Back in April I posted news about the World Challenge competition, hosted by BBC and Newsweek. Well, I just got an e-mail from a friend reminding me about it so I went to the competition's website, only to find out that the final round is on and that votes for one of the finalists will be accepted until tomorrow.

So I encourage you to visit World Challenge, take a look at the twelve finalists and cast your vote! There are interesting projects coming from Latin America, Africa, East Europe and Asia.

Finally, a hat tip for the BBC/ Newsweek crew for the remarkable job they have done profiling these projects through video.   
 

Guest blogger Christi Huizenga is a second-year MBA student at Thunderbird School of Global Management.  Before Thunderbird, she spent five years in project management and business development for International Justice Mission, a human rights NGO.  Christi has a B.A. in Business Communications from Calvin College in Grand Rapids, MI.

Christi Huizenga

The days when development finance organizations were the only ones pouring capital into emerging markets are long gone. Private Equity firms are increasingly chasing returns into emerging markets.  A panel last weekend at the Net Impact North America Conference brought together both private equity firms and development finance organizations to discuss the trade-offs between profitable returns and the social impact of these investments. 

It was moderated by Graham Sinclair, of Sinclair and Co. and the first panelist was Peter Greenwood from OPIC (the Overseas Private Investment Corporation), a U.S. Government agency working to develop private sector opportunities overseas providing services to U.S. firms.  Services include insurance, financing assistance, and support for privately owned and managed investment funds.  OPIC private equity is essentially a fund of funds and they provide investment guarantees to their clients.  

While OPIC does not directly invest in emerging economies, they can choose to work with funds that will have a development impact.  OPIC rates investment opportunities based on factors such as environmental impact, workers rights, human rights and other development contributors. 

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(Editor's note: Today, November 19, is World Toilet Day, part of an awareness campaign led by Water Aid. This post is timely to stop for a second, think about and learn more a crisis that keeps 2.5 billion of the world's poorest citizens away from basic sanitation services)

Guest blogger Mike Pezone is a returned Peace Corps volunteer from the Philippines and a 2nd year MBA from The Johnson School at Cornell University.  He focuses on Base of the Pyramid business models at Cornell's Center for Sustainable Global Enterprise.  This past summer he worked in Mexico conducting the BoP Protocol  to develop a water purification business model for an early stage startup.

By Mike Pezone

Water touches everything. This was reflected in the diverse backgrounds and interests of the panelists at the Saturday morning session about "innovative solutions to water and sanitation challenge".  Hailing from different corners of the water problem, panelists included Mikkel Vesterdaard - CEO of the company that created the Life Straw, Andra Tamburro - Program Director at Water Advocates (the first nonprofit organization dedicated to increasing American support for the global water problem), and Jeff Seabright - VP of Environment and Water Resources at the Coca-Cola Company.

Stan Laskowski, President of the Philadelphia Global Water Initiative Board moderated an engaging session between panelists and participants.  In my opinion the panel was less a discussion on innovative solutions and more of a call to action as each panelist cited statistics reminding us of the gargantuan scale of the current water crisis.

• 1,000,000,000 people lack access to safe drinking water
• 2,600,000,000 people lack access to proper sanitation
• 50% of the schools in developing countries lack access to clean water
• 75% of the schools in developing countries lack access to proper sanitation
• Every 15 seconds a child dies from a water related illness 

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Guest blogger Matt Austin is a second-year MBA student at Thunderbird School of Global Management focusing on the intersection of international development, entrepreneurship and venture capital. He spent this past summer advising a group of Endeavor High Impact Entrepreneurs in Turkey on their capital raising and expansion efforts.

Prior to Thunderbird, Matt was a private equity and M&A attorney for nearly seven years. He is a graduate of Harvard Law School and the University of Iowa with a degree in Economics.

By Matt Austin

The buzz surrounding social enterprise in international development circles has been loud and growing louder.  Hybrid business models that blend private sector and non-profit approaches are becoming increasingly prevalent.  Development NGOs, multilateral institutions and government agencies are all looking for ways to incorporate more private sector approaches into their programs.  In response to this trend and growing demand from socially-minded students, business schools are adding many social entrepreneurship and BoP-focused courses. 

At the Net Impact Conference, a whole series of panels focused solely on social entrepreneurship and innovation.  The kick-off panel for this track asked an important question:  how much of this buzz surrounding the benefits and value of social enterprise is just hype and how much is reality?

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Guest blogger Kelly McCarthy is a Communications Manager and Research Analyst for the New Ventures Project at the World Resources Institute. Her current work focuses on developing impact metrics for the enterprise development community.

By Kelly McCarthy 

There was a lot of buzz about "impact" last weekend at the  Net Impact Conference. However, this year it wasn't just talk about creating impact, but most importantly how we consider, measure and prove it.  Perhaps the word was being used too liberally lately thus loosing a bit of its meaning. 

However, as I listened to many organizations whose work intends to generate positive environmental and social impact, it became apparent that a shift is occurring.  Rather than talking simply about impact in anecdotes and what was better than before, foundations, funds, design-for-impact, not-for-profit (and not-for-loss) organizations alike were talking about a "social capital market", as Jason Saul, CEO of Mission Measurement, summed it up during one of the panels. 

Following are a few thoughts that came to mind from the perspective of metrics and evaluation, while attending some of the sessions at the conference.

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Guest blogger Miguel Jardine is a first-year MBA student at Thunderbird School of Global Management where he focuses on Green Capital Allocation.  At Thunderbird, he has further developed his ideas on Triple Bottom Line value propositions and the leadership role of business in igniting meaningful progress in solving the environmental and socioeconomic challenges of our times. 

Miguel was born in Panama and traveled through Asia led by his fascination with intercultural collaboration.

By Miguel Jardine

I went to the 2008 Net Impact Conference in Philadelphia to try to answer the type of questions asked in the description of  one of the presentations titled "Measuring Impact:" "How do you define and measure the value of social impact?  How does this vary between public, private, and nonprofit organizations? What metrics forecast impact?"  Evidently I was not alone in my quest because I had to jockey for a good seat in the packed auditorium where Jason Saul, CEO of Mission Measurement, was moderating the panel discussion.

The presentation started by voicing the commonly held belief that the warm, selfless act of service seemingly defies the cold, calculated precision of measurement.  After all, how do you measure feelings of  compassion and happiness?  The answer, however, has become more and more significant as the business world wrestles with the new demands of integrating social responsibility into their operations. 

As they do, nonprofit organizations, who have dominated the social service marketplace, are being pushed to face the inevitable incumbent challenge: to reinvent themselves in order to remain competitive.  It is entirely possible, the panel empathized, for nonprofits to remain true to their missions with only a slight change in perspective.

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Guest blogger Karen Lynn Vincent, a serial social benefit entrepreneur, is the co-founder and current chief operating officer at Resdida, a hybrid social business distributing content via mobile devices to the rural poor. She also works with the Global Social Benefit Incubator (GSBI) in the Center for Science, Technology and Society at Santa Clara University.

She sent us the following post from Santa Clara, California, where the Transformative Changes through Science and Technology: The Role for Social Benefit Entrepreneurs conference took place last week.

By Karen Lynn Vincent

During his morning address, 2006 Nobel Peace Prize winner, Muhammad Yunus of the Grameen Bank said that the integration of the many Grameen companies occurs not in structure or organization but with the woman in the village.  The Grameen companies are separate entities that converge in their compassion and empathy for the rural poor. 

Compassion and empathy were the recurrent themes of the day at the Transformative Changes through Science and Technology: The Role for Social Benefit Entrepreneurs conference, presented by the Center for Science, Technology and Society at Santa Clara University in on November 13, 2008.  This conference was held following and in conjunction with the Tech Awards Gala on the evening of November 12 at the Tech Museum in San Jose and brought the many sponsors and laureates together for a highly inspirational day.

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I had the opportunity to attend the Tech Museum Awards ceremony last week in San Jose, California.  What's interesting about this annual event is not just the social entrepreneurs and their sometimes quite remarkable innovations, but also the way Silicon Valley turns out to honor them and, at least for an evening, to focus on applying entrepreneurial skills to benefit poor people. This year the event was attended by some 1,500 people including many of the Valley's wealthiest and most powerful Venture Capitalists, CEOs, and networkers.

The mix of enterprises changes every year.This year was especially rich in BoP energy enterprises with seven entries. The prize winner was Distributed Energy Systems India, or DESI Power (desi means land or village in Hindi), which builds biomass power plants to generate electricity in villages that lack access to it. DESI trains locals to run the plants and also incubates local businesses that need power and enlarge the customer base for the model.

A wearable solar lighting system that stores up power in a cellphone battery and yields several hours of light in the evenings and technology for modifying diesel engines to run on virtually any plant oil were also intriguing.   

Highlights of a health cluster were Medmira, which has developed inexpensive rapid diagnostics for HIV and Hepatitis, and Star Syringe, the prize-winner, which develops syringes that only allow one use, thus preventing disease transmission by needle reuse.

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Last Saturday morning was gray, rainy and windy in Philadelphia, but it didn't keep the Net Impact conference from building momentum. I began the day attending a session led by the Base of the Pyramid Protocol team. It was interesting to get a closer feel of this tool; a detailed wrap up of the session will be posted here in NextBillion by its organizers (NextBillion co-founder John Paul, Patrick Donaheau, and others) so stay tuned for that.

Once the session wrapped up I walked down to prepare for the next panel "Unreasonable People: The Role of Entrepreneurs in Shaping Tomorrow's Markets". It was moderated by Virginia Barreiro, New Ventures global director at WRI, and featured panelists Agnes Dasewicz from the Grassroots Business Fund, Ben Powell from Agora Partnerships and John Elkington, co-founder of Volans Ventures and author of the book that inspired the panel's title.  

WRI's New Ventures team decided to host this panel and spark a conversation about the role of intermediaries like those represented by the panelists in supporting entrepreneurial solutions to the challenges of poverty and environmental degradation. We believe that the conversation was timely due to the critical stage that this "sector" and the world's economy as a whole is undergoing. As expected, the panelists and an audience of ca. 80 students and professionals delivered a dynamic and thought provoking session.

Following is a summary of the issues discussed. (By the way, several questions remained unanswered after the panel due to time constraints; if you are interested in following up with the panelists on any of the topics discussed, please comment below. We'd be glad to keep the conversation going here in NextBillion).

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It has been a fascinating morning, not without a funny feeling of nostalgia. A year ago I was logging in to read about the happenings at the Net Impact conference during my breaks writing essays and completing business school applications. In all of them, I tried to make sure to state my interest in joining a chapter and become part of this community.

A year later I am at the conference, not as a student but with my colleagues from WRI. I'm also running into familiar faces like the remarkable folks that were going to be my classmates at Michigan's Ross School of Business.

Take Nina Henning, for instance. I met her back in January when I went to visit Ross and to attend a Forum organized by their Net Impact chapter. Although I ended up not going to Ross, we have been able to keep in touch, even during her summer internship at Acumen Fund. She is a strong leader and I very much look forward to seeing her whereabouts once she finishes her dual degree next year. She will ignite significant change in the world, there's no doubt in my mind about that.

Now that's only Nina, and she's far from being alone. There are many (many!) like her this weekend in Philadelphia; more than 2,400 of the world's best-prepared people, business students, engaged in discussion about ways in which business can be an engine for social and environmental sustainability, for hope, for justice. That is the Net Impact Conference and this NextBillion's first post from it.

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Guest blogger Sami Nerenberg is an adjunct faculty at the Rhode Island School of Design, teaching the advanced studio Design for Social Entrepreneurship. She also is a member of the Grain collaborative and previously worked for the nonprofits, Design that Matters and Greenblue.

Co-contributors to this article include Alan Harlem, Caitlin Cohen, & Marina Kim.

By Sami Nerenberg

This weekend I had the honor of participating in Brown/RISD's first ever Better World by Design conference as both a workshop leader and panelist discussing the role of design in social entrepreneurship. This year's Social Entrepreneurship Panel was moerated by Alan Harlam, Director of Social Entrepreneurship at the Brown Swearer Center. Joining the panel were Caitlin Cohen, Co-Founder of Mali Health Organizing Project, Marina Kim from Ashoka's Global Academy University Program and myself.

Three panelists and one moderator, all from different backgrounds, came together and set out to discuss the following: 

1. What is design?
   
2. How does design play a role in social entrepreneurship?
   
3. How do interdisciplinary groups of designers, engineers, business men/women and more, come together to work effectively?

Well, there are some simple and not so simple answers to these questions.

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Today I am posting the results of a unique partnership and a novel experiment in furthering social entrepreneurship, the fruits of an effort launched on this site a year ago.

The partners were Santa Clara University's Global Social Benefit Incubator and World Resources Institute, and the attached white paper bears the names of Jim Koch (of GSBI), myself (then of WRI, now with Ashoka: Innovators for the Public) and Francisco Noguera, who has continued the water work at WRI.

The idea was to extend the scaling impact of the GSBI by recruiting a cluster of social enterprises within a single sector for the 2008 class, to add research on the sector as a whole, to involve water experts as well as the silicon valley VCs and CEOs in mentoring process of the water enterprise cluster so as to use them to provide a preliminary benchmark for the sector-and then to share what we learned so that other water entrepreneurs worldwide could build on that knowledge. 

The sector cluster was planned as 6 enterprises but, in the end, was only four (things happen!), so the database is less robust that we had hoped, and our conclusions must necessarily be more tentative. Yet it is clear to us that we have identified scalable models-both business models and low-cost technology-that are likely to be of use elsewhere.

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Following Jocelyn's post and just to keep the conversation going about the role of design in the development through enterprise field, here are two recommendations for your typical Tuesday afternoon.

First, please go over to Ethan Zuckerman's blog and read why good design and innovation are constraints-driven. You'll have a laugh or two (Ethan's writing simply takes you places) and you'll feel inspired by his insights and by the stories he delivers.

Then (or before that, if you'd prefer) take a look at the following video and see how good and smart design can help you deliver a simple message in an elegant, touching and impactful way. I'm sure many of you will have seen it already, but I think it's worth playing over and over (with your speakers ON).  

Guest blogger Jocelyn Wyatt works for the design firm IDEO, leading its base of the pyramid projects. Prior to joining IDEO, Jocelyn was an Acumen Fund Fellow in Kenya. She holds a MBA from Thunderbird. Jocelyn blogs at Design and Reach.

She sent us the following post following her attendance to the Better World by Design Conference last week in Providence, Rhode Island.

By Jocelyn Wyatt

The Better World by Design Conference was hosted last week by Brown University and the Rhode Island Design Institute (RISD) in Providence, Rhode Island. I attended the conference as a speaker and was impressed that the event was entirely student organized and run. The conference drew about 200 people from the design industry, private sector, social sector, and academia. We heard from a good mix of practitioners, consultants, and researchers.

The conference mapped closely to IDEO's Design for Social Impact initiative so it was very much in-line with the work we've been doing for the past year. Just as way of background, the purpose of IDEO's design for social impact work is to cause transformational change in communities of need.

One theme that was repeated throughout the conference was the importance of developing empathy. We heard from Ross Evans (founder of Xtracycle and World Bike  and Cameron Sinclair, founder of Architecture for Humanity,  about the need to live and eat in the communities we are designing with. We must work to understand the complexities of the local context and be sure to work closely with local partners. While this seems like an obvious tenant of design, many people at the conference shared market insights but didn't share stories of people or human insights. We need to make sure that we're looking not just as what's for sale at markets and what is being advertised, but that we actually talk to people about what they want and need.

A second theme which was emphasized at this conference as well as at the Design in the Developing World panel at SoCap, was the need to apply design thinking to business models, distribution systems, and marketing. As Emily Pilloton, Founder of Project H said, "design is easy; implementation is tough."

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NextBillion returns this year to Net Impact's annual conference, which this time will be held in Philadelphia at Penn's Wharton School of Business. Titled The Sustainable Advantage: Creating Environmental and Social Value, it will be Net Impact's largest conference up to date with more than 2,000 registered attendees.

NextBillion will not only be at the conference but also provide extensive coverage of the sessions most relevant to the conversation about market-based approaches to fighting poverty and environmental degradation. Given the magnitude of the event and the amount of content worth covering, I will be joined by a group of talented writers that include my colleague in WRI and New Ventures Kelly McCarthy, NextBillion Staff Writer Mark Beckford (who will be moderating a panel about low-cost computing businesses in the developing world), as well as a team of MBA students from Thunderbird, the Johnson School at Cornell, UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business and maybe even Michigan's Ross School of Business.

One of the sessions in the conference will actually be hosted by my colleagues at WRI's New Ventures project and will feature a conversation about the role of entrepreneurs in shaping tomorrow's markets.

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