BW on tracking social impact (quoting Professor Bugg-Levine!)

Check this Business Week article out on a new system for tracking social impact that was unveiled at the Clinton Global Initiative last week. Acumen Fund has teamed up with Google and Salesforce to develop a new way of measuring social impact, which is sorely needed as we saw yesterday in class.
Our optimistic Professor is quoted in the article. He thinks a lot of capital could flow into this field if there were proper metrics available to investors (although he may have a joke or two about it...).

Letter from Compartamos

Given the level of interest (and attack!) on the Compartamos case, it's due process to also hear their point of view. You can find it in elegant prose in the letter they sent to their peers.
You can also find here the comments from The Economist about it and here another article about profiting from the poor.

Grameen Shakti

Hello everyone,

This post is about Grameen Shakti, the energy company Gaurav Podar and I worked for during the summer. Grameen Shakti was founded in the mid-nineties by Muhamad Yunus and Dipal Barua, one of Yunus’ students when he started microfinance back in the seventies. Dipal, who is also the current number two of the bank, heads now an organization of more than 2,000 people with offices all over the country. They have installed close to 200,000 solar panels in rural households and want to reach 1 million in the next three years. Their clients pay back the microloan to purchase the equipment over three years and after that own a source of electricity that usually last up to twenty years. On top of solar energy they have other products like Improved Cooking Stoves and Biogas Plants. We helped them refine a plan to train young women to install and repair the Solar Home Systems so they can become independent entrepreneurs.

PBS did a great 30 min documentary on them. The excerpt is on YouTube (with Morgan Freeman as narrator and Jeffrey Sachs as economic expert)



Juan Aristi

A couple of interesting news

First, an example of innovation in microfinance at the intersection of business and development. Andy Kuper, one of the managing partners, is based in New York and a friend of mine, so if anyone wants to profile Leapfrog for their midterm I can introduce them to Andy. This is the whole piece:
President Clinton Announces Next Frontier in Microfinance and Insurance

Second, a link to an MIT journal that is often very interesting and relevant. This link comes with a discount code for people ordering the journal: INONWS08 for a 20% discount

Professor Bugg-Levine

Session 4 Questions on Compartamos

Hope op-ed & Ventures in Development (ViD)

In case you missed it, Paul Collier who wrote “The Bottom Billion” had an op-ed in today’s NY Times. I like how he raises hope as a differentiator. Would it make sense to add hope as a development measure, at both the individual and community levels?

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/22/opinion/22collier.html

 

Also, I promised Professor Bugg-Levine that I would post the organization I interned with this summer in China. The “mother” company is a nonprofit social enterprise incubator called Ventures in Development (ViD, www.venturesindev.org). It is currently incubating two for-profit enterprises:

·         Shokay (yak fiber/down that feels like cashmere), www.shokay.com

·         Mei Xiang Cheese (yak cheese), www.meixiangcheese.com

 

Part of my internship was to help ViD think about the financial and development metrics they should use to measure their overarching goal of alleviating poverty.  One question we faced was whether incubating a scalable company like Shokay is a “better” investment than incubating a company like Mei Xiang Cheese, which is a modular business. As long as Shokay’s products are in demand, we can continue sourcing more fiber from yak herders and creating more work for our knitting cooperatives. On the other hand, Mei Xiang impacts individuals in one village deeply (the one trained on western cheese-making techniques and now running its own cheese farm), but would require great investment to create similar benefits in other communities.

--

Beverly Chung | MBA 2009 | Columbia Business School | bchung09@gsb.columbia.edu | 650-776-5001

Session 3 Questions on Microfinance

The Economist: The bottom 1.4 billion

HI all!

 

I came out with this interesting article about the research on BOP measures, and its size evolution

 

Enjoy!

 

http://www.economist.com/finance/displaystory.cfm?story_id=12010733

 

Marta Solera

MBA Class of 2009

Columbia Business School

+1 646 853 3544

 

Hi Fellow BIIDers,

Economist article below has an interesting take on a new trend in fundraising using IPO’s – investors are promised a “significant social return” and input to management, but no prospect of financial return... Intriguing.

Don

http://www.economist.com/business/displaystory.cfm?story_id=12208564

Don Baxter
MBA | Class of 2009
Tel: 646-912-0744
E-Mail: dbaxter09@gsb.columbia.edu

Microfinance panel discussion

For those of you interested in micro-finance, you may want to attend a panel discussion next week at JP Morgan that will feature one of the most prominent leaders in the field discussing the applications of this particular business innovation in the US. (A small but growing trend in business innovations for development is that good ideas developed in emerging markets are being taken to developed markets). If you are planning on attending, please let David know directly. The head of JPM's social sector finance unit has agreed to put our class members onto a special invite list but I will need to let her know by Monday who will be coming.

See below for details:

Banking the unbanked in the US
Domestic Microfinance opportunities and challenges; lessons learned from international experiences

Featuring:
María Otero, ACCION International, President & CEO
Gina Harman, ACCION New York and ACCION USA, President & CEO

Hosted by Nick O'Donohoe, Global Head of Research and a member of the firm's Executive Committee.

Wednesday, September 17th
6 p.m. Reception (Reception will continue after speakers)
6:30 p.m. Speakers

J.P. Morgan
270 Park Ave (and 47th St.)
3rd Fl Auditorium

As microfinance continues to attract attention internationally, millions of Americans remain
unbanked in this country. Please join us to hear María Otero, President & CEO of ACCION
International, and Gina Harman, President & CEO of ACCION New York and ACCION USA,
discuss the current microfinance market in the United States and internationally. Topics will
include why it is difficult for MFIs to be financially sustainable in the US; the increasing trend of
internationally focused MFIs expanding into the US market; the landscape of international
players and how it is changing; and the impact of the global credit crunch on the growth of
microfinance internationally.

--Prof. Bugg-Levine

Acumen Fund Fellow application is open

If you have not already seen this, the Acumen Fund is recruiting Fellows. I know the Acumen Fund well and can recommend their Fellowship as an intriguing job prospect if you are looking for hands-on experience in the practical application of business and development. They have strong country teams in Pakistan, India and Kenya and a talented management team in New York who mentor Fellows. I am happy to discuss this further with any of you who are interested in applying to the Fellowship.

Professor Bugg-Levine

Interesting website with examples of innovations for bottom-of-they-pyranmid business

I look forward to seeing everyone on Monday. You will see this week that the reading and the class focus on business innovations to reach poorer customers, or Bottom-of-the-Pyramid business models. UNDP has recently completed a major report with examples of successful BOP business strategies and a discussion of measuring their development impact. Caveat:I haven't read the whole report, but it looks interesting and will allow you to search quickly for examples in specific sectors (such as healthcare, retail, etc.) and geographies of interest. You can see the report at http://www.undp.org/gimlaunch/index.shtml

and the overall homepage for this work at: http://www.growinginclusivemarkets.org/

 

Let us know if you find anything particularly helpful.

 

--Prof. Bugg-Levine

Second set of questions!

The Gapminder software online

You can find it at www.gapminder.org. Enjoy!

The List of Books

We will keep track of the books and web resources that Professor Bugg-Levine mentions in class. For those that are curious to learn more, you can find it here.

Maybe the Aid industry is ready for a round of M&A?

What do you think?

Sep 4th 2008 | ACCRA
From The Economist print edition:

Donors and recipients try to get to grips with the chaos in international aid

Food aid from the United States that also helps American farmers

THE development-aid business is a shambles. Privately, most of the 1,200 delegates at the grandly titled High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness, which met this week in Accra, agreed on that. The meeting was the first big follow-up, involving 100-odd countries, international agencies and non-governmental organisations (NGOs), to an accord on making aid more effective, reached in Paris in 2005.

The main problem is not the one poor countries and NGOs usually complain about: too little aid. In fact, official development assistance has been rising modestly since the mid-1990s, in real terms and as a share of donors' national incomes.

Rather, the problem is that aid is fragmenting: there are too many agencies, financing too many small projects, using too many different procedures. "Fragmentation is the opposite of effectiveness," says Lennart Bage, head of the International Fund for Agricultural Development.

Little Eritrea, for instance, deals with 21 official and multilateral donors, each with their own projects, budgets and ways of operating. Uganda has 27. That is normal. According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), 38 poor countries each had 25 or more official donors working in them in 2006. The number of aid projects financed by bilateral donors has skyrocketed from 10,000 to 80,000 over the past ten years.

NGOs are more numerous. Their explosive growth explains much of aid's fragmentation. The UN reckoned there were 37,000 international NGOs in 2000, a fifth of which had been formed in the 1990s. There are almost certainly more now. Ethiopia plays host to 12 affiliates from Save the Children, seven from Oxfam and six from Care International. NGOs are increasingly important to the aid business. By one estimate, they spent $27 billion of aid in 2005, compared with total official assistance of $84 billion. The Gates Foundation had a budget of $3.3 billion in 2007—more than Norway, Denmark or Australia spend.

This largesse is evidence of western generosity. But it is swamping poor countries. According to OECD figures released in Accra, donors conducted over 15,000 missions in 54 recipient countries last year. Vietnam played host to an average of three visits each working day. So did Tanzania, whose overstretched civil service produces 2,400 quarterly reports on projects a year. Health workers in several African countries say they are so busy meeting western delegates that they can only do their proper jobs—vaccinations, maternal care—in the evening.

The Paris declaration of 2005 laid down a number of principles for making aid work better, and drew up specific targets which donors and recipients are supposed to meet by 2010. The aim of the forum which took place in Ghana was to record how much—or little—progress has been made at the halfway point.

Some of the targets are sensible and even stand a chance of being hit. It is obvious that aid should help recipient countries but that idea is forgotten when donors ring-fence their projects, using their own experts (not local people) to build, run and evaluate operations. The Paris declaration aims to cut the use of such parallel systems dramatically. Between 2005 and 2007, their number did indeed fall, by about 10% in 33 countries. But big problems remain. In Mozambique, says Oxfam, a British NGO, donors are spending a staggering $350m a year on 3,500 technical consultants, enough to hire 400,000 local civil servants. "Aid should strengthen local capacity rather than spawn parallel aid empires," says Robert Fox, Oxfam's top representative in Accra.

Fragments of the imagination

Similarly, it may seem obvious that flows of aid should be recorded, so recipients can know what they are getting, and scrutinise it. But in practice this does not happen. One can measure how much aid is recorded accurately and the share has risen from 42% in 2005 to 48% in 2007 (ie, only 48% of aid is properly accounted for). Again, an improvement, but still a far cry from the target, which is 85% accuracy.

But the biggest problem is too many aid agencies, and the challenge is co-ordinating them. In practice, national, multilateral and NGO donors probably can't do more themselves than they do anyway, so the best way of coping with the fragmentation of aid is for recipient countries to lay down a set of national development priorities and ask donors to fit in with their plans. That sounds fine in theory, but if recipients were serious about it they would be expected to be saying no to offers of aid that don't fit in with their plans. That hardly ever happens. The Paris target is for three-quarters of recipient governments to publish development programmes that aid agencies can use. Last year, according to a survey on monitoring the Paris declaration, only a fifth did. Unless that improves, aid is likely to remain badly fragmented.

Still, the picture is not all doom and gloom. One of the oldest problems bedevilling the business is the practice of "tied aid" (ie, requiring some of it be spent in the donor country). This increases inefficiency (tying is reckoned to raise the cost of aid to the recipient by 15-30%) and adds to the problem of fragmentation. So it is good news that Britain, Sweden, Ireland and the Netherlands are untying their aid and that, in Accra, the OECD revealed evidence that things are moving further in the right direction. In 2002, 43% of official aid was untied. By 2006, the no-strings-attached share had increased to 53%. A small but welcome step in changing developing countries from "projects" to "partners".

Re: Business Innovations in International Development course introduction

Hello everyone!

As Professor Bugg-Levine said below, I will be the TA of this course. That means I will be in charge of making sure the blog is ready to receive your posts and comments, as well as the answers to the questionnaires. For any technical question, please refer to me and let the Professor concentrate on bringing in the best content for the class. But before that, let me go quickly over some basics.

First, whenever you feel the unstoppable urge to share something with the class, you should go ahead and email any text, links and pictures to the following address: david_delser1.innovations@blogger.com (sorry, blogger wouldn’t let me choose a less personal one). Your email will be published immediately for everyone’s benefit.

Second, once we solve Angel’s issues, we’ll set up a mechanism so everyone receives an email update after a post has been published. That way you’ll be able to rush to the blog and provide your comments or answer the questionnaires. We’re also thinking about providing updates after each comment made on the blog, but wanted to get your impression on whether that’d be a bit too much inbox cluttering. Any thoughts?

While we figure this out, and of course going forward, you can use the RSS feed of the blog: http://businessinnovations4development.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default. If you use Google Reader or any other blog reading software, this would be the best way to stay up to date with the class discussions on the blog.

Finally, I have added a blogroll with four blogs that are focused on international development. If anyone knows of a really good one that I may have missed, please let me know (email or comment!) so we can add it.

Thanks for your patience. I would kindly encourage you to provide any feedback you may have about this blog experiment. We’ve been thinking hard about how to make the course interactive outside of the classroom and would love to know how to improve the results. So please don’t be shy!

Cheers!
David

Questionnaire for our First Class!