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NextBillion News vol.16 -- 22 August, 2007
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Where Business and Development Meet: We’re back!

[Contents]

1. Bill Kramer: Changing of the Guard – A Message to the Next Billion community

2. Featured blog posts: BusinessWeek on BOP - A False Dichotomy? Immigrants Build Houses in Mexico with Remittances – The Case of Construmex

3. Rising Ventures: Berni Labs

4. Featured Activities: Wulff Capital

5. Upcoming Event: Business With Four Billion: Creating Mutual Value at the Base of the Pyramid

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1. Changing of the Guard – By Bill Kramer, Deputy Director of Development Through Enterprise

With this blog post, I am signing off as a staff member of WRI. Mine has been a long tenure in this field, almost six years exactly, and it’s an appropriate time for a bit of historical perspective.

I arrived at the program when it was called "Digital Dividends" and it was building from a seminal conference some six months previously. At that time, the program focused exclusively on the positive impacts of the information and communications technology (ICT) revolution. Project director Al Hammond had it right; ICTs were the vanguard and deserved serious study. ICTs remain today the best poster child for business engagement with the poor and for the positive economic development impacts they can generate.

As with CK Prahalad and Stu Hart (see the first featured post below for more history), our program evolved, and ICTs took an appropriate back-seat as the enabling tools for broader and deeper development impacts and economic empowerment of the poor. A second conference, "Eradicating Poverty through Profits: Making Business Work for the Poor," for which I acted as co-director and day-to-day manager, revolutionized the discipline in December, 2004 (conference papers and presentations can still be found on NextBillion, http://www.nextbillion.net/sfconference). If you haven’t looked at the resource, do; nearly three years on, it still represents an amazing (and remarkably prescient) sampling of the expertise, research directions, and future of the field.

Shortly, I will be creating a company to focus on executive education, training, and workshop/seminar development and management in the area of business engagement with low-income communities, and the other paradigm-shifting challenges facing business, civil society, and governments, including all of WRI’s concerns – climate change, ecosystem services, and governance. Why now? Because there is clearly a need and hunger for rigorous education and training in these areas. On every campus I go to the story is the same: all courses on the BOP or CSR are fully enrolled, and students want more. Businesses are saying, "OK, we get it. We can be part of the solution; tell us how." Governments around the world are looking for policy guidance. And there is a real shortage of coherent, problem-solving toolkits. I hope to address this need in some small way. So, this is not good-bye, but merely a change-of-address. You’ll be hearing from me (perhaps more frequently, actually) as this new task evolves.

I will retain my WRI email for a few months: wkramer@wri.org; you can also reach me at william.j.kramer@gmail.com.

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2. Featured blog posts from NextBillion.net’s home page

BusinessWeek on BOP - A False Dichotomy?

When C.K. Prahalad and Stuart Hart first wrote about the "bottom of the pyramid" (later changed to "base" by Stuart Hart in his work), they focused on both selling to the poor and "increasing the earning potential of the poor" (page 6). Later, Allen Hammond and C.K. Prahalad co-authored an article with the unfortunate title (not the authors’ choice) of “Selling to the Poor.”

Even so, these articles were early entrants in the BOP canon. Things have changed substantially since then, with BOP strategies now focusing on enterprise development, investment in local industry, and job creation as well as serving BOP consumers. Acumen Fund, a VC firm investing in start-ups serving and employing the BOP, was quoted in the BusinessWeek piece. Is Acumen simply "selling to the poor"? Absolutely not.

Read more…

Immigrants Build Houses in Mexico with Remittances - The Case of Construmex

Many immigrants come to work in the US, and when they do, they usually leave family behind. Often, their primary objective is to make money and provide for their families back home. Some companies - like the Mexico-based multinational cement giant CEMEX - are taking advantage of this situation and are starting to productize remittances. Instead of sending cash to their families back home, immigrants using a program called Construmex send aid in the form of housing materials.

Read more…

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3. Rising Ventures: Berni Labs

The crop duster crashing and dumping pesticides into the Los Mochis water supply was bad enough. But when a warehouse blaze released toxic agrochemicals into the air, causing respiratory illnesses among farmers and their families in the area, Jorge Berni knew there had to be a better way.

Jorge had twenty years of experience as an organic farmer but in the wake of this series of ecological disasters, he decided to apply his chemical expertise and his principled stance on sustainable practices to form Berni Labs and create a pesticide alternative. His product, Bug Balancer, has expanded its appeal as a safe, highly effective agrochemical from the local agriculture community in which he works to the far corners of Mexico, and more recently to the international market.

This company is well worth highlighting because it gives farmers in Mexico’s agriculturally-driven rural economies a safe and affordable method by which to protect their crops. Conventional pesticides cause serious health issues, entering water supplies, and being absorbed into laborers’ bodies on contact. Bug Balancer allows farmers to continue their economically sustainable practices while protecting themselves and their communities.

Read more…

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4. Featured Business Activity Database Entry: Wulff Capital

Activity Description:

Wulff Capital assists African entrepreneurs in commercializing their health innovations. These innovative products can improve wellbeing and lower health costs on a global scale. Product commercialization can create new jobs and protect botanic diversity.

Due Diligence
Extensive network of business incubation professionals recruit the best innovations and entrepreneurs to participate in the program. They screen these entrepreneurs for passion, expertise, and ethics. Then they screen their products for market demand, competitive environment and profit potential.

Entrepreneur Support
Once they have chosen to work with an entrepreneur, they support his/her product commercialization with:

* Advice on strategy, product and business development;

* Industry representation;

* Capital resource introductions;

* Agreement negotiations; and

* Sales and Marketing assistance.

Read more…

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5. Upcoming Event: Business With Four Billion: Creating Mutual Value at the Base of the Pyramid

September 9-11, 2007

Ann Arbor, Michigan

The William Davidson Institute at the University of Michigan and the Center for Sustainable Global Enterprise at Cornell University are pleased to host Business with Four Billion: Creating Mutual Value at the Base of the Pyramid. This conference will be held in Ann Arbor, Michigan on September 9-11 and is co-sponsored by the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan.

The conference builds on the growing global interest in enterprise-based strategies for serving the four billion poor at the base of the economic pyramid (BoP). It will bring together the foremost BoP business managers, policy makers, social entrepreneurs, academics, and non-profit leaders to share the latest thinking and further build the community in this emerging and dynamic field.

In particular, the conference will focus on exploring three of the most intriguing and timely challenges facing organizations that operate at the BoP. These include: understanding the landscape of the base of the pyramid, evaluating the development implications of enterprise-based approaches to poverty alleviation, and exploring the capabilities organizations need to develop successful BoP-oriented ventures.

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NextBillion News vol. 16 - August 22, 2007

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Thank you,

Development Through Enterprise Team
World Resources Institute

http://www.nextbillion.net
http://www.wri.org
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