Win up to $4k for a BoP short essay

4^th Annual BoP Short-Essay Competition

The Center for Sustainable Global Enterprise at Cornell University’s Johnson Graduate School of Management is pleased to announce its 2010-2011 Base of the Pyramid (BoP) Short Essay Competition co-sponsored by USAID and IFC. This competition seeks to highlight the challenges of implementing business in underserved markets and identify innovative business initiatives or solutions to those challenges.

Winning submissions must clearly articulate a business challenge that an organization working in a low-income community is striving to overcome. The description must describe in detail the business model and include a financial analysis of the business. Business models may be successful or unsuccessful, provided the challenge and solution-attempt is elaborated upon.

Submissions must be less than 1000 words, in English, and submitted no later than midnight, January 19, 2011. Prizes range from $1000-$4000.

For more details visit: www.johnson.cornell.edu/sge.

Impact investing jobs!

Check out the GIIN's new Career Center.

NYT article on Indian microfinance sector

Here's the NYT article Prof Bugg-Levine discussed in class.

Impact Investments: An Emerging Asset Class, published by J.P Morgan Global Research

Check it out: Impact investments: An emerging asset class is a research note published by J.P. Morgan Global Research and is the result of collaboration between Social Finance at J.P. Morgan and The Rockefeller Foundation, in partnership with the Global Impact Investment Network.

BIID happy hour

We're good to go at Amsterdam Restaurant Wednesday evening after class, starting around 6pm. Address: 1207 Amsterdam Ave. Head to the downstairs bar. CBS will cover a drink (or two, depending on how many of us show up) for everyone, including tips, but beyond that you're on your own.

Indian Village Bans Cellphones for Unmarried Women

We learned that "women" and "cellphones" are the keywords for successful business models in developing countries. However, this village sees cellphones as tools that arrange forbidden marriages.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703572404575634140904060312.html

Emergence of "social business"

A conversation with serial social entrepreneur Shaffi Mather

Free for students: BOP Innovation to Address Social Needs and Corruption: A conversation with Shaffi Mather, Serial Social Entrepreneur This event is part of the Nand and Jeet Khemka Distinguished Speaker Forum and is sponsored by the Jerome A. Chazen Institute of International Business. In 2005 Shaffi Mather launched Dial 1298 for Ambulance — a program that attempted to fill the need for universally accessible, high-quality emergency medical services in India. By 2009, with additional support from the Acumen Fund, 1298 operated more than 90 ambulances in Mumbai and several other locations in India. See the Columbia CaseWorks abstract on Dial 1298 for Ambulance. Mather is a lawyer, public policy analyst, and prolific social entrepreneur, creating other enterprises that address social needs, including Education Access for All, a network of schools in villages across India with cross-subsidy access to economically underprivileged students. Mather also works with MokshaYugAccess (MYA), a rural supply chains solutions company. Monday, November 22, 2010 6:00 – 8:00 p.m. Location: Columbia Club 15 West 43rd Street New York, NY Please click here to register. $20 per alum; $30 per guest; $10 nonprofit professionals A limited number of comp spaces are available. Please contact jt2121@columbia.edu. About Shaffi Mather Shaffi Mather is a Lawyer, Entrepreneur and a Public Policy Analyst. He is the founder of Ambulance Access for All (Dial 1298 for Ambulance — an Emergency Response Ambulance Service), Education Access for All (Newton Schools in Small Town India and E-tutor Digital Teaching/Learning Support) and www.bribebusters.com (an organization battling individual instances of demands for bribes). He is the Vice Chairman of MATHER and Founder Chairman of ZIQITZA. He is also co-promoter of Moksha Yug Access (an integrated Rural Supply Chain Organization based on Microfinance and Self Help Groups). Shaffi is an active member of Indian National Congress Party. Shaffi is one of the founders of Ambulance Access for All/Dial 1298 for Ambulance. It is an initiative started by a group of young professionals with a high degree of social and public commitment with the primary objective of rolling out a nationwide network of Life Support Ambulance Service accessible to anyone, anytime and anywhere through an easy to remember four digit telephone number. Today, Dial 1298 for Ambulance is India's largest private sector Ambulance service with operations in Mumbai, Kerala and Bihar. Shaffi co-founded Education Access for All which is setting up a network of schools in small towns/villages across India with cross-subsidy access to economically underprivileged students and developing a technology based low cost study material access for students across India. He also co-founded Mather Projects, which designs its villas and apartments with the belief that the quality of a home must improve the quality of the homeowner's life. Previously, Shaffi served as Senior Vice President & Head, Retail Rollout for Reliance Industries Ltd. where he was responsible for drawing up the roll out strategy and setting up 1000+ Reliance Webworld & Reliance Webworld Express stores across 500+ districts throughout India. He served as Chief Officer & Vice President of E City Indian Limited for the Essel/Zee TV Group and Assistant Vice President of Westex International Inc. About the Lecture The Nand and Jeet Khemka Distinguished Speaker Forum, established in May 2008 by Board of Overseers member Nand L. Khemka '56 and his wife, Jeet, brings leaders in industry, commerce, finance, and government from India and around the globe to New York to share their perspective on India's growing economy and business policies. These visits will create powerful opportunities for the School to engage alumni, faculty, students, and representatives of the business community in an active dialogue on this evolving region.

Midterm grades and final paper outlines

Hi all:
We will distribute your graded midterms with comments on Wednesday. We have also extended the deadline for submitting the final paper outlines to this Friday. I realize that some of you were hoping to use the midterm feedback to inform the final paper outline--if you are able to incorporate any necessary changes based on the midterm feedback by Friday that's great. However, I will not expect you to do so and will not grade them accordingly. Instead I am looking to see how well you have incorporated the class learnings (through last week, not this week) into the proposals. Mostly I am just interested in seeing these outlines as a way to ensure that I can provide you with timely input into thinking about how to structure the final project and suggestions for sources (of information and interviews) I can connect you to for the final. I will discuss those with you in person during the sessions we are scheduling with all teams in the next few weeks.

--Prof. Bugg-Levine

Partnering with non-profits to extend basic service delivery

'A Deadly Misdiagnosis' - TB in India

Check out this compelling New Yorker piece (from the Nov. 15 edition) on a private-sector innovation that some believe could halt the spread of TB in India.

Prof Bugg-Levine's presentation on innovations in financing development solutions

As promised:

Columbia capital markets presentation oct 2010

View more presentations from Joellen Perry.

Upcoming Columbia Club talk on "Entrepreneurship Making a Positive Impact"

FREE FOR COLUMBIA STUDENTS!:

Nand and Jeet Khemka
Distinguished Speaker Forum

Entrepreneurship Making a Positive Impact

Featuring
••
Shaffi Mather
Entrepreneur, Lawyer and Public Policy Analyst
Founder Chairman, Dial 1298 for Ambulance
••
and
••
Gita Johar
Meyer Feldberg Professor of Business &
Vice Dean for Research, Columbia Business School

Monday, November 22, 2010
6:00pm to 8:00pm

Columbia Club
15 West 43rd Street
New York, N.Y.

$20 per alum ($30 per guest)
$10 not-for-profit

For more information or to register, please visit
www.gsb.columbia.edu/chazen/events/khemkaspeakers

Current controversy in Indian microfinance

For those of you who still can't get enough of microfinance controversies, the last few weeks have been very interesting with the fall-out from the SKS IPO in India and a subsequent major crack-down by government on microfinance in the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh. The Indian consulting and advisory firm, Intellecap, has published a white paper that provides an interesting perspective on the situation in Andhra Pradesh with important insights for the broader issue of the interplay between for-profit businesses, their poor customers and government agencies trying to provide public-sector solutions. Vineet Rai, the Chairman of Intellecap, has picked up this conversation with an interesting post and discussion thread on the Harvard Business Review blog.
--Prof. Bugg-Levine

Change o plans for session 9

First: Blue Orchard's not coming this semester due to timing conflicts, but Brad Swanson, one of the founders of Developing World Markets (and author of last week's reading on microfinance and capital markets) will speak during the second half of this week's class. He's also offered to stay after class for students interested in hearing more about his work.

Second: Prof Bugg-Levine won't be distributing the additional readings before class. Instead, he'll bring a few of the most interesting pitch documents to class for us to discuss during the first half.

Thanks and see you Wed. (yes, i know the font is wacky on this post, but i can't get it to work. apols.)

Innovations in private equity and venture capital to promote development

Midterm paper topics

here's who we've heard from regarding midterm paper topics. if you see an organization that looks interesting to you and/or you're looking for a team, you may get some direction here:

Stephen Puschel – Bamboo Bike Project

Matthew Magenheim – Small-Scale Piped Water Supply System

YuJung Kim – Casas Bahia

Sekhar Suryanarayanan – Financing and distribution for off-grid lighting

Erin Halfnight – community health mobile platform

Xander Kaplan – Barefoot Power

Jesse De Salvo – Microfinance for cocoa farmers (Mars Inc.)

Shelley Rescober – Pesinet

Mendel Pinson – Natura’s Ekos

Mae Podesta – 1298 for Ambulance

Kumiko Uchikawa – Grameen-Uniglo

Eric Puleio – VillageReach (reaching the last mile with medical supplies and services)

Clotilde Rossi di Schio – Waste Concern

Graham Reed – The Chanfeng computer for Chinese farmers

Pedro Ferraz – CrediAMIGO

Jeff Lamour – Fonkoze

Kristin Stepaniak – Aspen Pharmacare

Jordan Drosdick – Denmor Garment Manufacturers

Jean Saint-Geours – Agro-processing warehouses for maize and the Warehouse Receipt System in Uganda

Shaun Callaghan – “Good wood” timber certification in Guatemala

Mike Brown – Community Water Solutions

Jason Chatterjee – Micro Drip

Simon Heckscher - VisionSpring

Sebastian Peters – Social Impact Bond

Lei (Leo) Chen – Chinese Red

Pepe Morales – Light Years IP

Gordon McLaughlin – Agora Partnerships

Nunzio Digiacomo – Rural electrification in Mali

Gerwin Baek – Africa Health Placements – Locum Business

Shayan Mozaffar – Gyan Shala

Emma Furniss – Aakash Ganga (River from the Sky) – harvesting rainwater

C. Bryan Lassiter – franchising in the pharmaceutical/medical supplies distribution business

Rahmesh Behymer – E+Co

Giulia Christianson – DMT Mobile Toilets

Xiaoxu “Cathy” Sun – CreditEase

Kate Szostak - Embrace Infant Warmer

Nii Koney - Healthcare - Carego Livewell

Adrian Aw - Shokay

Bruno Orsini - TiendaTek

Eliza Schnitzer - One Acre Fund

Joaquin Alemany - Tecnosol

Nandini Nayar - Fabindia

Joellen Perry - Indian School Finance Company

Xinqiong Yu - Dialogue in the Dark

Temilola Agbede - Pot-in-Pot cooling system

Yassir Zouaoui - Argan Oil Cooperatives

Article on Aravind Founder

Take a look at this Fast Company profile of Aravind founder Govindappa Venkataswamy if you get a chance before this week's class. We'll talk about Aravind this week.

Innovations to extend finance and fill in the "missing middle"

Intl Development Job Opportunity

Here's more info on the position that CBS (and BIID) alum Jake Goldberg's looking to fill. Email me if you'd like contact details.

******

Work in Africa for an innovative, start-up non-profit organization!
Excellent career-track opportunity mixing private-sector management skill-set with non-profit service

Industry: Nonprofit/International Development
Function: Operations Innovation

Employer: One Acre Fund
Job Title: Program Associate
Job Location: Western Kenya (English required) or Southwest Rwanda or Burundi (French required)

Organization Description
One Acre Fund is a start-up initiative in Kenya and Rwanda which serves some of the hardest-working farm families in the world. Instead of giving handouts to families, One Acre invests in farmers to generate a permanent gain in farm income. Our "investment bundle" includes education, finance, farm inputs, and export market access. We target subsistence farmers, and help them to generate a lasting, 100%+ gain in farm income per acre.

We have been operating since January 2006, and we currently serve 30,000 farm families (120,000 children). Our target is to change the lives of 50,000 families (200,000 children) within 12 more months, scaling at a 50-100% annual growth rate thereafter. One Acre Fund has achieved high validation as an innovative social start-up, winning grants from the highly competitive Echoing Green, Draper Richards and Skoll Foundations, and first place wins at the Stanford and Yale social venture competitions. Website: www.oneacrefund.org

Job Description
We are seeking exceptional professionals with 2-4 years work experience, and a demonstrated long-term career interest in international development. They will serve in a career-track position that combines both field and management experience in Africa. As a young organization, we are ready to hand over large responsibility for specific, well-defined work modules, with similar structure to an operations consulting role.

Projects will be focused on improvements to One Acre Fund’s program model – as opposed to day-to-day operations, which are operated by our country staff. The typical program associate leads three major projects, and several smaller ones. Example projects include:
- Operations projects. We recently started large-scale purchase and sale of bean seed. The program associate devised a protocol for purchasing seed from farmers, worked through field staff to enroll hundreds of farmers in the program, created financial protocols for payment processing, and set up a warehouse receiving/ processing operation.
- New model configuration experiments. One Acre Fund is currently experimenting with several different program model configurations, led by a program associate. He is setting up the infrastructure to set up a fertilizer savings program with a bank, and field-trialing the program with 200 farmers in two sites, in cooperation with two of our managers.
- Financial processes. We have a program associate who is leading up an effort to rationalize our financial processes. As a result of his work, we will now have monthly data on actual expenses vs. budget across all budget line items and five different operating units. He will gradually hand this off to two office staff that he is managing. Having this data will lead us into the next phase of the work, which is to design and implement a wide variety of cost-cutting programs.

Qualifications
We are looking for somebody truly extraordinary for the program associate role. This is not a stint in Africa – this is an extremely competitive posting for a career-track role. Only 3% of applicants make it to a phone screen. Therefore, please do NOT respond unless you fit these criteria:

• Strong work experiences. Examples include a high-level professional work experience, or some kind of successful entrepreneurial experience (e.g. starting a field program in a developing country, leading a conference, starting a business, solid peace corps accomplishments)
• Leadership experience at work, or outside of work.
• Top-performing undergraduate background (include GPA and test scores on your resume)
• No ego or drama. We are all stable people who are fun to be around. We are looking for others that combine strong leadership skills with a humble approach to service
• A willingness to commit to living in rural areas of East Africa for at least two years – this is a long-term, career-track role. The ideal candidate will have at least one year demonstrated experience working in the developing world, although this is not a strict requirement
• Nice to have: Kiswahili or Kinyrwandan a plus. English required, and French required in Rwanda.
• Ability to cook/ laugh/ extraordinary patience – all desirable

Preferred Start Date: Flexible
Compensation: Starts very modest. However, this is a career-track role eventually paying a real and livable salary for a long-term placement in developing nations.
Benefits: Health cover, immunizations, flight, room and board. 2 annual home flights provided – home trips include some speaking and fundraising duties
Career development: Quarterly management consulting-style career reviews, and significant investment in career development. Your manager will invest significant time in your career development.
Sponsor International Candidates: Yes

SKS and Root Capital

First, some followup from session 7 - Here's a short piece about one result of the SKS controversy. Want more? Here's the Intellicap White Paper on the controversy that Prof Bugg-Levine mentioned in class.

And here's a lookahead to session 8 - a recent NYT profile of Root Capital, a fund we'll discuss next week.

USAID's Development Innovation Ventures fund follows private venture capital model

Dr Rajiv Shah announced USAID's new Development Innovation Ventures (DIV) fund during his Oct 8th keynote speech at the CBS Social Enterprise Conference. Here is an excerpt from the DIV press release:

"Borrowing from the private venture capital model, DIV will seek, through a competitive process to invest resources in promising high-risk, high-return projects that breakthrough innovations often require, but are often difficult to undertake using traditional Agency structures. DIV's goal is to identify and support innovations with a proven, cost-effective impact that can match the scale of microfinance—75 million end users worldwide."

And here are some related links:

DIV Press Release

Transcript of Dr Shah's conference speech

DIV Frequently Asked Questions

Capital Markets for Social Good - Impact Investment Exchange Asia (IIX)

Join Professor DurreenShahnaz for a talk on how she is linking social enterprises to impact investors in Asia. Professor Shahnaz is the Founder and Chairperson of Impact Investment Exchange Asia (IIX) in Singapore, as well as the Head of Programon Social Innovation and Change and Adjunct Associate Professor at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore. She was recently nominated as a 2010 TED Fellow.

Visit www.asiaiix.com for more information.


DATE: Wed, Nov 3, 2010
TIME: 6pm until 7pm
Location: TBD

Sponsored by: SIPA Economic and Political Development department (EPD)

http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=154512664590109

Mobilizing Investment Capital for Development

Hi,

here are two more websites that you might find helpful to find an organization for the mid-term paper:

http://www.schwabfound.org/sf/index.htm
http://www.skollfoundation.org/

I hope it helps.
Best,

Simon

KIVA working in the US

KIVA expands microlending reach to U.S. businesses

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303738504575568032575697328.html?mod=WSJ_hpp_sections_smallbusiness

Event on Technological Innovation in Developing Countries

Tuesday October 19th
Avery Hall Room 115
11am - 100pm
Organized by Kate Orf

Prof. Smita Srinivas
"Innovation and Developing Countries: Prospects for a shared society
SUSTAINABLE FUTURES
The Earth Institute-GSAPP Joint Forum on the Built Environment

Prof. Smita Srinivas, Urban Planning and Director of the Technological
Change Lab (TCLab) Columbia University, will be speaking at the
Sustainable Futures series, a joint program between the Earth
Institute and the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and
Preservation (GSAPP). Prof. Srinivas's talk will be focusing on how a
different approach to technological innovation in developing countries
could lead us to very different economic and built outcomes for a
shared future. She will begin by discussing standard models on
innovation, alternate economic and institutional lenses to industrial
history, and will then pose an alternate view (see URL below for
paper), discussing examples and issues that professionals should
address."

Link to Paper: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1099492

UN Global Conference on Social Change

For those interested. Looks like an interesting event. I'm sure you should be able to get student discounts by contacting the organizers directly....

http://foundationchange.org/events/united-nations-global-conference-on-social-change/

Guest speakers so far

Some of you have asked for a list of the guest speakers we've had so far. Here you go:

Sept 22: Mike Kubzansky, Global Account Manager at Monitor Inclusive Markets

Sept 22: Alvaro Rodriguez Arregui, Managing Director, Ignia, and Carlos Danel, Co-CEO and Cofounder, Compartamos

Oct 6: Gautam Ivatury, Managing Director, Signal Point Partners

Nov 3: Brian Milder, Managing Director of Strategy & Innovation, Root Capital

Nov 3: Suchitra Shenoy, co-author of the Monitor report we read early in the class, now working on her book about Aravind.

Basic service provision: The economic and political limits of business solutions

One more on Compartamos

Here is the letter that Carlos Danel wrote with his co-founder to address the IPO controversy. It references the CGAP paper we read in the class and is a great articulation of their perspective on how the management team navigated strategic choices to optimize business and development imperatives.

Follow-up from Session 4

Here are two of the enterprises Prof Bugg-Levine mentioned in class:

Nuru Lights

and One Earth Designs.

And here's the May 2010 New Yorker profile of development economist Esther Duflo. If you can't get this link to work, you can also get The New Yorker through Lexis-Nexis, which we can access thru the Watson Library homepage.

Resources to find midterm topic

To identify an organization or idea to profile for your midterm paper, below are a list of links that can quickly help you identify interesting business innovations. You may be frustrated at the relatively sparse detail that is often available on these organizations. Do the best you can to find the data you need to assess the business viability and development impact of the innovation; where you cannot find additional information be explicit in the paper about what more you would want to know to make an assessment, how you would efficiently gather the information and how different results from the new information would affirm or refute your hypotheses about the innovation.

• UN's Growing Inclusive Markets program has a resource center that includes case studies on business innovations sortable by country and theme.
• Changemakers ran a competition on Leveraging Business for Social Change that should have many relevant examples. Their G-20 Finance Challenge also has some enterprises profiled that would be relevant.
• The NextBillion website that WRI runs (as part of the program that includes the market sizing data we looked at in class) is a comprehensive place for dicsussions and descriptions of businesses.
• Many of the fund managers and non-profits who work in this space also describe specific investee companies in their reports and onlines. You can either profile an investee company, or the fund as a business innovation itself. Good places to start would be SEAF, E&Co. (especially if you're interested in clean energy and development), Acumen, IGNIA ,Root Capital, Grassroots Business Fund, GroFin, Business Partners, Actis (larger-scale, more commercial business opportunities). The development finance institutions (World Bank, IFC, Norfund, FMO, etc.) all have websites with some anecdotal examples of investee companies and social and financial impact reporting.

If you find additional online resources that are useful in your search, please post here so we can all know about them.

--Prof. Bugg-Levine

Midterm and Final Dates

Midterm paper due: Friday Oct 29

Final project description due: Wednesday Nov 17 (note: not Wed Nov 10)

Final report due: Friday Dec 17 (note: not Wednesday Dec 15).

Pls also note, the syllabus is wrong about the maximum size of teams for the final report: It's five students, not four.

Can't Get Enough Compartamos?

Check out this 2006 New Yorker piece on MFI, which has a good chunk on Compartamos (if you can't get the link to work, you can also get The New Yorker on Lexis-Nexis, which we can access thru the Watson Library homepage).

And here's a brief wrapup of what's happened since the IPO:

Compartamos’ profits have continued to skyrocket since its April 2007 IPO. In July, the bank said its second-quarter profit rose 46% to $37.3 million from 2009. Return on equity rose as well, increasing to 42.3% in the quarter from 41.3%. Analysts credited the success, in part, to continuing customer growth, as the number of active Compartamos clients rose 23.4% to 1.63 million at the end of June. Compartamos’ comparatively recession-proof customers – low-income borrowers and small business owners engaged in pursuits such as craft manufacturing and food vending – also helped shield the bank from the Mexican economy’s 6.5% contraction in 2009. Default rates rose in the second quarter by more than 20% but, at just 2.2% of the bank’s loan portfolio, remain low. Now, Compartamos and other Mexican banks stand to benefit from a recovery slated to push Mexico’s economic growth up to around 5% this year.

Compartamos remains a behemoth in the Mexican microfinance sector, with a market share of just over 50%. Among its closest domestic competitors: Finsol, Fincomun and Financiera Independencia. Compartamos’ flagship product – Credit for Women, which offers 16-week loans exclusively to groups of 12-50 women – continues to dominate the bank’s business, accounting for some 75% of its loan portfolio and 89% of its clients. Critics continue to charge that Compartamos gouges its customers with interest rates averaging around 85%, compared to a global microfinance average of 26%. Bank officials say the fact that Mexican loans are much smaller than loans in other countries means Compatamos' rates have to be higher. Compartamos’ relatively high financing costs also contribute; the bank is working on launching a deposit program to diversify its funding base, which is currently comprised of its own capital, long-term debt and Mexican development-bank loans.

Compartamos is now one of five microfinance companies to have publicly listed shares. The other four are Bank Rykat of Indonesia, BRAC Bank of Bangladesh, Equity Bank of Kenya, and SKS Microfinance of India, which saw its shares rise 10.5% on its first day of trading last month. The microfinance industry itself is becoming a big-money player. In 2008, the sector attracted $14.8 billion in foreign capital, up 24% from the previous year. For the first time, the majority of the money came from private investors – including pension schemes and private-equity funds – rather than governments, according to the World Bank.

-0-

Adapting technology to reach poor customers

Special Session: Profiting from the Poor? A Discussion on Microfinance IPOs

Finally! The stage is set at the 2010 CGI meeting in NY.
Yunus vs. the "IPOs" and WWB in the middle to serve as a buffer while each side prepares its response. The long heated argument has come to an end... or not

Video Link

Not sure if these are Akula's exact words but I got the message that: Grameen got the ball rolling and if it wasn't for them, Microfinance wouldn't be what it is today. But, companies like SKS are today's needed evolution of the Microfinance model in order to continue increasing the amount of credit available to poor people

Very interested to hear your views as there are definitely many points to counter my argument, and I believe that we actually need to constantly re-asses the direction of Microfinance in order for it to continue effectively alleviating poverty.

Best,
Pepe

Hey all -

Here's the full Monitor "Emerging Markets, Emerging Models" report, which Mike Kubzansky mentioned yesterday. Lots of other interesting stuff in the Monitor Inclusive Markets archives, including Mike's Dec 09 piece on MFI networks, if you're inclined to poke around.

After hearing about IGNIA from Alvaro Rodriguez Arregui yesterday, you might want to check out a new livemint piece featuring SONG Investment Advisors. SONG, which like IGNIA counts Omidyar Network among its major backers, is a venture capital fund focusing on economic development in India.

Happy reading.

Compartamos Qs

Aid versus business: what’s the best way to fight poverty?

There is an interesting and relevant debate currently taking place on FT.com's blog – Aid versus business: what’s the best way to fight poverty?

The following URL will direct you to a short summary article from which you can click on the varying opinions and arguments mentioned within the article.

http://blogs.ft.com/beyond-brics/2010/09/21/aid-versus-business-how-best-to-fight-poverty/

Hope you find this helpful. I did.

Mobile phones without handsets

Check out the latest edition of springwise for some cool business innovation ideas - including the cloud phone service (handset not required) for rural users in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia.

Article on innovations in distributing electricity to poor customers

Interseting article on NURU, a company that sells kits that enables people to generate electricity from bicycling for lights (and now cell-phone charging). Quite a few of the seven basic business models identified in the Monitor report are at play in making this work.

Gini coefficient

Hi guys,


FYI here is some data on the Gini coefficient for various countries. There's also a link to the 2009 UN Development Report and an excel file if you want to download the data. Enjoy!

http://www.pressrun.net/weblog/2010/07/gini-coefficient-income-gap-in-singapore-and-elsewhere.html

Follow-up from Session 2

Hi all,

As a follow-up to the data I showed in class, if you are interested in sector- and region-specific data on "bottom-of-the-pyramid" spending patterns, you can access all the data and chapters of the Next 4 Billion report. (Twill be helpful for some of your midterms and final papers.) The same project has subsequently spun out an influential blog NextBillion.net that provides a wide range of stories and perspectives on social enterprise and development (though with a definite "good news" tilt to it!).

As I mentioned in class, this Wednesday Mike Kubzansky from Monitor will spend the first half of class going over the Emerging Markets, Emerging Models research in India that you have read and sharing what his team is learning about the differences conducting similar research in Africa (these findings are unpublished). The second half of the class Alvaro Rodriguez, the co-founder of the $102MM venture capital IGNIA Fund, will describe the opportunties he sees to provide basic services to poor customers profitably. He will be joined by Ignia Board member and Compartamos Banco co-founder Carlos Denel. We will discuss the legendary and controversial Compartamos IPO in depth in Week 4 but hope to get a preview from Alvaro (who is also Compartamos Board chair) and Carlos next week.

Meet Gordon Gekko's Grandchildren

Hey guys,

This article is a bit outdated but definitely one of my favorites and I feel like its quite relevant to what we have seen in the last couple of classes. It might seem a bit 101 for some of you who have taken a deep dive in the social enterprise/international development field, but I am happy that the language and examples are a bit basic since I guess a lot of WSJ readers have probably never read about this approach to business before.

Meet Gordon Gekko's Grandchildren

World Toilet Summit 2010

Note the pitch: 2.6 billion people in the world without sanitation = major market opportunity.

Energy in the Developing World

The fact that 25% of the world's population still lacks access to electricity is spurring lots of innovation. Check out this Economist feature on new ways of delivering energy to poor people.

Survey Questions for Session 3

Echoing Green fellowship applications now open

In case you are interested, the application process for 2011 Echoing Green Fellowships will be open Oct. 12-Nov. 12. This is a highly-regarded Felowship with strong brand value and networking opportunities in addition to a $60,000 stipend for start-up organizations taking innovative approaches to addressing social issues. This past year many of the winners are running for-profit social enterprises. CBS grad (and former Business Innovations TA!) David del Ser Bartolome is a current Fellow for his start-up company Frogtek. If you do apply please let me know as I know the CEO of Echoing Green and a few Board members

Almost 1 billion people in the world are hungry

A new report by the UN food agency (FAO) estimates that 925 million people around the world are chronically hungry, the first time in 15 years that number has decreased (after a rapid rise in chronic hunger in 2008 when basic food prices increased ~40% around the world). This includes only people who are hungry every day (rather than at some times of the year). Here's the New York Times story on this report.

Mango crates in Haiti - aka the challenges of implementing business innovations in a developing country

Hey all - A friend told me about this excellent This American Life episode on the challenges of running a business in Haiti (and, by implication, in other developing countries where aid is ample but progress unclear). This American Life, for those who don't know, is a weekly hour-long public radio program. The link above lets you stream the program for free or download it for 99 cents (you'll need iTunes for the second option). The whole program's good, but the first half hour is especially relevant. Enjoy.

Culture, politics and business-led development

Interesting New York Times article this week on the contrasting interplay between culture, politics and entrepreneuralism in North and South India. While I do not find explanations of development that focus exlcusively on race, tribe, religion, etc. to be analytically useful (or morally acceptable) this article touches on the undeniable importance of these factors when they intersect with politics, education and resource allocation. Especially in the US, we are tyically uncomfortable having honest discussions about these issues (and the role of gender)--we will have to overcome these discomforts if we are to understand how best to use business as an engine for promoting pro-poor development.
--Prof. Bugg-Levine

Hi folks,

Here are some of the links Prof Bugg-Levine mentioned in class yesterday, as well as a link to a cool development-oriented fund and a quick primer on posting to the blog.

First, Gapminder's Human Development Trends presentation, which we saw in class. This page lets you download the presentation to your Mac or PC.

Second, the Gapminder 2010 World Map, also in both Mac and PC versions.

Third, Prof Bugg-Levine recommends you check out the Grassroots Business Fund, which provides investment capital and capacity building to businesses in several developing countries. You can read their Fall 2010 newsletter here and join their mailing list here.

Fourth, we really envision this blog as a discussion hub for everyone in the class. To that end, I'll be sending everyone an invitation to become a blog author, so you'll be free to post relevant links etc whenever you'd like. If you see a cool international development article somewhere, for instance, you won't need to go through Prof. Bugg-Levine or me, but can instead go ahead and post it directly to the blog.

Posting is easy. After you've accepted the invitation to become an author (and set up a Gmail account, if you dont already have one), you'll see "New Post" in the upper right-hand corner of the screen when you're on the blog homepage. That'll take you to a text box where you can add the post's title and content. If you want to embed a link, first ensure you're in the "Edit HTML" tab of the text box (as opposed to the "Compose" tab). Then highlight the text you'd like to hyperlink, click on the third icon from the left on the dashboard (the green globe with what looks to me like a little gray halo), add your link, and click "OK". You can check whether it worked by clicking "Preview". Pls holler with any questions.

Finally, we've posted the second set of survey questions below. Please remember that the deadline for submitting answers is Tuesday Sept. 14 at 10am.

Thanks! J

Survey Questions for Session 2

Questions from Gapminder data

As we mentioned in class, you might enjoy playing around with the Gapminder data. Specifically, check out the country-specific development trajectories. In class we saw why health matters for development by looking at the case of Swaziland.
A few others we did not have time to cover but that you might find interesting:
Why political context matters for development? Check out the last 50 years for Kenya, Congo and Vietnman. What do think explains the gains and losses in these cases?
Why political systems matter for development? Check out the different trajectories that India and China have been on. What do you think explains why one country can have substantial health gains without great increases in income and others do not?
I mentioned Equatorial Guinea: why do you think their GDP/capita has improved so radically? Do you think this data shows that the typical person in Equatorial Guinea is better off than 20 years ago? If not, why not?

Please feel free to post responses to any of these questions on the blog. Also, let us know if you have found other countries that provide better examples for understanding these questions or other questions that you think this data allows us to explore about the context in which development does (or does not) happen. We will discuss the most interesting responses in class next week.

--Prof. Bugg-Levine

Follow-up from first week

Business Innovations students:

Thanks for an exciting first session--I know we covered a lot but hope you found it as excited as I did.

For next week, we will be turning to the question of "how can we create viable business models that support development by delivering basic services affordably at scale to poor people who currently lack access to them?" This concept of the "bottom-of-the-pyramid" customer was first popularized by Prof. CK Prahalad in 2004. The required readings include a short essay that captures this thinking. The Monitor Group took this concept one step further with a ground-breaking report last year examining what was really working (and not) in scaling these approaches in India. Part of the report is also required reading for next week. The co-author of that report, Mike Kubzansky, will come to class on Sept. 22 (not next week as we had planned in the syllabus) to discuss these findings and new (unpublished) research his team has conducted this year in Africa on the same topic.

For next week we will not have any outside speakers -- instead we will recap the main concepts from Week 1, discuss data that "gets below the mean" in understanding the "bottom-of-the-pyramid" market, and then focus the second half of the class on the Patrimonio Hoy case.

I look forward to seeing you all next Wednesday.

Prof. Bugg-Levine

Welcome note from Prof. Bugg-Levine

Business Innovation students:

I look forward to meeting you all on Wednesday afternoon and to kicking off what should be a great semester. We have provocative and inspiring ideas and examples to cover together about a topic that gets both more timely and more sophisticated all the time. I look forward to discussing these with you and for all of us to learn from your diverse and experiences.

As noted in the syllabus, the topic of business and development naturally lends itself to provocative conversations about what we care most about and how we can apply our skills to achieve it. To facilitate this interaction, we have set up this blog. In addition to encouraging you to post interesting articles, links or videos you see or ideas you have related to our coursework, we will also use the blog to post weekly questions on the required readings that I will use as the basis for navigating the following session. Your timely answer to these questions is both very helpful in setting up the class discussions and measured as part of your class participation grade. These questions will rarely take more than a few minutes to answer but offer an invaluable pulse of your perspective on the course material. We will post questions on the day after each session and need answers by 10 a.m. Tuesday morning of the following week so that we have time to collate and analyze them before the Wednesday afternoon session.

The first questions are already on this blog – you’ll find the survey in the entry that follows this post. We do have a few required readings for the first session (though you need not read them before answering the blog questions). The readings are all relatively short but set the context for the course. Since you won’t get your coursebooks before Wednesday, we are posting links to the readings here. They are:

• Case Study: this is a brief write-up on one business innovation to revive a domestic cashew processing industry in Mozambique. This is background to a role-play exercise we will conduct on Wednesday.

• UNDP Report: Read Ch 1-2 (~20 pages) of this report (and more if you are particularly interested). This was a breakthrough report for one of the most important development agencies to acknowledge the potential in private sector and business-led development approaches and touches on many themes we will find later in the course.

• Philanthrocapitalism--a counter-point to the "good news" you will read elsewhere about the role of the private sector in development. This attack on business-oriented charity and development work caused quite a stir when it came out in 2008.

• Global Monitoring report: Introduction--this is the World's Bank annual overview of the global economy. It provides important context for the beginning of our discussion about the relative gains and pains experienced by poor countries during the recent commodities boom and global economic crisis.

Joellen Perry, our TA, will be able to answer any questions you have on course logistics. If you want to contact me directly, email me at antonybugglevine@gmail.com though I am not always able to answer immediately.

I look forward to seeing you on Wednesday,

Prof. Bugg-Levine