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It has been increasingly clear to me that there is a large grain of truth to the not-so-old adage, “If you want to get something done, give it to a busy person.” As I navigated the handful of near misses with Harvard Business School Professor Dan Isenberg, I realized that I had much to learn about the “busyness” of business school. He surely wins the award for fastest turnaround time —ever. I suppose that explains how Professor Isenberg has time to conduct research, teach classes, write cases and field random interview requests from first year MBA students like me. In any event, I was eager to chat with Prof. Isenberg about the case he wrote about Lapdesk, a South African company that provides portable desks to school children who need them, all 4.2 million to be exact. (Isenberg, 5)

Lapdesk’s business model is unique because it capitalizes, literally, on the desks’ advertising real estate to attract company sponsorships. Companies buy the desks, which are then emblazoned with corporate branding, and given to the students of facilities-poor schools. Lapdesk CEO Shane Immelman has been well-recognized for his work, receiving the “Proudly South African New Business of the Year” award in 2005 and becoming an Endeavor entrepreneur in 2006.

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The article that appeared in The Washington Post last Sunday titled "Our Cells, Ourselves" talks extensively about the growth of cell phone technology. According to that article, we have on a global scale reached yet another tipping point. As Malcolm Gladwell might say, the cell phone has become a social epidemic. Depending on who you ask, we have either just passed, or are about to pass the point in time in which there are half as many cell phones in use as there are people on the planet. It is notable that Eric Schmidt, chairman of the board and enlightened CEO of Google says that the trend "will end with 5 billion out of the 6 billion with cell phones," a figure that reaches well into the Base of the Pyramid.

In fact, as we are seeing more and more with the BoP, a cell phone is the ideal tool in an informal economy, a network in which there is little more than ipso facto social infrastructure. Suddenly, a fisherman can call ahead to see which port will offer the highest price on the day's catch, while at the same time, people who have never had access to financial services are being taken out of the somewhat insecure cash economy through value stored in prepaid networks. Network time is traded as a stable form of currency, and money is "wired" from a man working in the mines of South Africa to where his family can use it in Botswana. Cell phones are a more prevalent sign of "development" in Tibet than toilets are.

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"We must imagine a world which combines in equal measure economic development and eradication of poverty, ecological stewardship and social justice. We must harness the forces of globalization to create this outcome. We have to imagine this future. If we cannot imagine it, we cannot create it. We cannot create this world if we cannot imagine it. I do hope that we can bring to this task our collective imagination, passion, courage, humanity, humility and intellect. We cannot expect less of ourselves.”- CK Prahalad

Last year, I had the chance to listen to CK Prahalad give his lecture entitled, "Democratizing Commerce" at the University of Michigan. He urged the audience to push for a globalization that benefits all, particularly the poor. I listened with great intent and thought that his final comments of the talk were quite profound, particularly related to BoP strategies.
A few thoughts on what Prahalad suggests as the building blocks for business leaders seeking to create a more inclusive global economy:

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In the several days since the news that Yunus' microfinance movement would be coming to the U.S., I've had some time to consider what this says about how we treat the BoP institutionally. To me, the fact that Yunus' forays in NYC are seen as so newsworthy illustrates the "us and them" (or "U.S. and them") mentality we have in dealing with poverty.


By this, I mean that in general, there is a thick barrier separating domestic poverty programs from those that work internationally. Just go to Kiva or Microplace and try to find a U.S. based project to invest in. We at New Ventures don't cross this line either, maintaining ourselves as an internationally-focused organization, and the same principle works for the many poverty-focused organizations that bill themselves as domestic in scope.

Odd that in this age of globalization, goods and capital are increasingly flowing across borders indiscriminately, yet we think that how we impact poverty should be determined and defined by national boundaries?

I remember thinking that Paul Collier was implying as much during a talk I attended a while ago in which he discussed his book The Bottom Billion. To paraphrase, he made the argument that we shouldn't target support for the poor in China or India because those countries' growth rates are high enough, people are reaching the middle-class etc. In other words, unlike the poor in sub-saharan Africa, they're doing just fine.

I took issue with this assumption because it is based on a world view that is to me a bit outdated and generally flawed - one that treats people as being a part of homogenous national group, undifferentiated by factors such as income, quality of life, etc. This view, held by Paul Collier and implicitly by many international poverty-alleviation organizations states that if a country such as the U.S. or China is "developed" or growing rapidly, then we shouldn't focus support there because "the Americans" or "the Chinese" are well-off.

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Last week, I discussed the rift the Tata Nano has exposed between environmentalist and poverty-alleviation focused professionals, academics and activists - a car that at once represents aspirations of new material wealth for millions of BoP consumers and a potentially enormous source of new CO2 emissions.

But there is another story worth telling here - far away from the Nano controversy, out in the rural Yunnan province of southwestern China, there is Hao Zheng Yi. Transportation issues may not be the first thing on peoples' minds here since, as I've reported previously, one fifth of China's rural population lacks access to electricity. Without reliable energy infrastructure, 80% of people in these regions rely on biomass for heating and cooking, burning wood and straw in ovens as a primary energy source. The negative implications of this practice blur the line between environmental and social concerns, touching on issues of deforestation as well as health problems arising from the indoor air pollution generated by smoke.

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Which banking models could be used to enable access to the BoP? A recent BCG publication, entitled "A Roadmap for Expanding Financial Inclusion in India," tries to answer just that question for the Indian market.

India has the second highest number of financially excluded households in the world with 135 million (China is first with a whooping 263 million). Rural households represent a big share of those financially excluded. BCG estimates that between 2007 and 2010, 17 million households will enter the financial markets thanks to income growth and 30 million more thanks to innovative banking business models. BCG further estimates that these 30 million people will represent Rs 10,000 crore (about $2.5 billion) for banks and Rs 20,000 crore ($5 billion) for insurance companies, or $83 and $166 per household.

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Let's face it, this BoP movement has picked up speed since the early days of The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid. We're getting to a point where we can really glimpse a world, a development space, where the term BoP has arrived in the mainstream, in the media and in business plans of entrepreneurs.

A sure tell tale sign is when consultancies like Triple Value emerge that explicitly use the language of the BoP and advise major corporations on tapping into this market.

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Guest blogger Brian Trelstad is the Chief Investment Officer of Acumen Fund, a non-profit global venture fund serving the 4 billion people living on less than $4 a day. Before joining Acumen Fund, Brian Trelstad spent four years at McKinsey & Company as a consultant in the healthcare and non-profit practices and as an editor of the McKinsey Quarterly. Prior to McKinsey, he worked as a case writer at Stanford University's Center for Entrepreneurial Studies and advised a number of early-stage technology companies.

By Brian Trelstad

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In "The Next 4 Billion: Market Size and Business Strategy at the Base of the Pyramid," the authors analyzed several markets. However, only one market - financial services - was not estimated in terms of exact size and scope.

Financial services can be a fiendishly hard thing to measure, but is at the same time a crucial tool to develop markets for BoP customers. In fact, financial markets often help other BoP markets flourish. Data measuring access and efficiency in financial markets are notoriously hard to come across in emerging countries, because most of these markets lie under the cover of informal economies.

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The launch of the Tata Nano, the ridiculously low-priced car that could open a floodgate of new drivers in India and elsewhere, is undoubtedly one of the milestone innovations marking the early years of the 21st century. This is not just because of the unprecedented feat of technological and design innovation it represents but because of the huge rift it exposes in the public debate over the linkages between two crucial concepts, poverty and environment.

Will the Nano be a leap forward in quality of life standards for the BoP? Will it be an environmental train wreck of snarling traffic, suffocating levels of air pollution and unsustainable resource use? These questions have made the Nano so much more than a car - it has become a symbol for the collective tension over two trends that will define global growth for the foreseeable future: the impact of unmitigated environmental risks and the steady ascent of millions of people into the global middle class.

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