Housing portfolio manager Helen Ng is part of the CGAP Working Group on Housing Finance for the Poor, a group of donors and practitioners who share learnings and best practices in the sector. As part of that shared learning, Helen authored a working paper on housing finance and guarantees for base-of-the-pyramid markets, which you can see here.

Our longtime friend and advisor Seth Godin recently returned from India, where he shared his expertise with our India team and some of our investees, as well as visited some pipeline investments. He wrote about some of his experiences on his blog, which is always a great read.

Our first cohort of fellows has finished up their assignments with Acumen Fund investees, and is re-joining us in New York as of today! We are excited to have them with us for the next month as we debrief as a group; collect their insights related to leadership, sustainability and scale for small enterprises serving the poor; and help them prepare for their next steps. You can expect them to share some of their experiences on this blog, as they have done throughout the year.  And as they prepare to leave the fellowship (but certainly not the Acumen Fund community), I’m pleased to announce that we have selected our second cohort of fellows, who will be joining us this fall.

We have certainly learned a lot in the first year of the program, but most importantly, it has reinforced our belief in the need to capture the energy of talent all over the world who can apply skills and imagination to help solve some of the world’s biggest problems. As Jacqueline discussed in last week’s quarterly newsletter, “talent” has become one of the pillars of Acumen Fund’s work – it is thrilling to see the sector moving toward developing not just the next generation of leaders, but the next generation of entrepreneurs and managers with business and operational skills.

Here is an interesting article about the Aga Khan, the Ismaili leader who has used a mix of business and philanthropy to effect significant change around the world. We have real respect for the initiatives of the Aga Khan Foundation, especially in Pakistan and East Africa. What excites me is the number of articles covering leaders who are unafraid to use this necessary combination for change.

Acumen Fund has just published its Summer 2007 newsletter, which updates our activities over the past quarter, including new housing investments and our new class of fellows. If you aren’t already on the mailing list, you can sign up here.

Our friend Satyan Mishra, the dynamic entrepreneur behind our investee Drishtee, sent us this email sharing some of his experiences, frustrations and joy of working in rural India.

Village diary

Monsoon mornings in any part of India are as beautiful as it gets. Perhaps it is the smell of wet earth which refreshes or the sight of the cloud-laden sky. Being driven on such a morning into the countryside of North Bihar is an experience worth sharing. More so as the past and future run alongside as two lanes on the same road; one on which we are driving and the other one, broader and more promising, being laid fresh. But wait ! Before I get philosophical about development, let me tell you that I am headed to our project village in Madhubani, for the second time in the same week. That is where the Pollution Control Board has suddenly decided to make a visit and inspect the site where we are putting up a state-of-the-art bamboo gasifier plant to produce 25 kw electricity to bring to life the aspirations of the community. Bihar’s first rural business process outsourcing (BPO) facility has been set up in the heart of the village to allow young people to work and compete with their urban counterparts. Ten village youth have so far found employment, and there is scope for many more if the pilot succeeds. Jobs inside the villages would result in reverse migration and the growth of the market within the community, helping to revive a dying economy.

Here I go again talking of development and future, while the present seems to be hidden under the dark monsoon clouds. Why has a safe electricity-producing technology (manufactured at the prestigious Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore) with low emissions levels and fancy acoustic enclosures, in the back of a village where the average income of a family is less than US $1 a day, found sudden notice of the Pollution Control Board of an otherwise sleepy state?  To answer that question, let’s take a step back a week in time. (more…)

Because I am often asked for book suggestions, this is a good review of a terrific book that I’m reading and am really enjoying. The economist Paul Collier looks at the poorest billion in the world and offers suggestions about how to extend economic opportunity to them. I highly recommend it.

I recently attended the US India Business Council’s (USIBC)  32nd anniversary celebration in Washington, DC, which was attended by over 500 people and featured global business leaders, US companies who have a growing presence in India and industry-leading Indian companies. What was exciting was not only to see people crowded together to discuss India’s attractive landscape and GDP growth but to hear business leaders come back time and time again to the need to think about a more “inclusive” growth, one that includes the 75% of people who live in India’s villages and 80% of people who earn less than $2 a day in India, and have so far been excluded from this growth – an issue that we at Acumen Fund work to address on a daily basis.

Mukesh Ambani, who received the Global Vision Award, accepted it on behalf of his father, Dhirubhai Ambani, who started Reliance with $1,000 and a dream, and made its growth and profits available to the common Indian through the stock market. According to Mukesh, Dhirubhai believed in two things: (1) investing in innovative business models and (2) trusting in the talent of young people, who in his opinion held the key to making things happen. Today, Reliance is India’s largest private sector company, 1 in every 4 Indians in the stock market own Reliance, and the average age of Reliance’s 100,000 person workforce is 29.  (more…)