,000 MFIs.  Should there be industry Darwinism or should more MFIs proliferate because only 10% of the world’s poor have access to financial services?  There are these raging debates between practitioners and pundits and my experience through Kiva (and prior to Kiva) has been to try and understand the things that Kiva does that are indisputably good and I think that there are a couple of them. 

One example is how Kiva captures a previously untapped source of capital.  There is a guy in Kansas right now who probably A) never heard of micro credit or B) read a Newsweek article, has no other option but to make a donation at this point at a price that he would like to.  So, he could go and find Grameen.org and make a donation, but my sense is that compared to all the other donations that this person might make, he probably wouldn’t get around to doing it. 

So the thing that I think is indisputably good about Kiva is that it is such a unique idea and it’s so different from the typical thing you can do with your money.  Because it’s highly transparent, it’s highly personal, and you are doing something good with very little financial commitment.  It’s unlocking previously trapped capital for the microfinance industry.   And because there is an emotional return that complements it, it subsidizes the need for a financial return, but it’s still operating at the market rate and translates into more affordable capital for a lot of the high quality MFIs that we wish to work with.   To the extent that these MFIs use those savings in a productive way to expand capacity, I think it advances the mission.

Guest blogger James Dailey worked at Grameen Foundation's Technology Center for five years and lead the development of the Microfinance Open Source project. He also teaches Microfinance at the University of Washington. He is a founding member and CTO of MicroFinance ClearingHouse.
By James Dailey

The grande Waldorf Astoria Starlight Room in in mid-town Manhattan was above its capacity of 300 with participants at the second annual "Microfinance: Cracking the Capital Markets" conference. Based on the attendance and presentations of major banks and investment houses (Citi, Deutsche Bank, Credit Suisse, JP Morgan, etc), the capital markets are listening. This is an industry, or a sector of the financial industry depending on who you talk to, that is more often associated with charity and Nobel Peace Prize winner Mohammed Yunus and Grameen Bank, than with structured finance deals. Maria Otero, President and CEO of Accion International, which co-hosted the event with Credit Suisse, commented that even five years ago she could not have imagined being surrounded by the likes of these banks in front of the financial media press. That coincidentally, is how long I have been in the microfinance field, and I was also struck by how many new faces and new ventures I saw at this conference.

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We've all heard of the dire situations: "Every x seconds, y children/women/people die of z disease around the world."  For many years, health crises--HIV/AIDs, malaria, diarrheal diseases, etc.--have been a prominent focal point for the efforts of the development community.  Only recently, however, have people begun to consider private sector strategies for helping to stymie the overwhelming need for more adequate healthcare delivery to the BOP, often considered the province of governments and aid.  But there IS some willingness and ability to pay among the BOP for healthcare.

This idea isn't so monstrous when one considers that the BOP already must spend for healthcare and that often, available options are of poor quality and costly to access, especially for rural dwellers.  The size of the BOP health market worldwide is estimated to be at least $158.4 billion.  How could the private sector provide high-quality, accessible, affordable treatment and medication to this market?

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This week's Rising Ventures feature is about a company that has begun piloting rural energy markets at a time when the market opportunities are becoming increasingly abundant, yet unrecognized by many in the private sector.

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"Last year, global insurance giant American International Group Inc.opened a garage-size office in this dusty town of about 50,000. Coming up soon here: a policy that insures a cow for a $10 annual premium. "

This opening in WSJ article "Insurers Seek Growth in Developing Markets" captures best how the world is changing.

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Our good friend Chris Monasterski over at the PSD Blog has used data from The Next 4 Billion to describe the market for BOP water on today, World Water Day.  Here's what he's got to say:

The brand new report The Next 4 Billion: Market Size and Business Strategy at the Base of the Pyramid quantifies the BOP market for water—3.96 billion people paying an estimated $20 billion annually.

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