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When Muhammad Yunus, Ingrid Munro and other microfinance pioneers, got together in the first Microfinance Summit in 1997, they adopted what for many was an impossible goal: to reach 100 million people living with less than $1 per day by 2005.  Although the deadline was missed, the 100 million mark was reached in 2007, an incredible feat nonetheless.

The Microcredit Summit Campaign groups microfinance institutions with the common goals of reaching the poorest and of empowering women. In their State of the Microcredit Summit Campaign Report 2009, they confirm that, having double-checked 80% of the figures of their member microfinance organizations (totaling 3,552 organizations in 2007), the 100-million-poor mark was reached by the end of 2007. Just to get a feeling of the figures involved: it is estimated that these 3,552 microfinance organizations reached more than 150 million clients, of which more 106 million were "poor."

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D.Light, the renewable energy organization that distributes clean sources of light in the developing world, is looking for its first class of Fellows.

D.Light, which has often been mentioned on NextBillion, is an incredible start-up that was founded by savvy Stanford MBA graduates Sam Goldman and Nedjip Tozun. The organization is growing quickly, and, as Kiva and Acumen Fund have exemplified, highly-talented Fellows could be a key part of that growth.
Position: Available positions include: Business Development, Marketing, Product Design, International Business Development, Marketing & Communications, Reliability & Testing, Research & Development, and Supply Chain & Operations

Location: New Delhi, India and Shenzhen, China

Application Deadline:

Feb 15th for most, March 1st for some

Description: "Fellows will be able to use their unique skills and experiences to contribute in a significant way to our mission of replacing kerosene lanterns with safe and bright light. We are committed to providing our fellows with a uniquely invigorating, challenging, and life-changing experience.

Fellows will be located in one of our field offices in India, China, or Tanzania for 3 to 10 months. They will be supervised by one of our senior managers and partner with our diverse team across three continents and multiple countries."

For more information on this position, including how to apply, check out:  http://dlightdesign.com/fellows.html

There has been a lot of buzz about new models of foreign aid and the role of social entrepreneurs since our post on President Obama and the NextBillion.net Agenda for the Base of the Pyramid. Guest blogger Apoorva Shah also shared some great points about the important actors in aid reform, including the American Enterprise Institute. 

Iqbal Qadir, a noted social entrepreneur and Founder of MIT's Legatum Center for Development and Entrepreneurship, argued effectively in his opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal for the overhaul of America's current model of international aid and a renewed focus on supporting entrepreneurs in developing countries. Qadir details America's earlier motives in pouring aid into other countries as a way to cement alliance and allegiance to the U.S. and he points out that such models are now sterile and in fact often inhibit the true democratic development of aid recipient countries. While Qadir offers a historical perspective on why such models are in dire need of re-shaping and re-doing, other noted journalists and bloggers have also been focusing on the link between Obama, sustainability, foreign policy, and international aid.

I came across some important materials and entrepreneurs for the NextBillion.net community to ponder and discuss and I hope you'll join in on the dialogue. I will also echo Apoorva's central  question: What role can the NextBillion.net community play in the debate and formation of President Obama's policies on foreign aid? What do you think is the role of entrepreneurs in development and in helping America better support international development?

First, I was thrilled to read in the attached Obama Campaign policy statement that he has plans to create an entitiy that provides seed capital to SMEs and even build "SME Universities" in partnership with American business schools. Based on this policy statement alone, there is clearly thought being put into new approaches to development, including an understanding that the private sector plays a critical role. There is also some talk of there being a new, coordinated Agency to oversee the multiple U.S. agencies for international development, including PEPFAR, USAID, and MCC.  Obama has called for the doubling of foreign aid, but what does that aid look like? Is it charity or investment? And how is the aid being distributed?

Bill Gates has also called for the doubling of funds directed toward foreign aid, but this request is perplexing. Gates is a unique and interesting advocate of innovation in development and he has recently called for a new, "creative capitalism." But calling for a doubling of foreign aid is not the same as a call to embrace creative capitalism. Does this send mixed messages? What do you think?

Peter Beinart, a Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, presents an interesting analysis of America's foreign aid policies and points out:

"In the 1990's, American soft power was  based on more than goodwill; it was based on economic and ideological hegemony. There was only one widely accepted path to prosperity--deregulated, American-style capitalism. And there was one central destination for a poor country seeking the investment and aid it needed to travel down that path: Washington."

But, he continues, "That is no longer the case." I agree, and think that countries seeking America's investment should have a more diverse pool of options to choose from. It would probably be a much more empowering exercise to help countries think through several paths to development, before they eagerly accept American dollars. If Obama were to introduce a full-fledged initiative on business at the base of the pyramid, offering struggling MNCs a way forward and at the same time a new approach to improving the lives of the world's 4 billion poor, this would be an amazingly potent initiative and America and its aid recipients might just get what they want: revenue generation and economic growth. Let's call the initiative, "The Committee for Global Development and Entrepreneurship at the Base of the Pyramid" (GDBOP).

Obama could harness the power of entrepreneurs here in the U.S. and in developing countries to collectively brainstorm and decide where and how America's international aid should be distributed. The example of social entrepreneurs has more to offer in the way forward, because, afterall, development entrepreneurs work from the bottom up, with the base of the pyramid, and bottom-up innovation has always been Obama's strong point.

For examples of the building wave of BOP entrepreneurs in developing countries, check out Francisco Noguera's coverage of the attendees at Santa Clara University's 2008 Global Social Benefit Incubator program, including entrepreneurs such as Alfonso Gamboa of the Philippines. Echoing Iqbal Qadir, Mr. Gamboa calls for a drastic paradigm shift in development funding, stating, "The answer to poverty is business development, not charity. . . . Trade, not aid."

The above ventures and dozens of others highlight a new movement of entrepreneurs that connect the interests of America with the democratic development of other countries, which, as Qadir points out, leads to more secure allies for the United States. I believe that our NextBillion community has a huge role to play in alerting not only the Obama Administration, but the development community as a whole, to entrepreneurs in developing countries and here in the U.S. that offer new choices and innovative alternatives to traditional approaches to development and foreign aid.

Such entrepreneurs are young and have broken out of an old world understanding of what makes people and countries grow. They understand the changes that are needed and I would suggest to Obama to keep a close eye on their work.  One of the things that caught my attention when I saw Obama speak in Boston in February of 2008 was him saying that he supports entrepreneurship. He has certainly proven himself receptive to the trends of younger generations with his brilliantly-executed use of new media in his campaign and his hiring of a Facebook Executive to help in that effort.

I hope that he will continue this trend and pay close attention to the building wave of social entrepreneurs both in the U.S. and abroad and adopt their approaches to development in the same way he adopted young people's new media approach to communication. NextBillion.net is certainly part of the new media wave and so are all of you, because of our collective use of the internet to discuss and share analysis instantaneously.

Maybe President Obama is reading this post and all of your comments right at this moment. Here's hoping.

Editor's note: Al Hammond, entrepreneur in residence at Ashoka, will write a series of reports documenting his experiences and the learning involved in started a "base of the pyramid" (BoP) healthcare venture to serve developing countries. This is his first report in the "Notes From the Field" series.

There I was, looking over the shoulder of a woman physician, in a unique 400+ seat medical call center in India, as she dealt with a female patient with abdominal pains. The patient was calling from her home on a mobile, had been initially engaged by a trained lay health worker, and then passed on to the doctor. 

As the doctor asked questions--guided by a software tool called a clinical decision support system--and selected the patient’s answers, the questions on the doctor’s computer screen changed. Within a few minutes, the doctor had isolated the problem, decided that she didn’t need to dispatch an ambulance, selected a medicine, and clicked on another tab that sent an e-prescription by text message to the patient’s phone. 

The patient can take that message on her mobile to a pharmacy and fill her prescription. The whole process took 3-4 minutes for the patient, and was free (subsidized by the state government). But it also didn’t cost the state much, because it only used a few minutes of the doctor’s time, so that she can deal with more than 100 patients in an 8-hour shift. No clinical office to rent or equip. No patient travel involved. Available when needed, 24-7. And trained lay health workers, paid perhaps a fifth of a doctor’s salary, handle 80% of the calls, so only 20% get passed on to doctors.

Thus, in economic terms, a single doctor is in effect overseeing the treatment of more than 500 patients per day. Of course, not all patients have problems treatable remotely—trauma, cancer, heart attacks and others will be referred to hospitals. But for many primary care problems, this is high quality, and very cost-effective, care.

It gets better. Another example concerns a young mother, calling late in the evening, distraught over her baby’s raging diarrhea. A lay health worker, guided by the smart software and short disease summaries, calmed the mother down and told her what to do. But, she asked, suppose it doesn’t work? All the clinics are closed now, and the hospital is hours away. So the health worker said, Why don’t you call us back every 2 hours—we’ll be here.

Imagine how wonderful that kind of help would be even here in the US. But this service is available exclusively to poor rural families in one state in India, for now. And it works—the call center handles 50,000 calls a day and is expanding to handle 3 times that number.

Truly, I felt I was looking at the future of healthcare. There aren’t enough doctors to provide traditional kinds of medical care in rural areas in virtually all developing countries. And there won’t be enough even in the US as the baby boom starts to age. So a more efficient model, based on de-skilling healthcare and using doctors very efficiently and only when their expert judgment is really needed, is inevitable. Maybe the Obama Administration should go take a look.

As for me, I’m convinced—I and my colleagues who are starting a health-based social enterprise in India are planning to partner with this call center in our pilot effort to transform rural healthcare. More about the struggle to finance that effort, in this market climate, in my next post.

Last Friday Rob wrote news about new Base of the Pyramid conversations taking place, this time in Davos. Great news indeed. For those who can attend, venues like that of Davos (or the one starting tomorrow in Long Beach) are the time of the year when they allow their brains get picked by new trends, challenges and ideas. Connections take place, not only in the form of business card exchanges but most importantly inside their minds, among concepts and issues, dots that previously seemed somewhat disconnected.

Rob also promised a more in depth analysis of the content of the Next Billions reports on our behalf. However, I've decided not to focus my scarce bandwidth on that tonight. The reports are available for everyone to read and I encourage you to do so. I encourage interested readers to leave their comments and raise particular aspects of interest for discussion.

I don't think the impact of WEF's reports (or any book/ report for that matter) will come from their detailed contents, hence my choice not to write detailed analysis tonight. They are valuable but not how-to manuals. The reports become significant as long as they're able to spark curiosity in readers, which may eventually drive them to continue exploring relationships between seemingly disconnected dots --development and enterprise in this case-- by reading further into them, looking for other sources, or taking action.

Just as part of the Davos-and-beyond WEF audiences are beginning to explore the connection between development and enterprise (and food security and enterprise through their second report), I am myself starting to to wonder and explore into what I think will be the defining "connection" during our generation and for the development community in particular: that between climate change and poverty.

I've been wondering about this for a while, motivated by unusual observations I made in recent trips to Colombia, where I saw unusually harsh and devastating floodings taking place last year and coast cities like Cartagena seeing sea levels rising in also unusual ways, although seeing and treating it as something temporary.
Coming back from those trips I e-mailed and then had coffee with Heather McGray, WRI's expert on this subject matter and since have tried to learn more about the concept adaptaion to climate change, choosing it as an area of interest amidst of the broader environmental debate.

Today, a new report helped me take a couple of steps forward down that line. Brookings' "Double Jeopardy: What the Climate Crisis Means for the Poor" crossed my desk and I expect to finish it tonight and start looking for something new on this area tomorrow, just like the Davos atendees are hopefully doing with their BoP material.
 
An explicit and focused conversation about the imminent effects of climate change and what they mean for BoP business approaches will start to take place, I believe, and I am in good company. My former colleague Derek begun to explore the "Green BoP nexus"; Change.org's Nathanial mentioned it as one of the defining trends for the social entrepreneurship movement in 2009; BOPreneur Paul Hudnut has made sustainability a key component of his latest BoP research; Grace once wrote a great profile about an innovative venture that works at that nexus.

All good, and I'll follow closely what develops in this area. However, I'll place special attention on climate change (the most imminent and prominently discussed manifestation of an imbalanced environment), its effects and the role of enterprise to help the poor cope with them.

"Development and Adaptation through Enterprise", if you will.

For now, back to reading... or to bed, perhaps.

The American Enterprise Institute  recently convened a two-day symposium on the future of U.S. development policy and foreign assistance. The nexus between development and enterprise was a recurring theme at the event, and participants discussed how entrepreneurial philanthropy, social entrepreneurship, and base-of-the-pyramid approaches to development will influence U.S. engagement in the developing world. We invite NextBillion.net readers to join the dialogue about foreign assistance under a new U.S. administration.

Guest blogger Apoorva Shah is a research assistant in Foreign and Defense Policy Studies at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington D.C.

By Apoorva Shah

Jenara Nerenberg's timely post on President Obama and the NextBillion.net agenda reminded readers that the new administration will make substantial changes in America's foreign assistance policies. Obama and his colleagues in Congress, most prominently Rep. Howard Berman (D-CA), chairman of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, have promised an ambitious and large-scale reform of the U.S. foreign aid system.

In this effort, will they consider the growing influence of entrepreneurial philanthropy, social entrepreneurship, and private sector based development in U.S. policies for engagement with the developing world?  And what role can the NextBillion community play in influencing these decisions?

The existing U.S. foreign assistance system is clearly antiquated, with 20^th century bureaucracies attempting to confront 21^st century challenges, and there has been minimal effort to reshape legislation written almost five decades ago (the 1961 Foreign Assistance Act). At the AEI symposium, discussant Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of GOOD Magazine and co-founder of Ethos Water, suggested that the United States could become an "investor" like many entrepreneurial philanthropists in the private sector.  "We could use the power of leverage to put one dollar in and get ten dollars out," he noted.  

But panelist Carol Adelman, director of the Center for Global Prosperity at the Hudson Institute, which produces the Index of Global Philanthropy, noted that private American contributions to the developing world - not including remittances - already trump that of official development aid. 

Entrepreneurial approaches to development have flourished because of these private donors - from the individual lender on Kiva.org to large-scale philanthropies like the Skoll Foundation. If the U.S. government were to support private sector led development, would social entrepreneurs have to sacrifice flexibility and independence for oversight?  How would funds be appropriated?  If the government venture fund worked anything like other spending, would bureaucrats in Washington decide which efforts receive funds in Africa or South East Asia?

Nevertheless, NextBillion bloggers frequently discuss the challenge of scaling entrepreneurial approaches to development.  As I wrote in a guest post last year, social entrepreneurs already operate in fields traditionally relegated to the public sector - health care, education, and electrification, for example. The U.S. could use aid money to help governments adopt the proven strategies of social entrepreneurs working in such fields and expand their impact.

In the end, the question is not about more or less aid, but whether our aid money achieves its intended purpose. Panelist Steven Radelet, senior fellow at the Center for Global Development, noted that there is almost unanimous agreement that the U.S. does not provide aid well. If the development through enterprise field can add more value to each aid dollar, then this is an ideal time to bring forth new ideas to the U.S. foreign assistance apparatus.

Unfortunately, too much of the debate in Washington has dwelled on foreign aid organizational structures (see HELP Commission or Modernizing Foreign Assistance Network) rather than best uses for the American aid dollar. In the end, it will not matter if there is a central development agency if the money we spend still does not support local entrepreneurs and private-sector-based approaches to development. Iqbal Quadir is right on the money.

The question now is: how can the NextBillion community get its voice heard in this debate? Partly, its work has already been done by showing rather than telling what works and what doesn't. What should be next?

Position: Pakistan Portfolio Manager

Location: Karachi, Pakistan

Organization: Acumen Fund is a global non-profit venture capital fund, focused on supporting the delivery of critical services – water, health, housing, energy – at affordable prices to the four billion people earning less than four dollars a day in India, Pakistan, and East Africa.  Acumen Fund seeks to prove that small amounts of philanthropic capital, combined with large doses of business acumen, can build thriving enterprises that serve vast numbers of the poor.  Acumen Fund has successfully impacted over 10 million lives so far, through over $30 million invested in South Asia and Africa. Its country offices in India, Pakistan and Kenya work closely with the New York team to identify and support local social enterprises.   Through our investments we address problems of poverty using market based approaches, demonstrating that there is a role for patient capital, intensive management assistance, and knowledge sharing at the base of the pyramid.  Since 2001, Acumen Fund has functioned under a philanthropic capital model, raising donations to fund investments in enterprises that deliver health, water, housing or energy to the poor.  In 2008, we launched an invested capital fund that will operate side by side with our philanthropic fund, making investments in enterprises that support the poor.

Description: The Pakistan Portfolio Manager will play a senior role within Acumen Fund Pakistan office, working closely with the Pakistan Country Director to develop and manage Acumen Fund’s investment portfolio in Pakistan. The Pakistan Portfolio Manager will also work with other members of Acumen Fund’s global portfolio team to identify, analyze and structure prospective investments as well as play a leadership role in ongoing management and technical assistance for existing investments in Pakistan. Additionally, the Portfolio Manager will also play a key role in business development, working with the Country Director to develop and manage key partnerships in the country, as well as attracting Talent towards Acumen Fund and our investees. The Portfolio Manager will report to the Pakistan Country Director.

For more information on this position, including how to apply, see the job description.

Position: Search and Selection Associate

Location: New York

Organization: Founded in 1997, Endeavor works with High-Impact Entrepreneurs in Latin America, the Middle East, South Africa, and India. High-Impact Entrepreneurs are operating for-profit businesses with enormous growth potential. Endeavor supports these entrepreneurs by providing access to mentors, strategic advice, management talent, capital, and inspiration. In turn, these entrepreneurs create jobs and wealth in their countries. To date, Endeavor has selected 406 High-Impact Entrepreneurs running 266 companies. These entrepreneurs have created over 86,000 jobs and, in 2007, $2.51BB in revenues.

Description: As a Search & Selection Associate, this person will be involved in a core part of Endeavor's model for identifying high-impact entrepreneurs in emerging markets. Together with the Search & Selection Director and a small (2 person) S&S team, he/she will oversee and coordinate Endeavor’s globally-managed, locally-run Search & Selection process to screen and select new Endeavor Entrepreneurs. Based in Endeavor's New York Headquarters, the individual will be working with staff and entrepreneurs throughout Latin America, South Africa, the MENA region, and India.

For more information, including how to apply, please see the attached job description.

Position: Summer Associates (varied roles)

Locations: Multiple

• New York, NY
• Karachi, Pakistan
• Hyderabad, India
• Nairobi, Kenya

Organization: Acumen Fund is a non-profit global venture fund that uses entrepreneurial approaches to solve the problems of global poverty. We seek to prove that small amounts of philanthropic capital, combined with large doses of business acumen, can build thriving enterprises that serve vast numbers of the poor. Our investments focus on delivering affordable, critical goods and services – like health, water, housing and energy – through innovative, market-oriented approaches.

Description: Acumen Fund seeks Summer Associates for roles in the New York, Karachi, Hyderabad and Nairobi offices.  There are openings in the following offices/roles for 2009:

• Portfolio Associates - New York (2)
• Portfolio Associates - Pakistan (3-4)
• Portfolio Associates - India (2-3)
• Portfolio Associates - East Africa (3)
• Knowledge & Communications Associate - New York (1)
• Business Development and Communications Associate - Pakistan (1)

Full information, including position descriptions and instructions on how to apply, can be found on the Work with Acumen page of the Acumen Fund web site.

Application deadline is February 20, 2009.