This week’s Acumen Fund Pakistan Quarterly Tea event at the Sheraton Hotel - Karachi opened up with a spectacular light show – or lack thereof. Actually, the power went out in the entire hotel for 15 minutes as the event was to begin. Not so surprising when you consider that Pakistan faces an electricity shortage of 3000 to 4000 megawatts at peak times. But what was surprising and impressive was that everyone in attendance, from Acumen Fund Pakistan partners to advisors to entrepreneurs, all 50 people strong, carried right on with their conversations in the pitch black and did not miss a beat, even with the air conditioning out. Some even used their cell phones as a light source, which showed their resourcefulness and also how common these power outages are becoming in Karachi.

When the power came back on, Brian Trelstad gave an overview of the Acumen model, highlighting the importance of providing ‘patient capital for impatient people’ – those unwilling to sit on the sidelines and watch the problems of poverty. He also spoke specifically about our investment in A to Z Textiles and Water Health International (WHI) – both of which have shown an impressive ability to scale: A to Z is producing millions of bednets a year and has created more than 6,000 jobs; and WHI has 85 water systems serving 250,000 Base of the Pyramid customers, with plans to grow to hundreds of systems serving millions of people in the next 2-3 years.

When it comes to the lessons we are learning, it is within the context of how to best solve the problems of poverty. While increasing aid is important, Acumen Fund is looking at different ways to utilize philanthropic capital. Acumen Fund’s investment philosophy tests market-based mechanisms, and invests in the ingenuity of entrepreneurs and their teams.

After the brief presentation, Brian opened up the floor to questions and for me personally (as well as the Acumen Fund Pakistan team), it was incredibly exciting to see how engaged the audience members were as they asked very specific, focused questions.

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Today, we had the pleasure of meeting with the MicroDrip team to discuss their drip irrigation systems being rolled out in the Thar desert region of Pakistan. Dr. Sono is the visionary founder of the Thardeep Rural Development Program (TRDP), which is incubating MicroDrip as a for-profit to serve poor farmers living in the desert. TRDP, the non-profit, provides support services, like education and training, to these farmers.

This is my second chance to meet Dr. Sono, who spoke at Acumen Fund’s 2007 Investor Gathering and Celebration last November. Dr. Sono was joined at the meeting by Saqib Khan, the COO of Micro Drip, and Javaid Chaudhry, MicroDrip’s Technical Sales Manager.

MicroDrip is a for-profit company that sells and distributes drip irrigation systems to farmers in the Thar region. Acumen Fund has supported the formation of MicroDrip as a for-profit company and is making a US $500,000 loan to support their growth.

Acumen Fund has been working with drip irrigation since 2003, when we first funded International Development Enterprises India (IDEI), an NGO that had the ingenuity to engineer drip systems that were inexpensive enough to make economic sense for farmers making as little as $1 a day. MicroDrip now buys these systems from Global Easy Water Products (GEWP) in India, a recent Acumen Fund investment in scaling the domestic and international distribution of affordable irrigation technologies available to smallholder farmers. This is a powerful partnership across the India/Pakistan border.

Drip systems are deceptively simple. Rubber tubing with tiny holes delivers water directly to the roots of plants. These systems can more than double farming yields, especially in parched areas, while requiring less water and fertilizer than flooding. Drip also allows farmers to plant three crops in a year instead of one, and has the potential to pay back the farmer’s investment in the system in one growing season.

So why is it so hard to grow MicroDrip and improve the live of hundreds, if not thousands, of smallholder farmers? Like Saiban, MicroDrip is creating a new market – one whose customers are some of the poorest people in the world – and this requires an amazing amount of experimentation and iteration.

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As I walked into Desmond Tutu Center in New York on Thursday night, I wasn’t quite sure what to expect from the social networking event hosted by Good Capital. Good Capital is an investment fund aiming to accelerate the flows of capital to social enterprises, and they successfully convened an incredible group of colleagues, investors, and friends.

Just to give you a sense of the event, my first conversation was with two women from Scojo Foundation, an Acumen Fund investee that reduces poverty and generates opportunity through the sale of affordable reading glasses. I then had the pleasure of talking with Tim Freundlich, a partner at Good Capital, who - among other things - told me of the upcoming conference they are hosting in San Francisco in October. This was followed by a conversation on community building with Jed Emerson, one of the leading thinkers on Blended Value and also an Acumen Fund and Good Capital Advisor.

I finished up the evening discussing the growing spectrum of capital with two fellow Michigan Alumni, Josh Cohen of City Light Capital, a money management and business development firm that focuses on the security, media and energy sectors, and Michael Baratoff of Equilibrium Capital, a growth equity fund focused on sustainability.

As I walked out of the event into the breathtaking and serene courtyard of the seminary behind the Tutu Center I realized that we are no longer a few disparate mavericks but instead an interconnected community leading a movement that can demonstrate the power of the market as a tool for sustainable and innovative solutions to social problems.

Editor’s note: Sasha Dichter is Acumen Fund’s Director of Business Development.

Earlier today, I visited Saiban’s development at Khuda Ki Basti-4, about 30 minutes outside of Lahore. Saiban’s potential seems limitless. Simple, clean, brick homes for people making between two and four dollars a day, in a self-contained community with full plumbing, electricity, commerce, schools, and even playgrounds. Someday, this will be a full, vibrant community of 2,500 people who have moved away from rental and slum dwellings.

There is still a long way to go. 45 families have already moved in to the Khuda Ki Basti-4 (KKB-4), out of 115 plots that have been sold and booked. There is also a 3-room school, a small playground, one shop in place and another three planned. Acumen Fund Fellow Jawad Aslam is even talking about putting in a soccer pitch. A few gardens are planted, and houses throughout the site are in various stages of construction. But, three years into this project, it still takes a lot of imagination to envision a full, thriving community of 500 families.

Jawad and the team at KKB-4 are in the business of overcoming challenges, whether it’s getting the permit for the site, bringing in power and sewage, or getting the access road to the site built – which took a full year longer than expected. Saiban’s customers are now able to get 10 year mortgages from the House Building Finance Corporation, which are the first mortgages ever to be provided to this segment of the Pakistani population. But it is a long, hot, dusty road, and nothing comes easy.

There is talk of the need to get a critical mass of customers in order to show people that the development is for real. Jawad tells us that there are a lot of fly-by-night housing schemes in Pakistan, where people simply put down money and get nothing in return. More common still are developments where land is purchased by speculators who either hold or flip their empty plots, and no houses are built for 10 or 15 years. So Saiban’s proposition of building a community that will be vibrant and full of homes in less than five years’ time is more aggressive than it seems. They have done it before in Karachi, and all the pieces are in place to have similar success at KKB-4.

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Editor’s note: Fareed Zakaria will be hosting an online discussion about his new book, The Post American World, on Monday May 12 at 3:00 PM EST.  Visit the Washington Post web site for details.

This is a powerful article (The Rise of the Rest; Newsweek - May 3) by Acumen advisor Fareed Zakaria, who argues there is a case for real optimism in the world. In fact, he believes – as do I – that we are living in one of the most important moments in history. There is less violence today, more resources, and more interdependence than ever before. The key challenge for the United States will be to recognize the changing nature of a world where there are many players – and the wonderful benefits that can come of that.

For Acumen, our challenge is to help “push the inevitable”, as John Gardner used to say, and identify and scale those innovations that help all people on earth gain access to the goods and services they need to solve their own problems. Through our work, we can be a further reminder that we are a single world, each of us dependent on the action – and inaction – of players all across the globe; and that we have the collective opportunity to solve those problems of poverty that most vex our ability to leave peacefully and prosperously.

I urge you to take a few minutes and read this article.

Editor’s Note: We received this appeal from Acumen Fund ally Cameron Sinclair, the co-founder and executive director of Architecture for Humanity, a charitable organization which seeks architecture and design solutions to humanitarian crises and provides design services to communities in need. We have re-posted his appeal in an effort to spread the word about this latest disaster.

It has been less than 24 hours since Cyclone Nargis hit the heart of Myanmar (Burma). Government figures have reported 15,000 dead but reports claim it is now 22,000 and in the coming days it may move closer to 50,000. While the media will focus its attention on the loss of life there will be millions displaced in the coming weeks and like most natural disasters no plan for long term sustainable reconstruction. Large aid agencies like Oxfam and Care will be knee deep in immediate delivery of aid however how will the country respond to the long term strategy need to rebuild the country.

We are currently reaching out to our community. We will need to raise a minimum of $10,000 to provide design services to communities affected by the disaster. This is a small start, but could affect tens of thousands of those displaced.

Find out more and donate at the Architecture for Humanity web site.

Last week, I attended a session of the NYU Reynolds Program series “Social Entrepreneurship in the 21st Century,” with speaker Paul Farmer (our own CEO, Jacqueline Novogratz, spoke in an earlier session). Farmer is a physician-anthropologist who co-founded Partners in Health, a non-profit providing health care service to poor in various parts of the world (including Haiti, Rwanda, Peru, Russia, Lesotho and Malawi). Partners in Health is also a leading public health research and advocacy organization.

Dr. Farmer coined his talk an ‘insider’s critique’ of social entrepreneurship, and started by wondering whether he was in fact a social entrepreneur. Does he, by his own definition, bring real innovation to solving big problems? What’s so innovative about what he does? Partners in Health basically says that poor people deserve basic health services and then makes it happen. Farmer thinks that access to those services should be a right enjoyed by all people. However, the fact is that most of the world’s poor don’t have access to basic health needs – even defined by mid-19th century standards: clean water, food, sanitation. (Amartya Sen might describe these deprivations as “unfreedoms.”)

According to Farmer, the efforts of most social entrepreneurs are falling short – despite the best of intentions. Their innovations are not reaching the people they are designed to help. Much hard work is being done, but it is scattershot. He asks the questions: are we innovating merely for the sake of innovating? Are we targeting the right problems? Answering himself, he argues that we must keep our innovations grounded in solving the problems of the poor.

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Pangea Day is an international event that will bring the world together through film.

In a world where people are often divided by borders, difference, and conflict, it’s easy to lose sight of what we all have in common. Pangea Day seeks to overcome that - to help people see themselves in others - through the power of film. (Watch Pangea Day organizer Jehane Noujaim’s TED Talk about the concept; Noujaim is a 2006 TED Prize winner.)

Live events in Cairo, Kigali, London, Los Angeles, Mumbai and Rio de Janeiro will be linked for a program of powerful films, live music, and visionary speakers including Queen Noor of Jordan, CNN’s Christiane Amanpour, musician/activist Bob Geldof, and Iranian rock phenom Hypernova. Pangea Day is a live broadcast - in seven languages - featuring powerful films, visionary speakers and inspiring music that will reach millions of people worldwide through public and private gathering places and through the Internet, television, digital cinemas and mobile phones.

Join members of the Acumen Fund team at The Paley Center for Media – a great venue for Pangea Day. Starting on Saturday, May 10 from 2:00 to 6:00 pm, the entire Pangea Day will be broadcast live. Don’t miss this opportunity to gather together locally and connect with the international community (through media) globally.

The Paley Center for Media is located on 52nd Street between 6th and 5th Avenue. Pangea Day is a free event - typical admission charges to the Paley Center do not apply, just remember to mention ‘Friends of Pangea Day’ when you arrive. We hope to see you there on Saturday! And if you’re not based in New York (or if you won’t be here on Saturday), please be sure to check out the Pangea Day web site, where information on thousands of venues can be found with just a few clicks.

As I turned the corner, it appeared almost out of nowhere - a monument to the successes (and failures) of capitalism - the New York Stock Exchange. I had ventured downtown to attend the premiere of Carol Pineau’s new documentary, Africa Investment Horizons, which was being screened inside the Exchange. As first impressions go, you could do no better: it’s impossible not to take Africa’s investment potential seriously when you’re talking about it inside the center of the financial universe.

Even the security line was interesting: long but vibrant, an impromptu salon of Africanists, investors, expatriates and activists, all of whom share a passion for the business of Africa. Not surprisingly, I saw a number of base of the pyramid allies: Liz Wald, of EDI Imports; Emeka Okafor, of TED and Timbuktu Chronicles fame; Joy Sun, COO of Market for Change. This was going to be a good event.

Before screening the movie, we heard from Carol Pineau, its director. Pineau’s previous film, Africa: Open for Business, came out in 2006 and served to shine a spotlight on the quantity and quality of business opportunities in Africa. (Both high, by her estimation, and underexploited.) That conclusion was a natural starting point for Africa Investment Horizons: if there were high-quality, under-exploited business opportunities in Africa, wouldn’t that be a recipe for solid returns?
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