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Changemakers - the Ashoka spinoff that uses "collaborative competitions" to identify innovative social enterprise models - is at it again.  Their latest competition, sponsored by the Gates Foundation - is looking for "[i]nnovative solutions that span the entire agricultural value chain – from seeds to sales."  It's called "Cultivating Innovation: Solutions for Rural Communities."

(We have written about Changemakers in the past - they ran a great water & sanitation challenge, one on banking, one on health innovations, one on housing...and those are just the "bottom of the pyramid" focused competitions!)

If you haven't heard of Changemakers before, here's how it works: Project prospectuses are nominated or submitted online, then discussed and reviewed by the global Changemakers community.  During the disucssion period, a panel of expert judges selects the competition finalists.  Once the finalists are selected, Changemakers opens up the process to its community.  The top vote-getters earn $5000 USD prizes.

The entry deadline is still about a month away (enter by May 13) and there are already 102 submitted entries as of this morning - with $15000 in prizes at stake, I'm not surprised.  Even more, there are incentives for Indian companies in particular to get involved - CyberMedia, a media firm, will produce short spots on selected Indian winners.  In addition, the Rural Innovations Network will provide incubation services for Indian winners.

Read the full competition guidelines here; please consider nominating a worthy project or submitting your own prospectus.  At the very least, you will get the word out about your work...and there's always the chance of a $5000 prize, a TV spot and an incubator waiting!

Added bonus: NextBillion.net ally and TED Africa director Emeka Okafor is one of the judges.  Longtime NextBillion.net readers will undoubtedly know Emeka's top-notch Timbuktu Chronicles blog.  You can even follow him on Twitter these days! @emeka_okafor. 

Good luck to the participants - NextBillion.net will check in periodically and report back on the winners.

I live and work in Kathmandu, Nepal, one of the poorest countries in the world, where GDP per capita is $1,100, 42% of the population is unemployed, and 65% of women are illiterate. Recently, I had some expatriate friends say to me that living here is the hardest place they've lived, even harder than living with the daily threats of violence in Afghanistan. I personally do not feel that way but when I pressed them on why, it was clear that the fact that we only have power for 8 hours per day played a role in their uneasiness, as did the roads, overcrowding, pollution, lack of infrastructure, high rates of TB (almost 50% of the population) and more. To me this is all part of living and working in a developing country.

I wanted to take a moment to focus on Nepal in this post. We all study, breathe, and agonize over how to help countries develop and sometimes I think it's odd that we don't have an elixir, some magic formula that we can simply put in place and poof! magic happens, democracy is restored, people's bellies are full, families earn a strong income, and all else positive that comes with development magically happens.

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The Global Social Benefit Incubator (GSBI) - the scholarship-only, base-of-the-pyramid entrepreneur bootcamp worth $20,000 - has announced its class of 2009.  When it comes to taking good ideas and nurturing them into real, viable companies, GSBI is in select company.  Previous GSBI scholarship recipients include Matt Flannery from Kiva, Graham Macmillan from VisionSpring and a host of other now-successful entrepreneurs serving BoP markets with critical goods and services.

The Incubator, held at Santa Clara University every summer, re-convenes this year with a class made up of 4 sub-categories: ICT applications, economic development, environment/energy, and health/education.  I'm particularly excited to learn that Manoj Sinha, of Husk Power Systems, was selected.  And I'll look forward to learning more about the class when the Insitute takes place later this summer.

In the meantime, check out all the winners on the GSBI page at SocialEdge.

The Financial Access Initiative (FAI) - a consortium of development economists funded by the Gates Foundation - is at the forefront when it comes to financial research for base of the pyramid markets.  I have long admired the work of Jonathan Morduch and Sendhil Mullainathan, two of FAI's directors.

Earlier today, I received word that Morduch - with 3 co-authors - has written a new book, entitled Portfolios of the Poor: How the Poor Live on Less Than $2 a Day.  According to the FAI web site:

The book reports on the yearlong "financial diaries" of villagers and slum dwellers in Bangladesh, India, and South Africa--records that track penny by penny how specific households manage their money. The stories of these families are often surprising and inspiring. Most poor households do not live hand to mouth, spending what they earn in a desperate bid to keep afloat. Instead, they employ financial tools, many linked to informal networks and family ties. They push money into savings for reserves, squeeze money out of creditors whenever possible, run sophisticated savings clubs, and use microfinancing wherever available.

I have not read the book, nor have I spoken to its authors; therefore, I must reserve judgement until it's released.  But knowing the quality of FAI's work - and Morduch's in particular - I cannot help but get excited by its prospects.  There is preciously little known about the micro-level spending patterns of low-income individuals.  With 4 co-authors, I attempted to tackle this question a couple years ago, which culminated in a macro-level estimate (The Next 4 Billion: Market Size and Business Strategy for the Base of the Pyramid).

Micro is relatively virgin territory.  A notable exception is the excellent scholarship coming out of MIT's Poverty Action Lab.  Still, it's exciting to see this new book on the horizon.  In conjunction with the book launch, the FAI is hosting an event at NYU next month with Morduch, co-author Daryl Collins, Economist editor Matthew Bishop and White Man's Burden author (and NYU professor) William Easterly.

The eponymous event will be held Thursday, May 7 from 6:00 to 8:00 PM in New York.  I plan to attend - if you're coming, let me know and maybe we can meet up.

This year (well... no, not "this year", actually next week!) will see the first gathering of WRI's initiative to promote sustainabe entrepreneurship in Colombia: New Ventures Colombia. For those of you less familiar with WRI and New Ventures, we work with local partners in emerging economies and bring together critical elements (investors, mentors, advisors, research, connections) that, working together and in coordination, constitute ecosystems of support that enable the growth and visibility of entrepreneurial solutions to the challenges of poverty and environmental degradation.

Our partner in Colombia is Universidad de los Andes and 2009 the first year of operations for the program. Let me tell you briefly about the entrepreneurs and then a couple of words about who's coming to the venue and our vision for the program. We began working last year and identified a group of companies that are now part of the New Ventures portfolio. The companies have been working with local consultants and mentors for the last eight weeks, improving and sharpening their business plans, and also putting together their pitches to present them to potential investors. 

The forum next week will serve the purpose of showcasing these entrepreneurs, as well as connecting them with investors and people interested in this idea. It will also serve as a venue to bring the interesting and vibrant SME/ SGB/ impact investment/ you-name-it conversation to Colombia. Randall Kempner, executive director of the Aspen Network for Development Entrepreneurs (ANDE) will be joining us as will representatives from organizations like Agora Partnerships, Bamboo Finance, Grupo Ecos, Ecoempresas and Verde Ventures.

I'm really lookig forward to the conversations that will take place between local investors, entrepreneurs and the representatives from these organizations. In fact, one of the things I've become most aware spending more time in Colombia lately is that I (and aguably we, regular NextBillion.net readers) really suffer from what the Heath brothers call "Knowledge Curse". That is, we become used to talking about this all day almost every day; we're part of a community that is very passionate about it; we all read the same papers and attend the same events. Hence, it's easy to assume that everybody else knows what we're talking about and knows that there's such a thing called ANDE, and social investment, and patient capital, and the list goes on and on...

Not true. Far from it. This is why I know (and hope) next week's forum will be only the first brick of a building that will take many years to take its final shape, a humble effort to start making these interesting conversations more inclusive and, of course, hopefully see some deals take place for the benefit of the entrepreneurs.

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To most NextBillion.net readers the name Esther Duflo may not ring a bell at all. However, those who have received some formal training in development economics will instantly know who she is. Esther Duflo is probably one of the most important people in development economics at barely the age of 35. Currently a professor at MIT (where she got her PhD in Economics) Duflo has seen her work published in the most important academic journals, has received a huge amount of academic honors such as the highly prestigious Elaine Bennet Prize for Research by the American Economic Association in 2003 and has been included as one of the 100 top public intellectuals by Foreign Policy. More recently The Economist named her as one of the most promising young economists.

How has she made such a splash in such a short time? In two words: randomized experiments. The basics of randomized experiment methodology are relatively straight forward. A researcher selects a group of people for a study. A random selection of this group receives a treatment (such as vaccination, better quality classes or a loan) and a control group receives either a placebo or nothing. Both groups of people are examined before and after the treatment. Since the individuals belonging to both groups are similar any differences between them after the treatment are assumed to be due to the treatment. By comparing both groups we can get a more exact idea of the impact of the treatment. This statistical technique is very similar to that used when conducting clinical trials and, if properly conducted, is one of the easiest to interpret, since it involves comparing the means from the treatment and the control group, but one of the most powerful, because it conclusively proves causality.

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You know you want to be a Pop!Tech Fellow.  Or you know someone who will want to be.

Either way, now's the time to act.  The 2008 Fellows were a great bunch - including base-of-the-pyramid innovators like Husk Power Systems, Por Fin Nuestra Casa, Mobile Metrix, Ushahidi.com and more.  Think you have what it takes to join this select company?  Pop!Tech just announced its selection process for up to 15 next-generation world-changing people who are incubating new approaches to some of the world's toughest challenges.  They're called Social Innovation Fellows.

Fellows participate in an all-expenses-paid, multi-day intensive development program focused on insights, tools and skills for accelerating and scaling "big bet" innovations in areas like healthcare, energy, development, mobile technology, climate, education, and civic engagement, among others. Fellows receive world-class training in areas like branding, design, measuring impact, media relations, social/Web2.0 media, finance, leadership, digital storytelling and organizational development. These session are led by remarkable leaders in these areas.

After the program, Fellows participate in and present at the Pop!Tech conference, which will take place this year from October 21-24, 2009 in Camden, Maine. Fellows receive prominent placement at the conference, including arranged interviews and collaborative sessions with leading journalists and sessions with members of the Pop!Tech network dedicated to helping them amplify their work and profile. Here are some of the absolutely fantastic presentations from the Fellows class of 2008.

If you are or know someone who should be a 2009 Social Innovation Fellow, nominate them here.

A couple of months ago, after reading an excellent Brookings report, I suggested here that a growing interest in the cross-implications of poverty and of climate change was set to become the new hot topic in ours and the traditional development space. A couple of events I've recently come across signal that this is actually beginning to happen. Climate change adaptaion, it seems, is quickly becoming the new buzz word in the development and BoP spheres.

To begin with, the Ateneo School of Government in the Philippines and the iBoP Asia program hosted a discussion on entrepreneurial approaces to cope with the effects of climate change, just over a month ago. Jenara interviewed iBoP's Tony LaVina and NextBillion.net ally Niti Bhan pointed us to the proceedings from this interesting gathering which you can read here.

Back in the U.S., New York will see a major conference this summer whose area of focus will be the intersection between entrepreneurial solutions to poverty and environmental sustainability. Put together by Cornell's Johnson School of Business, the Global Forum on Sustainable Enterprise will convene thought leaders like Stuart Hart, Al Gore, and practitioners like Ratan Tata.

Finally, and along the same lines, the Wold Bank's Development Marketplace has recently started to gather applications for its 2009 competition, which will focus on grassroot solutions to, again, climate change adaptation.

It's promising to see this nexus between BoP and green starting to go mainstream. For more information on what climate change adaptation actually is and how it's being discussed at the international climate negotiations, I encourage you to read Heather McGray's recent posting on WRI.org, part of a larger series that seeks to build broader understanding about these issues as we move closer to Copenhagen this next December.

Stay tuned for more coverage from these and other events and ventures that are decidedly tackling it.