Editor's note: Guest video blogger Karthik Janakiraman is an Acumen Fund Fellow. This year, Karthik is working with Global Easy Water Products (GEWP), an company in India providing poor farmers with access to affordable micro-drip irrigation solutions. He will develop a production, inventory and logistics plan, while also building and refining GEWP's export strategy.

Before joining Acumen Fund, Karthik was a Senior Engineering Manager at Applied Materials in Santa Clara, California, responsible for new product development. He has been awarded five patents in the area of semiconductor design. Karthik holds a Master of Science degree in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Michigan.

Video blog by Karthik Janakiraman

During my first week in Aurangabad, I went to the agricultural fields and met a few customers of GEWP. One of them in particular, stood out. This short video captures my thoughts and impressions on that meeting.



This post first appeared on the Acumen Fund Fellows blog.

Following is the second of a Two-Part Series written by guest blogger Ryan Gunderson after a recent trip to rural Zambia.

Ryan is a business professional with Medtronic, the world's leading medical technology company.  He earned a bachelor's degree from Brigham Young University and an MBA from the University of Michigan's Ross School of Business. He writes about sustainable, scalable solutions to end global poverty on his blog Riches For Good and is actively pursuing his goal to help 1 million people out of poverty during his lifetime.

By Ryan Gunderson

I met Blessings and Francis in October 2008 when I visited the church they both attend in Lusaka, Zambia.  Although some 90 people were in attendance, Blessings and Francis stood out to me for the obvious reason that they were the only two speakers in the main meeting that day. Before Sunday school I introduced myself to all who were present, and I told them I was traveling with a non-governmental organization (NGO) and would be visiting rural farmers in Zambia to help them increase their incomes. 

Intrigued by the purpose of my trip, Francis invited me to his house after church, and I gladly accepted.  Blessings separately invited me to his house; the three of us traveled to Francis' house, where we spoke for about an hour.  I'm pictured below with Blessings (suit) and Francis, and several members of Francis' family.

I shared my goal to help 1 million people out of poverty and asked Blessings and Francis for any suggestions.  They each shared their opinion that many people have ideas for small businesses, but they lack startup capital. 

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Following is the first of a Two-Part Series written by guest blogger Ryan Gunderson after a recent trip to rural Zambia.

Ryan is a business professional with Medtronic, the world's leading medical technology company.  He earned a bachelor's degree from Brigham Young University and an MBA from the University of Michigan's Ross School of Business. He writes about sustainable, scalable solutions to end global poverty on his blog Riches For Good and is actively pursuing his goal to help 1 million people out of poverty during his lifetime.

By Ryan Gunderson

Mr. Hakawale is a farmer who lives along the banks of the Magoye River with his family in rural Zambia.  Up until 1997, he cultivated a small plot of land, watering his crops by hand with a bucket.  When I visited Mr. Hakawale in October 2008 as a guest on IDE's annual board trip, he gave us all a great history lesson of irrigation on his farm, starting by holding up a rusted out metal bucket he used years ago, shown in the picture below.

In 1997, Mr. Hakawale met a representative of IDE (short for International Development Enterprises), a Colorado-based non-profit that has been helping rural farmers in the developing world to increase their incomes since the 1980s.

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The International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) is launching a new project called "Millions Fed: Proven Successes in Global Agriculture." With the help of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the project aims to document evidence on what works in agriculture—what sorts of policies, programs, and investments in agricultural development have substantially reduced hunger and poverty.

They are inviting nominations highlighting interventions that have had a significant impact on food security, including those that have empowered women and vulnerable groups to improve their livelihoods. The nomination deadline is December 31.

For more information click here.

Guest blogger Bree Olivari is a second-year MBA candidate at Thunderbird Global School of Management and is a leader of the Net Impact chapter. At Thunderbird, Bree integrates her interest in sustainable business with her degree in supply chain leadership. Her projects include mapping best practices of supplier codes of ethics, organizing Thunderbird's Sustainable Innovation Summit and greening procurement practices on campus.

During a recent internship Bree helped design the distribution of micronutrient sachets to undernourished children in Mexico.

By Bree Olivari

As I bit into an apple provided in my Net Impact lunch box, my mind wandered to the farm it came from and how this juicy treat related to a growing and global food crisis. It is expected that such a thought cross my mind especially since the details from the session I attended at the Net Impact National Conference hours earlier entitled "The Global Food Crisis: Business-Led Solutions to Alleviate Food Insecurity and Malnutrition" were still fresh.

Back to my thoughts of the apple farm. Much unlike the farms described in the session, which the world's poorest communities depend on, the apple farm probably uses technology developed over the past fifty years, can afford to use fertilizer and may even receive a subsidy from the US government. Furthermore, the apple farmer clearly has access to a reliable transportation infrastructure which affords her access to markets where she can make well-informed decisions on price and value for the customer.  

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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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Chip Ransler is the co-founder of Husk Power Systems (HPS), a for-profit company that cost-effectively converts rice husks into electricity. HPS utilizes a proprietary technology to run 35-100 kilowatt mini power plants, delivering pay-for-use electricity to un-electrified villages in India's "Rice Belt." HPS' five pilot projects have become operationally profitable within six months, delivering sustainable, environmentally-friendly, low-cost energy that is dramatically improving the lives of rural Indians.

Chip is also a Pop!Tech Social Innovation Fellow.  We sat down this week at the conference for an interview.  For more context on Husk Power Systems, check out their profiles in Virginia Business (Chip and his business partner, Manoj Sinha, are MBA candidates at the University of Virginia) and Rediff.com.

Rob Katz, NextBillion.net: Tell me briefly – what is Husk Power Systems?

Chip Ransler, Husk Power Systems: Husk Power Systems is a rural electrification company.  We go where the inputs are cheap and where electricity is most needed and valued.  In practice, that means rural villages – places where 3 or 4 thousand people live.  Our systems are truly community based – we don’t have to truck in wires from all over the place.  It’s a relatively small, off-grid system.  There are 350 million people in India without power living in small villages; and those communities harvest 92 million tons of rice harvested every year – we’re meeting the need and using the best, local materials.  Also, this is not a dream – we’re in 5 villages, power 12,000 people’s homes. Our goal is to build 100 as quickly as we can – then scale our model throughout the developing world.

NextBillion.net: Tell me about rice husk – what is it, how much is there, where do you find them?  What do farmers do with them now?

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Paul Polak is wearing a sweater vest.  This will come as no surprise to anyone who’s met him or seen him speak.  The man loves sweaters – cardigans, sweater vests, pullovers.  Hell, in Camden today – with temperatures hovering around 40 degrees in the midday sun – Paul’s sweater makes a lot of sense.  But despite his grandfatherly image, Paul is a truly a young, tireless innovator and entrepreneur at heart.  

Polak is the founder of the non-profit International Development Enterprises (IDE) and the author of Out of Poverty (review here).  He is dedicated to developing practical solutions that attack poverty at its roots. For the past 25 years, Paul has worked with thousands of farmers in countries around the world to help design and produce low–cost, income–generating products that have already moved 17 million people out of poverty.

His goal - like Bunker Roy's - is to create a franchise of barefoot, women microentrepreneurs based on the ruthless pursuit of affordability. Polak suggests that a company could set up a water kiosk where entrepreneurs could sell water at an affordable price, profitably.  (Sounds familiar!)

He starts his presentation with some seemingly random facts – 200 million Americans have hemorrhoids; men talk on cell phones 16 percent more than women do.  His point: we know everything we need to know (and more) about affluent consumers.  But we know next to nothing about the other 90 percent of the world's customers.

Serving these customers means re-thinking business.  But it also means re-thinking development.  To do so, Polak has based his work on what he calls the three great poverty eradication myths:

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Guest blogger Champa Gujjanudu is an 1st-year MBA student at the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley with an emphasis in social impact consulting and community development. Prior to Haas, Champa was a Strategy Consultant with BearingPoint in the Bay Area and in New Zealand. She has held consulting positions in various industries such as Financial Services, Healthcare and Technology. She graduated with a degree from the University of Auckland with degrees in Computer Science, Mathematics and Business Information Systems.

By Champa Gujjanudu

Today, I was privileged enough to attend not one but two great panel discussions on a topic close to my heart, Fair Trade. While being familiar with some of the local and regional Fair Trade associations and retailers, I was blown away by the breadth of experiences and the passion that the various panelists brought to the discussions.

The first panel addressed one of the major challenges in the mainstreaming of Fair Trade - how do we influence the large untapped proportion of consumers to affect long lasting change in preferences? The other important question was how do we compete in the market with other non-Fair Trade products?

The next panel was focused on attracting investment in Fair Trade - tracing the supply chain of Fair Trade and discussing some of the key attributes of Fair Trade that deter traditional financiers and limit micro-financiers such as lack of collateral and the scale of Fair Trade.

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Guest blogger Lauren Withey is a research analyst for the Climate, Energy and Transport Program at the at the World Resources Institute, in Washington D.C.

By Lauren Withey

"So, we are going to help the indigenous people of the Colombian Amazon raise bugs," the young Colombian man explained simply as I looked over his poster, covered with photos of indigenous people in traditional dress alongside images of massive beetles, butterflies, and spiders.

"Uh-huh," I nodded understandingly. It seemed to me that if I lived in the Amazon, the last thing I would want to deal with would be more big spiders.

"Then, we are going to ship them around the world."

"The bugs?"

"That is correct. Here in the US, there is a big market for live butterflies for butterfly exhibits. In Japan, they pay a lot of money for these beetles the size of your hand. And the spiders. It will help these indigenous people to make a living and will protect biodiversity at the same time. And it will give them an incentive to protect the forest they live in instead of burning it for agriculture."

"Ahhh..." Who'd have thought it?

This encounter marked the beginning of an afternoon last week at the World Bank's 2008 Global Development Marketplace, in which my mind returned to this refrain many times.

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Guest blogger Peter Moers is economist and the regional coordinator for the Social Trade Organization in Central America. He has worked in several countries in Central America, West Africa and in The Netherlands in small enterprise, cooperative, rural and local economic development. He believes that local production for local markets is an underexplored development strategy and that biofuels offer a unique opportunity to many rural areas to create strong, diversified and stable local economies.

By Peter Moers

Paris Hilton and biofuels may have more in common than you think.  After all, they have both experienced the ups and downs of fame lately. After having been presented for several years by the media as the ultimate solution for many energy and environmental problems, biofuels' star has fallen to the point of being the main culprit of food shortages, high food prices, deforestation and even pollution.

Of course, there is neither a simple solution nor a single culprit. In the meantime, the generalizations that lead to biofuels’ Paris Hilton moments – the ups and downs – lead to a negative image for many initiatives that DO contribute to positive social and environmental change.

This article explores the food-fuel relationship in the specific context of rural development project in Honduras, Gota Verde. The project uses small-scale biofuel production for local consumption as a strategy to create employment, stabilize income sources for small farmers, reduce their dependence on loan sharks, avoid soil erosion, protect water sources and increase food production.

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