August 2006

I was recently invited (with full sponsorship from UN Habitat) to speak on a panel at Stockholm World Water Week. This is the world’s largest annual water conference and I was there to discuss the value of market-based approaches to water and sanitation funding for small towns. The planners of the session wanted to foster a debate and encouraged speakers to take on their opposing roles in earnest. Goaded on by facilitator Dominic Waughrey of the World Economic Forum, we each took polarized positions and provided concrete examples of failures and opportunities of the various forms of financing. With a little humor and expert facilitation, each of us went further than we may have planned in pointing out the inconsistencies and gaps in each others’ arguments.

What do Anil Kumar Taka, a Drishtee Kiosk Operator at the Jawahar Nagar village in the district of Meerut in Uttar Pradesh, India, and Stephen Holt, CEO of Movie Magic and an Iowa-based eBay entrepreneur, have in common?

Whether you call it the arrival of Business 2.0 or credit the technology revolution, it’s clear that cutting-edge companies the world over now provide platforms to empower their clients rather than delivering end-to-end solutions.  eBay provides an automated and efficient platform for product distribution, leaving it to their enterprising customers to decide what product mix to sell and how to price it.  Drishtee.com provides a turn-key package for offering residents of an Indian panchayat - a cluster of 5 villages - a mix of education, e-government, health, agriculture and leisure services delivered over a PC-based network.

A New York Times article this week highlights the concerning scarcity of water that the world faces, noting water conservation strategies in agriculture as an innovative solution. Acumen Fund investment, IDE India, is focused one exactly this issue, developing useful and affordable water storage and irrigation technologies for small-scale farmers.  We believe that organizations such as IDE India will help to minimize the adverse impacts of these increasing water deficits on low-income populations.

Acumen Fund Advisory Council Member, Dr. Seth Berkley is President and founder of the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative (IAVI).  IAVI is a global non-profit organization focused on accelerating the search for a vaccine to prevent HIV infection and AIDS. Their biennial flagship publication, AIDS Vaccine Blueprint 2006: Actions to Strengthen Global Research and Development, was released last week at the XIV International AIDS Conference in Toronto.  We are proud to know Seth and his team.

Acumen Fund and IDEO have developed a partnership over the last two years to explore how Acumen Fund’s focus on using entrepreneurial approaches to address the problems of poverty, coupled with IDEO’s human-centered approach to design, could create synergy and help both organizations achieve their broader goals.

Earlier this month, Acumen Fund and IDEO met with Jennifer Davis of Stanford University and Ranjiv Khush of the Aquaya Institute, experts bringing extensive experience working on issues of water and sanitation internationally. This was a unique group - bringing together Acumen Fund’s knowledge of water-related BOP market business opportunities, the creativity of IDEO’s idea workshop and the deep sector knowledge of water experts.

A pervasive challenge Acumen Fund has seen with both our current and potential water investments is how to assure safe drinking water for low-income consumers, who collect water from centralized sources, like wells, standpipes, handpumps, and water treatment systems. We saw this as an opportunity to pool the talents of the group to develop design innovations that could have an impact in the water sector.

Voxiva, one of our health investments, was recently profiled in this Wall Street Journal article. The company, which offers disease surveillance and disease management platforms for national or regional health systems, is building a brand around technology that uses SMS messaging for real time data collection and dissemination (”the power of the internet with the reach of the cellphone” as their management team likes to say).

As the article explains, the pervasiveness of the existing cellular networks, and the rapid penetration of mobile phones among all demographic groups, should enable Voxiva to offer a range of health services, leveraging existing infrastructure.

Like Drishtee in India - a company that is building health information services into a network that rural computer kiosks already used for a range of services (from e-mail to e-governance to just plain old web surfing for cricket scores) - the flow of health products, services and information may be more cost-effectively delivered using these existing information and communication technology (ICT) networks.

The Case Foundation is currently spotlighting the work of Acumen Fund investee IDE-India. The article, written by The Skoll Foundation, highlights the ethos - core to IDE-India and Acumen Fund’s work - of recognizing the poor as customers, who want affordable, effective products. Enjoy.

Our water portfolio team recently held a series of meetings in Mumbai, Hyderabad, Bangalore and West Bengal to explore the role that microfinance organizations could play in providing credit for water products and services.

One group in West Bengal asked us why the poor in their state should pay to treat their own water, when in the developed world safe water is made available for free. This question underscored the misperception that water can be made available on a sustainable basis at no cost. The reality is that where water is managed most effectively is where there is a price associated with it - which promotes more judicious use of the resource and a revenue stream to assure that investments are made and maintained over time. These misperceptions have plagued efforts to introduce water treatment and delivery models that require users to pay.

Dr. Venkataswamy, founder of Aravind Eye Hospital and Acumen Fund partner, was remembered this past weekend in a new Wall Street Journal feature that notes the passing of important people who have left an imprint on the world of business.

For everyone lucky enough to have met Dr. V, he was an extraordinary individual in every way, who did what so many of us dream about- he changed the world. As important, he made the world a better place just by being in it, just by walking through it in a way filled with dignity and respect for everyone he met.

Infosys is celebrating its 25th anniversary - a long journey from their beginnings with 250 dollars and a single room. To mark the occasion, they rang the NASDAQ opening bell on Monday, becoming the first company to do so from India. As Infosys CEO - and Acumen Fund partner - Nandan Nilekani says, “This event is yet another example of how the world is becoming flat.”

Nandan, along with the founding CEO and a small group of others, started Infosys with the idea of creating a world-class company in a time when India was too often associated only with poverty.

Today, that company is a billion dollar enterprise with over 45,000 employees, receiving tens of thousands of applications each month from aspiring young programmers. I often use Inofsys as an example of what is needed not only in India, but also in Africa and other places where examples of success create direct impact but also inspire tremendous hope - life’s greatest currency. The whole Acumen Fund team extends their warmest congratulations to Infosys.

Infosys has recently launched their blog - we encourage you to visit it.