Blog

This year, the Global Social Benefit Incubator at Santa Clara University piloted an approach to capture and diseminate systemic knowledge about community-scale water treatment and sanitation. Four of the entrepreneurs this year represented projects that address these challenges. Deepinder Mohan, founder of Environment Planning Group Limited, is one of them.   

EPGL is bringing an affordable and reliable source of clean and safe drinking water to rural villages in India using reverse osmosis technology. With support from Acumen Fund EPGL has reached a scale of 35 plants in operation and envisions a rapid growth to achieve its vision of 5,000 plants by 2013.    

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The NextBillion.net team is proud to introduce its newest member: Staff Writer Mark Beckford.

Mark is a veteran of corporate base of the pyramid strategies. He worked for Intel from 1995 through 2008, where he had a prominent role shaping the company's strategy in emerging markets. He helped design and lead their World Ahead program, among many other impressive roles.

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Guest blogger Niti Bhan has been developing and implementing new market strategies for both the developed and developing world for almost two decades. An established author and speaker, her research interests include the challenge of designing effective business and transaction models intended for those with irregular and unpredictable incomes.

The Emerging Futures Lab is a small, multidisciplinary team that aims to increase the understanding the people at the base of the pyramid across the developing world in order to improve the success rate of new ventures, products and services intended to serve this market in a holistically beneficial manner. 

By Niti Bhan

Here in Helsinki, a number of speakers made insightful comments about the state of base of the pyramid strategy, practice and research. 

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Guest blogger Niti Bhan has been developing and implementing new market strategies for both the developed and developing world for almost two decades. An established author and speaker, her research interests include the challenge of designing effective business and transaction models intended for those with irregular and unpredictable incomes.

The Emerging Futures Lab is a small, multidisciplinary team that aims to increase the understanding the people at the base of the pyramid across the developing world in order to improve the success rate of new ventures, products and services intended to serve this market in a holistically beneficial manner. 

By Niti Bhan

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In addition to the Social Capital Markets conference, there are a number of interesting events covering base of the pyramid-related topics happening in the coming weeks and months.  A quick overview:

Sustainable Innovations at the Bottom of the Pyramid, September 26-27, Helsinki, Finland - The conference will address technological, social, and business innovations in the context of social and ecological sustainability.  NextBillion ally and Emerging Futures Lab principal Niti Bhan will be blogging about the conference and its BoP content.  Stay tuned for more updates.

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Like Tony Bennett, I once left (a bit of) my heart in San Francisco.  That was in 2004, at Eradicating Poverty Through Profit, the first major conference to discuss market-based approaches to poverty alleviation – the "bottom of the pyramid" idea.  Now, nearly four years later, I am again heading west for a conference – one with the same sort of potential to change the way we think; this time, about social capital.

The aptly-named Social Capital Markets conference is the brainchild of Kevin Jones, a participant in that 2004 conference and a longtime NextBillion ally.  For three days next month, a group of investors, venture capitalists, businesspeople, practitioners and academics will gather in San Francisco to think about how and when to deploy social capital.  Acumen Fund – my current employer – and World Resources Institute – my previous one – will both be in the room.  And I'm proud to announce that NextBillion.net – co-managed by those two organizations – will be live-blogging the event.

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American Express recently unveiled the top 25 projects selected as semi-finalists for Members Project, the online initiative that invites Cardmembers and the public in general to come together and submit, discuss and vote for projects to make a positive impact on the world, which American Express will fund with $2.5 million.

Since July, people from across the country and the Members Project Advisory Panel helped choose the top 25 projects from the more than 1,000 that were submitted. In less than 5 days (this round of voting ends 9/29), cardmembers will determine which projects advance to the top five.

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In case you are not familiar with the video series we have been displaying over the past couple of weeks with entrepreneurs from Santa Clara University's GSBI, make sure to catch up by meeting David, Tendai, Zipporah, Neelam and Christopher.

Today's turn is for Alfonso Gamboa, an entrepreneur that is revolutionizing the practice of blue crab fishing in his native Philippines. Alfonso's leadership and efforts have earned him recognitions in venues like the World Bank Development Marketplace and the Business in Development Challenge.

Nothing better to explain Alfonso's vision than the following excerpt from a recent Wall Street Journal article. By the way, these were his opening words during the final business plan presentation at GSBI.

"Teach a man to fish," Mr. Warren says that is "not good enough." He explains, "If all you do is teach a guy to fish, you create a village of fishermen and everybody does the same thing. They all catch the same fish. They all sit on the side of the road. They all sell the same fish. The same fish rots. They go home and they never get above subsistence level."

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Most estimates of the size of the BoP population sit between 3 and 4 billion people. The original population figure of 4 billion by CK Prahalad in his "Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid" has been criticized as an over estimation. It is true that, for scientific analysis, exactness is something we should always aim for.

However, from the point of view of the colossal opportunity that BoP markets represent for the private sector, the exactness of our measurements of the BoP population is not crucial. That is why, in the past few years, the lessons taught in his book have been taken to heart and developed by BoP entrepreneurs, investors and researchers alike.

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Guest blogger Liliana Valle is an MBA candidate at Duke University's Fuqua School of Business. She recently worked as a Summer Associate with Agora Partnerships in Managua, Nicaragua.

By Liliana Valle 

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