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Business Action for Africa's report From Crisis to Opportunity: Harnessing the Power of Business to Sustain Progress Towards the MDGs is hardly ground-breaking in its arguments.  It presents, through the voices of influential leaders in business, development, and academia, a series of strategic imperatives that will mitigate the damage caused by the financial crisis and steady African progress toward the MDGs.  What I appreciate about the report is the re-orientation of the MDG-driven development agenda in terms of the impact of the financial crisis on Africa.

Perhaps this is not entirely surprising because collectively, Africa was unlikely to reach these goals before the financial maelstrom emerged, as the Chairman of Anglo American Sir Mark Moody-Stuart points out.  However, it is useful to frame the dialogue in way that explicitly acknowledges the systemic link between the failure of global financial institutions and the economic progress made by African countries.  After all,Paul Collier, Oxford Professor notes that "Africa's growing integration into the global economy" pulled it into the mêlée, resulting in a reduction in FDI and trouble in the commodity markets.

Moody-Stuart goes on to assert a well-worn, but highly appropriate warning against protectionism in response to the disaster, a sentiment that is echoed throughout the report.  Instead, the challenge should be met by the re-doubling of efforts to address the long-standing agricultural, infrastructural, and regulatory challenges that the continent faces, as well as trade liberalization and resource extraction dependence.  The familiar call to action also includes pushing richer nations to assist poorer ones; encouraging the private sector to collaborate with government to create healthier investment climates and business linkages; and focusing on providing the basics, such as food security, healthcare, and education. Although the report reads a bit like an institutional showcase, highlighting the priorities, initiatives, and accomplishments of the organizations featured, there is some interesting commentary.  

My favorite bit of analysis, one that literally put a smile on my face, is offered by Richard Laing, Chief Executive of the CDC,"the biggest private equity investor in Africa." According to Mr. Laing:

Any simple prognosis for the continent's economic future ignores the fact that there are 48 countries in sub-Saharan Africa with differing economies and at varying stages of development. It is action, not talk, that is required.  Of course, as the global financial crisis brings about falls in foreign aid, commodity prices and remittances, it is clear that no country will emerge unscathed. Some nations like South Africa are already in recession and those economies with a greater reliance on exports and trade with the West are undoubtedly bearing the brunt of the crisis. However, we should caution against too much doom-mongering. Many African countries are still growing on the back of strong domestic demand and consumer  markets, with Uganda, Ghana, Nigeria and Rwanda as prime examples.

Bravo, Mr. Laing.  He also contends that African businesses, especially those that serve local and regional markets, are sorely in need of capital.  Companies like these will serve as the engines of economic growth and contribute to the fight against poverty.  Another interesting excerpt by Gabriel Solomon, Senior Vice President, GSMA, highlights the tremendous impact of telecom on African development:Across Africa the mobile industry employs more than 3.5 million people today. It will generate  $71 billion in tax revenues between 2000-2012. And it is a substantial generator of economic  growth, responsible for around 6% of East Africa's GDP in 2008. A 10% increase in mobile penetration boosts GDP by 1.2% in a typical emerging market.
He also makes a rather cogent observation about the need for cross-sector cooperation with telecom, i.e. the development of supportive financial regulations and the co-location of telecom infrastructure with that of utilities.

Other notable initiatives include DFID's North South Corridor project, which aims to improve the efficiency of trading routes between Southern and Eastern Africa by improving ports, roads, railways, and customs processes, and efforts made by Diageo and SABMiller to source sorghum and barley locally.Although the report was quite informative, two questions lingered in my mind upon completing it.  First, "Why do new challenges still garner old solutions?"   While many of the concerns highlighted remain critical, new dilemmas have emerged, such as the need to assure African citizens that their financial institutions are trustworthy (and actually ensure that they are so), an observation made by DeBeers Chairman Nicky Oppenheimer.

The second question, and perhaps the more troubling of the two is, "Where are the African captains of industry, academicians and civil society leaders?" Kofi Anan,Obiageli Ezekwesili and Omari Issa and Nicky Oppenheimer are featured prominently in the report, but appear to be lone voices. Oppenheimer notes this as well---"African leaders need to continuously engage with, and play a constructive leadership role in, the global forums that address these key issues."

The question is how do we make that happen?  If it's a pipeline issue, part of me thinks (and I apologize for sounding trite) that there should be a mandatory "take a rising star to work" policy so that more emerging African leaders become privy to these debates.  Reports like these could also feature excerpts from new voices in the field; Dambisa Moyo comes to mind.  Regardless, surely a wider set of stakeholders could have been invited to weigh in.In any case, the report is new andt the debate ripe for commentary.  Be sure to check out the report and voice your opinion here.

Infodev and UNESCO have developed a new discussion and debate forum to explore the role of ICT in learning in developing countries. Called the Educational Technology Debate, it promotes a multi-week discussion over one month with two participants debating two sides of an argument, and additional user comments supporting or refuting either side. Check out the latest debate between myself and Walter Bender, CEO of Sugar Labs, the non-profit organization that provides the software for the XO laptop of One Laptop Per Child, and recently, the "Sugar on a Stick v1 Strawberry" which allows users to experience Sugar on any computer through a USB flash device.

I started the debate with a position that supports shared access computing as a more economically feasible approach than 1:1 computing (1 computer per 1 student), the premise being  that with very limited resources available to governments, it is better to get more students access to a shared computing device part time than it is to significantly fewer students access all the time.  

Over the next few weeks we will post additional responses and potentially evolve our position.  So join the debate and comment on the current discussion at 1:1 Saturations and Computer Labs: Can Their Benefits Bring a New Model?

In "Making Better Investments at the Base of the Pyramid," Ted London of the University of Michigan points out that even though most ventures serving the world's poor have feel-good stories and data on milestones, most of them lack a systematic way to assess how well they're reaching the people they set out to serve.  Too often, the wrong indicators - milestones and tasks accomplished - are used, and these fail to capture the complete picture.  London argues that without understanding exactly whom their ventures benefit and how, managers cannot effectively build on the approaches that work, and avoid those that do not.

London has developed a more holistic approach - the Base of the Pyramid Impact Assessment Framework - that guides managers through a detailed look at the impact a BoP venture has on the economics, capabilities, and relationships of local buyers, local sellers, and local communities.  The framework identifies and examines negative as well as positive effects. 

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Some years after CK Prahalad's book, business activities and entrepreneurial initiatives targeting low-income communities have been blooming, being covered extensively on NextBillion.net and other sources.  Looking into leading journals on economic and management issues, the issue is less prominent and the debate apparently has been slow in reaching wider circles of scholars. Poverty is still a neglected topic in areas like international business research, for example.

Does this matter? Some feel it does. Very early in the debate, a team of academics warned that Prahalad (and 4 billion people more...) might "wake up disappointed" if we do not develop a sound understanding how business and poverty really interact. Research on inclusive markets at the BoP is a challenging task, however, especially for young researcher and PhD students. Luckily, innovations are out there. Some researchers set up elaborate experiments to see what is working for the poor - handing malaria nets out for free in some, selling them in other villages. While the complex and entangled realities of poverty make it hard to apply classic tools in a straightforward manner, young researchers need to find their way through a jungle of methods, disciplines and new research designs and also get their field work done in the conditions of developing economies.

Targeted at PhD students and young faculty working on poverty and sustainable development from a management or economics perspective, oikos and UNDP have launched the oikos UNDP Young Scholars Development Academy. The academy will feature one-week intense discussions of their ongoing research projects with fellow students and senior faculty. Invited faculty are Jonathan P. Doh (US), Ashok Som (France) and David Wheeler (Canada), who will work together with the aspiring young scholars. To assure that results are relevant, participants have the opportunity to apply their insights and skills in a practitioner day with responAbility Social Investments from Zürich, Switzerland. Scholarships covering travel, participation fee and housing are made available by UNDP's Growing Inclusive Markets initiative.

For those not going for the academic track in live: What open question of yours would you ask an aspiring academic to spend his precious PhD years on? The call for papers is out and submissions will be accepted until September 15.  

There are dozens of motives for people to work in the business of development and I've been pondering the psychology of "giving" and what drives people to want to work in international aid, donate to charities, work for non-profits, and generally work in an environment where there is a heightened desire to help others. I majored in political theory at UC Berkeley, conjuring up ways of creating a more just world and how we should collectively govern it. For me, thinking about how to help people out of poverty has always been about justice and fairness. So what drives you?

Katherine Fulton, in a recently released TED Talk from 2007, talks about leaders a century ago who engaged in the "business of benevolence," those who created modern Western philanthropy as we know it, in the form of foundations. Those same people are now criticized as being closed-minded, risk-averse, and slow to respond to new challenges, because of the bureaucratic evolution of those foundations and the sharp contrast of more current, cutting-edge tools of philanthropy as found on the internet. Fulton goes on to discuss the need for philanthropy to become a big, crowdsourced act, "the democratization of philanthropy" as she calls it, that we have started to see in organizations like Kiva, Spot.Us, DonorsChoose, Ideablob, and numerous others.

The phrase, "business of benevolence," took me back to my studies in political theory, where the phrase itself sounds a bit Machiavellian. The utility of "giving" to one's subjects, whereby giving is simply a means to achieving what you want (the maintenance of power) and not a selfless act, could be deemed as yet another motive for working in public service.  

I had a Professor of Public Health Ethics who praised his students as "saints" for choosing a field that required us to be so giving and sacrificial. He went on to describe his preoccupation with "status" and the meaning of being appointed Professor and at a school as prestigious as Harvard. He was very matter of fact and was simply trying to differentiate those who choose a career that very clearly focuses on helping others from those careers where helping others is a side benefit. Now, it can be argued that most positions help people in some way, such as Professor or banker or real estate agent. But, the decision to work in development is a decision to help people (or so we assume we are helping people).

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Changemakers is one of the web's most dynamic and interesting destinations for those of us interested in ideas and their power to advance tangible change in the lives of the "next billion". Its recent re-design and the upcoming finals for one of their competitions (one very much in the vein of development through enterprise) are reasons compelling enough for me to ask you: have you been to Changemakers lately? If the answer is no, well it's about time. 

Their new site is refreshing in so many ways. Visually it a made a great leap forward, showing beautiful pictures that introduce their variuous competitions, like the ones that ends in just five days which is focused on innovations to improve the lives of rural communities.  It also has other new and interesting features such as a space for stories, a summary of Changemakers and solutions by country and a space where anyone can start group discussions on topic related to social change.

The site (and competitions in general) serves a very important purpose: it helps unveil many solutions and entrepreneurs out there, who would otherwise remain unheard of. This platform opens up the space for people interested to identify previous entries ideas in their topic and region of interest. The one thing I'm not 100% on board with is Changemakers' prize structure. Cash prizes (which are the norm at least in the competitions I've checked out before... I hereby confess I've not  looked at every one of them) only go so far. Most of the entries in compatitions like Changemakers are entrepreneurs who would find other prizes much more useful for the purpose of launching their ventures.

Sure, you can argue that the competition's prize is not only cash but also recognition and visibility, which are also of great importance. Agreed. But how about recognition plus visbility plus, say, a scholarship at business incubator such as GSBI? Or a scholarship to travel and participate in the next IDDS or Maker Faire? Each competition draws a different pool of entrepreneurs who may benefit from different opportunities and connections that may well replace or add to the current cash prizes. 

The good news is that "prize design" is becoming more of a science and less of an art. At least that's my takeaway after reading Rob's entry on Incentive2Innovate, thanks to which I found out that McKinsey has been doing some thinking on the subject of prizes and competitions for social change. (A bit off topic but this is not the only fascinating thing McKinsey has surprised me with lately. Have you been to What Matters?)

I look forward to continuing the conversation on the topic and prizes and competitions in BoP contexts. In fact, stay tuned for what I hope will be an interesting interview with a researcher on the topic. However, this shouldn't be a distraction from the original purpose of this post: Check out the new Changemakers. If anyone in this space is testing ideas in this area for the rest of us to take action and comment, they are the ones.  

Husk Power Systems, a company we profiled here on NextBillion back in October, was announced today as the winner of the Global Business Plan competition sponsored by Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Cisco Systems.  As the winning entrant, Husk Power walks away with $250,000 in seed funding, which they will use to build and operate more power plants in rural areas of Bihar, India's poorest state.

Congratulations to Chip Ransler, Manoj Sinha and the rest of the Husk Power Systems team on this big win.  They have been featured in the Wall Street Journal, Fast Company and FOX Business.  More PR will inevitably follow.

I am personally extremely excited about this development, not only because I know and like Chip and Manoj.  Part of my excitement stems from the fact that Husk Power is working in some of the poorest, worst-served parts of India - Bihar - that are hardest-hit by the poverty penalty.  Many BoP-focused companies work in relatively better-off urban areas or peri-urban villages, where average incomes are higher and consequently, so is ability to pay.

But the single biggest factor that has me so excited about this is that the Global Business Plan venture competition was not limited to socially-focused businesses.  Rather, Draper Richards and Cisco collected thousands of entries from companies around the world, most of them focused on a single bottom line.  That the winner is a legitimate triple bottom line company - generating financial, social AND environmental benefits - shows how much the social sector is mainstreaming in the eyes of "non-social" investors.

Much remains to be seen - Husk Power remains a start up, and will for the foreseeable future - but, at least for today, there is reason to celebrate in Bihar.