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I just got an email from our friends at Ashoka announcing the launch, just two days ago, of a venture that promises to disrupt and transform rural healthcare in India. Led by NextBillion co-founder and The Next 4 Billion lead author Al Hammond, the E Health Points are joint venture of Ashoka, the Naandi Foundation, the Government of the State of Punjab and and Healthpoint Services India Pvt. Ltd.

It's very exciting to hear about this launch and see the pictures of it in action. I've had the opportunity to work in and out with Al Hammond over the last 18 months and in several of our conversations this project was a dominant theme. His vision of bringing together technological and business model innovations to produce a disruptive new model for healthcare services in rural areas is now a reality. I'm already looking forward to hearing about the launch and the prospects of this venture in his own words. I'm sure he'll be looking forward to sharing these through NextBillion as well, so stay tuned.

For now, I want to extend my congratulations and best wishes to Al and the team that has led the charge in launching this pilot. If you wish to learn more about this project and its various components, I encourage you to read Al's earlier posts related to eHealth, the future of healthcare and community scale water treatment facilities. I also urge you to read the complete press release and take a look at the Flickr slideshow.

As the week and month wind down and you make plans for the weekend and what´s left of the year, here are some events and opportunities you won't want to miss.

NextBillion readers in the DC area will have the opportunity next week to hear from Stuart Hart, the Cornell professor who co-authored with C.K. Prahalad the white paper titled "The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid" ad then published his own Capitalism at the Crossroads. He'll give a keynote address next week for FIELD Day, November 3 in Arlington, Virginia.  The conference will focus overall on "Food Security: New Pathways," and Hart will be discussing the co-creation, with BoP communities, of strategies that address environmental sustainability.  The conference organizers say it will be provocative and we look forward to it. FIELD Day is happening at the front end of the SEEP (Small Enterprise Education and Promotion) Network's annual conference, which runs November 4-6 at the Sheraton National Hotel in Arlington. It's still possible to attend with on-site registration. 

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It still baffles me that there are not more BoP businesses making use of women's skills to enhance their economic and social bottom lines. For example, looking at the details of the many fellowship opportunities or upcoming conferences (a list of which was recently provided by Francisco Noguera), the role of women is barely touched upon, if at all. Yet the earning power of women globally is expected to reach $18 trillion by 2014 - a $5 trillion rise for current income. That is more than twice the estimated 2014 GDP of China and India combined. This is a huge lost opportunity, which I already mentioned in one of my posts some time ago and which is creating important business opportunities.

To start with, women are productive economic agents that can contribute valuable assets to the commercial efforts in any company. As members of local communities they have valuable information about target customers such as their financial constraints or unmet needs. Therefore, they may be important in helping shape the final product, pricing or retailing decisions and/or targeting a more specific segment of the local community. Additionally, women can leverage liaisons between the local communities and private companies, hence spearheading commercial efforts by raising awareness about the benefits of the product or directly offering the product to the customer. As a result, women can often be included in significant ways in commercial and distribution networks.

Moreover, women are also important as consumers and heads of households. Women are often left in care of the family and are thus responsible for the welfare of their children. They normally purchase goods which are required in the household and they usually buy goods for other family members to use. According to our publication "The Next 4 Billion" women spend 51% of the household income in goods such as in food, housing improvements and health services. Therefore, they represent a very important "entry gate" for many routinely-used products. Furthermore, since they are often in charge of child care, women play a very significant role in improving the future opportunities of their offspring by improving household health and decreasing children mortality and morbidity rates. 

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Editor's Note: This post first appeared in the India Development Blog.

Question: Which manufactured consumer product has the deepest market penetration in rural India?

Answer: Matches

In fact, 97% of rural households purchase matches on a monthly basis. Matches are a unique product because of their high, constant demand and low price point.Their ubiquitous presence provides fascinating insights into India's rural distribution networks, and offer potential ways to inform and interact with India's relatively untouched market.

Several innovative businesses with rural focus have floundered because either their message or their products failed to reach the end-user. One of the largest barriers to introducing new products into rural markets is the lack of reliable distribution channels. Matches, however, have probably the most pervasive distribution network of any manufactured consumer product in India; they find their way to every village and nearly every household, regardless of how remote or how poor.

What is more interesting is that most of India's matches are manufactured in southern Tamil Nadu, and are sold as far away as Jammu and Kashmir. To understand match distribution in India is to understand India's most basic, underlying distribution system. How do they reach the end-user? How many distributors do they go through? How long does it take? How much margin is added to the price of the box of matches each time it exchanges hands? Understanding how matches reach the rural consumers from Kashmir to Kerala can provide valuable insights for scaling up other products and services.

Matchbox distribution can be relevant for product piggybacking, whereby manufacturers hitch a new product to established distribution channels.Piggybacking is becoming an increasingly common way to deliver products and services to the base of the pyramid, allowing for a broader reach in rural areas at a reduced cost. Are there any products or services that can piggyback on matches? 

In remote rural communities, where television, radio or even street names are almost non-existent, relaying information is a pressing issue. Matchboxes may contain the solution. The typical designs on most matchboxes in India show only the manufacturer's logo and some text about the contents. What if that space was used to relay information? Imagine the possibilities of spreading new health/educational information or advertising to 97% of rural families on a monthly basis. Simple pictorial designs would pique interest and accommodate India's vast differences in literacy rates and languages. Awareness of important topics such as the installation of chimneys to reduce smoke inhalation or cleaning and covering water containers to prevent stomach ailments could be spread to households across India, and potentially save lives. 

Matches' universal presence in rural villages provides unique opportunities to reach and interact with India's underserved market. By tracking their distribution from manufacturer to end-user, we can assess the potential for piggybacking additional products and for designing innovative messaging of crucial information. Sometimes, taking a closer look at even mundane objects can spark innovative solutions and approaches to serious challenges.

We are glad to welcome the newest member of the NextBillion.net team, Nathan Wyeth.  Nathan will support the operations of NextBillion.net, specifically its news, research, and jobs sections. 

He combines an academic background in international development with experience in environmental and energy policymaking.  When not working on NextBillion, he supports the creation and implementation of impact investing and patient capital strategies on behalf of philanthropic clients operating in the U.S., China, and Israel.

Nathan has previously managed public health economics research in Tamil Nadu, India and worked with the Clinton Foundation and the House of Representatives' Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.  Prior to this he coordinated national and international advocacy campaigns on renewable energy, trade policy, and international financial institutions with the Sierra Club, and currently serves on the Sierra Club's Board of Directors.  He has previously blogged on Grist.org and ItsGettingHotinHere.org. 

He grew up in Washington, DC and received a B.A. in Development Studies from Brown University, where he wrote his senior thesis on the political economy of rural electrification in India and strategies to finance renewable energy for electrification.  Nathan is currently based in San Francisco, CA and gets out to enjoy the mountains of California as frequently as possible.

Welcome, Nathan!

It's easy to see how the shimmering success of individual entrepreneurs can distract from surrounding structures that have long kept them from effecting change. Microfinance and the social enterprise movement have mobilized so much human capital among the BOP. Changing surrounding structures could unlock even more capital that the BOP could mobilize to secure prosperity along with dignity. How much more is there? Roughly $10 trillion in real assets owned by BOP households worldwide.

That rough estimate comes from the Institute for Liberty and Democracy (ILD), led by Hernando de Soto. They started out in the 1980s by walking through the slums of Lima (Peru) to ask poor people about their daily lives; in particular about where they lived and what did they do every day. The research they compiled eventually made its way into de Soto's first book, The Other Path. After ILD performed similar research in the slums of Mexico City, Cairo, Port-au-Prince and Manila, de Soto published their findings in 2001 as his second book, The Mystery of Capital.

What ILD found in every case, throughout vastly different social and political contexts, was that BOP households owned an entire world of property, businesses and other assets whose only documentation resided in dispersed extralegal arrangements. 'Extralegal' signifies that these assets are documented, but their documentation is outside the formal legal structure for ownership. It may sound outrageous, but that $10 trillion estimate is more likely underestimated than overestimated. BOP households aren't always keen on letting researchers know about absolutely everything they own, nor what they would really pay if they had the chance to invest in real estate.

It turns out that because these assets reside only in dispersed extralegal arrangements, they can't be fully mobilized on behalf of their owners. In western developed markets, assets or wealth are held in widely-recognized legal arrangements that have meaning to other people far and wide. Among dispersed extralegal arrangements, such assets have meaning only to the small number of people who recognize the legitimacy of their owners (many of whom are women). These assets are off the grid.

Microfinance has worked around the problem of assets being off the grid by providing small loans without collateral requirements. That doesn't change the fact that those $10 trillion in assets are still there, waiting to be mobilized as collateral for larger investments. Clearly there is business acumen among the BOP to mobilize them. Micro- and social enterprises provide brilliant proof of that. The main obstacle is how to get those assets on the grid.

ILD and de Soto have pioneered how to get those assets on the grid by incorporating dispersed extralegal arrangements into widely-recognized legal arrangements. It's not a matter of changing culture but rather changing the legal structure around culture. ILD consistently discovers some concept of wealth or assets in every tribe, village and slum it comes across. In direct response to recent violence related to indigenous property rights in the Peruvian Amazon, ILD produced a video that focuses on Amazonian culture and Peruvian legal structure.

It's that surrounding legal structure that has long kept the BOP from fully mobilizing their wealth and talents. Although changing legal structures takes a lot of grassroots political effort, local organizations are working toward that end in every part of the world (here's a PDF from CIPE with examples). Development could get so much more through enterprise, if the BOP could mobilize the $10 trillion of assets they already own.

P.S. In 1984, de Soto came to the United States to find a partner who would help ILD conduct a grassroots campaign in Lima to improve the surrounding legal structure for Lima's BOP assets, particularly BOP businesses. The partner he found was the Center for International Private Enterprise (CIPE), which was founded previously that year. ILD and CIPE based the campaign theme on "289," which was the number of days it took to formally register a business in Peru before the campaign. After the campaign, it took less than one day. The cost to register was also reduced, from over $1,200, all the way down to about $174. ILD and CIPE helped initiate 200 further reforms designed to bring Lima's BOP property, businesses and other assets onto the grid. Since then, ILD has offered its expertise to other countries seeking to bring BOP assets onto the grid; while CIPE has gone on to build capacity for more than 200 other partners worldwide, each doing similar work to fully mobilize BOP wealth and talent.

I'm back in Washington after four days in Maine attending Pop!Tech 2009: America Reimagined. You may have read some of my previous posts highlighting the work of the Social Innovation Fellows. I conducted three additional interviews whose notes will hopefully turn into blog posts some time later this week. Stay tuned for that.

I went through my notes last night and reflected on the ideas I was exposed to over the last few days, thinking about how the BoP idea was or wasn't present in the conversations at Pop!Tech, either explicitly (like in the work of many Social innovation Fellows, for instance) or woven in as an underlying trend that propels the conversation from within. Two speakers caught my attention due to their direct tie to the concept and practice of the Base of the Pyramid: Alec Ross and Esther Duflo.

Alec Ross leads the innovation efforts at the State Department. In essence, his role is understanding how emerging trends in areas like technology and social media can be used to advance the goals of US foreign policy. He delivered a crisp and concise talk that addressed what, in his words, is only "the first page of the first chapter of a new strategy for US foreign policy". The key words during his talk were "connectedness" and "empowerment". He addressed a number of innovations and trends in the space of mobile applications, drawing upon many of the ventures and resources that we often cite in the pages of NextBillion.

The fact that bottom up innovations like mobile money are scaling up is exciting and intriguing in its own right. Hearing about them from the man that sits next door from Hillary Clinton's office is promising in a whole new way. He encouraged the Pop!Tech audience to read The Economist's recent report on mobile money while letting us know that those were the tools through which the US is looking to shift its approach to foreign policy, moving from "repower" towards the "empowerment" of those living in developing countries. His speech was frank and humble, accompanied by an invitation to the community interested in the crux between innovation and development to share ideas with a State Department that is willing to listen and fully aware that innovations at the BoP are a trend governments and policy makers must thrive to work with, rather than shape through regulations.  

Esther Duflo's intervention was also highly relevant to the NextBillion community. She spoke about her work leading the MIT Poverty Action Lab and her efforts to understand what works and what doesn't in the fight against poverty. In particular, she invited the audience to be "modest and humble" in addressing the question of poverty alleviation. Breaking the complex issue of poverty into smaller challenges may be a useful way to address this issue, she argued. "If we think about the issue of poverty as a LEGO, we have can then focus on getting it right about each individual building block and how they can later be put together". She also suggested randomized experimentation as a method to conduct a rigorous assessment of what works and what doesn't within those "building blocks".

The talks of Mr. Ross and Ms. Duflo were complimentary. Individually and collectively, their conclusions and recommendations are applicable and relevant not only to the idea and practice of BoP but also to many of the other innovations, breakthroughs and predictions discussed during Pop!Tech. Rather than a conference track in itself, my feeling is that Base of the Pyramid and grassroots innovations are seen as mainstream and as one of the features that characterize the state of our society. 

My friend Monika is a designer. She's curious, restless even, always thinking about the next project and about ways to make them valuable for her local community. She currently doesn't practice design but she's looking for ways to get involved and make her creative thinking something she can devote her life to and a valuable resource to society. Monika is not alone. She's part of a larger movement that sees design and creativity not as a discipline aimed at creating new stuff and gadgets, but as a way of thinking, an approach to turn social challenges into design and innovation opportunities.

Today, I had the pleasure of having lunch with Emily Pilloton, founder of Project H Design, a Pop!Tech 2009 Social Innovation Fellow and a key character in the community interested in the nexus between design thinking and social impact. She is a really fast talker... and I'm a really slow typer. Hence, I took my notebook and tried to capture the main takeaways of our conversation. Here are th highlights of our conversation briken into three main section that underscore her thoughts on localizing efforts, markets and scale and, finally, her new book Design Revolution.

Localizing design: "I'd rather look at my own backyard"

We sat down. We shook hands. I introduced myself and NextBillion and went straight into arguing that her approach had enormous potential in my native Latin America, Africa and Asia, the places we most often analyze and write about in this website. Like Jason yesterday, Emily was quick in politely pointing my attention to the fact that the US faces enough social challenges to capture all of her attention at the moment.

Perhaps it's the theme of the conference, but this has been a common thread throughout my experience at Pop!Tech: a constant pledge for localizing efforts and creating tools, approaches and information that enable local communities to come up with solutions for their own problems, plus a growing interest for social innovation that takes place in the United States.

The key of Project H's approach and its local chapters is deep immersion into the circumstances of local communities. Partnerships with local organizations play a central role in the process of identifying social challenges where design may provide a viable solution. An example of these partnerships is the one Project H developed with the Downtown Women's Center of Los Angeles, where a solution for the needs of street dwellers has been developed. She also used the same example to explain how Project H's thinking begins by identifying a problem, not envisioning a solution.

Starting "with a need in mind, not knowing what the final solution will be" can be a lengthy process, particularly in terms of building trust among local actors and creating dynamics that allow communities to incorporate a problem-solving discipline that prevails even after the Project H design team is gone. "That's when you know you've been successful", said Emily, "when projects keep going even after we're gone".

I thanked Emily for her push back on my point about developing countries. It's really not about solutions and cool approaches being exported from this country to those across oceans. It's about making information available and about educating local actors in the art of observation and design thinking to make local challenges local opportunities for design and enterprise.

"1 million people doing something is better that 1 thing done a million times"

Our conversation quickly moved into the role of markets and enterprise in making these solutions sustainable. "That's one of our main challenfges", Emily admitted. "I would argue that a social need implies the existence of a market... but since we start from the need and not the market, we often have a challenge figuring out the business model or subsidy that can make a given solution sustainable and over time".

That's when the magic word came to my mind of course: "Scalable". But I told you Emily talks fast. Before I even said it, she told me "I truly believe scalability is not the inescapable answer". "I believe it's more important to move a million people to do one thing than make one thing and copy it a million times". Powerful, yes, but she wasn't done just yet... "what needs to be scalable is access to information and tools. A way through which people can feel as part of a community. A way through which they can get answer to any question they may have about a project".

Nothing to add here, really. You may agree or not but It's a stance that enriches our conversation here in NextBillion.

"The Design Revolution Roadshow"

Next I asked Emily if there was anything she wanted to say during her Pop!Tech talk for which she didn't have time. The obvious answer was "YES!" and then went on to tell me about the upcoming Design Revolution Roadshow.

Design Revolution is the name of Emily's new book, a compendium of 100 innovations in design for social impact divided into 8 sections: Water, well-being, energy, food, mobility, education, play and enterprise. The book is so new it's not even available at the Pop!Tech Bookstore, which has in display everything every speaker or fellow has ever published. However, Emily had a copy at lunch and I was able to take a quick sneek peek into it. It's totally relevant to the NextBillion community and I'm sure it will be appreciated by many of you out there.

"I wrote the book in 90 days (!) and see it as a continuation to my manifesto. The manifesto set the tone and marked the road. Design Revolution is a tool, a blueprint of how to actually do this work."

In sum...

I really enjoyed my conversation with Emily, someone who couldn't take working for what she thought was wrong, quit her job, worked as a blog editor for a while and then founded her own remarkable organization, one relevant to the NextBillion community because of its role in changing the way people and organizations think about design, enterprise and their link to development.

Make sure to keep track of Emily and the dates when the Design Revolution Roadshow will be in your area... she'll be releasing those soon! What's more, it will be Emily's home on the road! That's literal. See below for the Airstream, which will be rolling across campuses in the US bringing along a sample of the products highlighted in the Design Revolution book.

The morning sessions on day 2 at Pop!Tech is halfway through, with a major announcement just made by our host and curator Andrew Zolli: the Science and Public Leadership Fellows program which adds to the beyond-conference strategies Pop!Tech is implementing to fulfill its mission of accelerating the growth of world changing ideas and initiatives.

Andrew walked us through the rationale behind this initiative, aimed at helping scientists to overcome personal and institutional challenges they face in sharing their breakthroughs with the world. The structure of the program is different to that of the Social Innovations Fellows, consisting of a year-long support and a curriculum designed specifically around areas like communications and personal branding, which can expand the reach and impact of breakthrough discoveries.

Andrew's announcement was made right on time, after a packed room at the Camden Opera House gave a standing ovation to Hayat Sindi, a scientist and co-founder of Diagnostics for All, a living example of how science and research is critical to produce solutions that make critical goods and services available for populations living in their absence at the base of the pyramid. I had an interview scheduled with Dr. Sindi, one of this year's Social Innovation Fellows, after the morning session. However, not surprisingly, tens of people approached her after her presentation and Andrew's announcement. I'll do my best to sit down with her and share her words with you before traveling back on Sunday.

This is not the only announcement Andrew has made during the conference. Last night he also introduced the Pop!Tech Labs, through which members of the Pop!Tech community will collaborate on some of the critical issues discussed at the conference. The choice of "materials flow" for the first Labs year was timely after an afternoon full of innovations coming from MIT and shocking images shared by photographer Chris Jordan displaying the footprint of our plastic waste.

It sure looks like the Pop!Tech team has a busy year ahead. NextBillion applauds their commitment to making the impact of this convening more lasting and more focused on the needs of the underserved.

 "Clean coal" is a term that will probably ring a bell for those that were in the US around this time last year. Clean energy and the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions were both key issues discussed during the presidential campaign and clean coal was advocated as a solution by both Barack Obama and John McCain.

"Coal cannot be clean. Getting it off the ground is a dirty process already", explained Jason Aramburu during our conversation last Wednesday night in Camden. "However, the principles of the clean coal process can be applied to biomass. When I discovered that I decided to found re:char. We can produce energy through a process that is not only carbon neutral but carbon negative, and also produce char that sequesters carbon, enriches degraded soils and improves agricultural yields for farmers around the world."

The core of re:char's technology, Jason explained, is a process called pyrolisis, which takes place by heating to biomass like wood or agricultural waste in the absence of oxygen. Pyrolisis separates biomass and turns it into two main bi-products: a liquid fuel called bio-oil and bio char. Bio-oil is the used to run an energy generator and the remaining biochar can be applied back to the ground, enriching the soils and accelerating the process of carbon capture. Other models involving biomass do one of the two, Jason told me, either turning biomass into charcoal which can then be used, to operate cooking stoves or into energy through gasification processes. Jason's model is different in that energy needs for lighting and cooking can be met through bio-oil, leaving char available to be put back into the ground, producing both environmental benefits (making the process carbon negative) and social benefits in the form of increased agricultural yields.  

Jason presentred at Pop!Tech yesterday evening, as part of this year's class of Social innovation Fellows. He argued that his technology can be used to both bring energy to the almost 2 billion people currently off the grid and also make a huge dent in the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions. "With enough energy produced through our technology, we have the potential of going back to 1992 carbon concentration levels in ten years. Our process reduces GHG emissions and also captures existing carbon from the atmosphere."

Re:char is already operating pilots in the US and in Cameroon, and has plans to roll out its technology both in the developing world and industrialized economies. When I asked him what had been most valuable from his experience at Pop!Tech, Jason said he'd been reminded of the importance to "look back at the base of our own pyramid; there's enormous opportunity for technologies like re:char's here in the States".  

I was struck by Jason's presentation, his keen knowledge of energy issues and his understanding of the inextricable links between poverty and the challenges poised by climate change. I suspect we'll be hearing much more about him in the coming months and look forward to reporting on his process.