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.