Here is a great column by Sir Richard Branson, entrepreneur extraordinaire, who underlines the importance of social entrepreneurs in solving big problems of poverty. As he says, entrepreneurs turn problems into solutions, and he mentions Acumen Fund investees, including Aravind and SHEF. We are proud to know Richard and always inspired by his fearlessness.

One of the things we heave heard from our community is the value they place on insights direct from the field. As we think about how best to make this information readily available, we have discovered the importance of creating connections to those who have truly lived and experienced our work on the ground.

Recently we held a breakfast in New York with our 2007 Acumen Fund Fellows who have just returned from eight months working with our investees in India, Pakistan, China, Tanzania and Kenya. As I listened to this incredibly gifted group of individuals, I was captivated by the sense of humility, passion and empathy they demonstrated when speaking about their work. For me, there were two key themes that emerged from the breakfast. The first was echoed in the words of Nadaa Taiyab who eloquently articulated the reality and the barriers to accessing the fortune at the base of the pyramid. Nadaa shared her story of scaling Medicine Shoppe’s operations through listening and learning from the poor as consumers, employees, and partners.  The second theme was best revealed in Keely Stevenson’s story of the tension she faced when helping A to Z Textile Mills discover the sustainable price point for an insecticide-treated bednet coupled with the reality of the tradeoffs that a woman living in rural Tanzania must face to protect her children from malaria. The provocative stories told by the Acumen Fellows revealed some of the greatest challenging we face in the world today and reaffirmed the importance of building a community of engaged and inspired problem solvers.

You can listen to an audio recording of the session, and we hope to post video soon! (The audio is a large MP3 file, so it may take a while to download.)

Written with David Lehr and John Paul

A while back, I posted my impressions of being a mobile consumer in East Africa, ranging from interactions with the woman who cleans my apartment to the varied uses of mobile telephony Acumen Fund sees among its portfolio companies. Things have evolved. Since then, my landlord fired her and the replacement cleaner, settling on a dynamic young woman named Juddy. She too communicates through mobiles, except in those instances where she runs out of prepaid phone credits and we resort to old-style human contact. My own account has been migrated to “postpaid,” meaning I receive a (outrageously high) bill at the end of the month instead of buying the prepaid credit that accounts for the majority of mobile usage here. Meanwhile, across the country, SMS short codes are becoming ubiquitous for radio show call-ins, university and government programs, health data collection and more, as mobile phones solidify their position as the connectivity platform of choice for the world’s majority.

Acumen Fund’s thinking on the potential for mobile phone applications in the developing world has moved forward as well. I finished the Nick Sullivan book — You Can Hear Me Now — that sketches out the birth of the Village Phone business in the late 90s. The original model allowed entrepreneurs in Bangladesh, primarily women, to buy $420 phones with microcredit loans and then pay them off over time with revenues from selling calls at a markup. To Sullivan, two keys to that model’s success were the smart foreign capital coming into the sector and the dynamic local talent willing to take entrepreneurial risk in order to make something happen. Today, as the cost of phones drops steadily, many are betting on value-added services on mobiles as the next boom. I have seen three aspiring business plans along such lines in the past month alone. Mobile applications are inherently scalable since they are automated, available over a wide area, and there is virtually zero cost to add customers. And a la Sullivan, enterprising service providers are going way beyond ringtones and games to test these enterprise applications in developing countries.

Our Business Technology Solutions Team is studying the ongoing innovations in the mobile application space, particularly in the social enterprise arena, to analyze potential benefits to Acumen Fund’s low-income target market and the businesses that serve it. (more…)

This is a good article about SeaChange, a new nonprofit started by Acumen Partner Chuck Harris, who is focused on bringing Wall Street methods to helping nonprofits raise capital. It is an important endeavor, as the revenue-raising side of the nonprofit world needs innovation and, even more to the point, transformation in order to create change more effectively.

This article highlights a changing trend among foundations to discuss their failures as well as their successes. It is something we’ve been committed to doing since starting Acumen Fund, and is exciting to see in the broader sector. What is most important and compelling is a focus on learning from failure as consistent with having a greater sense of urgency around what it will really take to solve problems of poverty which are always complex, never easy.