IDEO was recently recognized as one of Fast Company’s top five “Fast 50” Most Innovative Companies, alongside Google, Facebook, Apple and GE. We are thrilled to see an organization that has been a valued partner to us for years get this recognition, and not only for its award-winning design work, but also for its proactive stance on having a social impact. Tim Brown, their CEO, was quoted saying “As social issues increasingly become business issues, this will be a critical new direction for design.”

Our work with IDEO has included a collaborative project to bring design innovations to the challenge of water storage and transportation in the developing world. Having worked on a team with IDEO designers, I was struck by the passion and interest across the company in projects that have a potential for social impact. Despite long dusty road trips to remote Rajasthani villages with scarce water supplies, and getting soaked on rainy days in Mumbai slums, interviewing local water consumers, the team at IDEO showed an incredible level of enthusiasm for listening to the needs of consumers whose needs are not being met. This may not have always been the norm for a design company famous for designing the first Apple mouse, and the interiors of jet airplanes, but it is becoming the hallmark for IDEO, which sees addressing developing world issues as core to its culture and its strategy. For the past two years, the Acumen Fellows have benefited from training on design thinking from IDEO, and an IDEO designer joined this year’s cohort and is now working in India with Scojo, one of our investees.

The role of cutting-edge design thinking in solving critical social issues is now being explored by companies like IDEO, and institutions like the Stanford Institute of Design and the IIT Institute of Design, as well as the non-profit Design that Matters. We look forward to seeing more applications of human-centered design to the many solvable problems facing low-income markets around the globe, and congratulate IDEO on its success demonstrating true innovation and leadership.

A social entrepreneur, a woman, is taking shape in the form of a young nurse who, after witnessing the mistreatment of children in an orphanage, begins to teach nurses out of her home. Soon, she moves to a slum, so she can more easily treat families who live nine or ten to a tiny room for diseases that should have disappeared long ago. She scrapes together funds for a small group of nurses to visit the slums alongside her, providing critical basic care.

She gets the attention of a successful businessman, who sees her commitment and effectiveness, and begins to support her, first modestly, and anonymously. But he demands accountability, requesting receipts for all expenses, and going to the slums himself to see the work of the nurses and their impact on the community.

Eventually, he helps her scale her solution based on the clear evidence he sees of her accountability, efficiency, and results.  He donates large sums of his own money, investing as he would in a business venture, based on performance and track record. To many, putting such sums into an organization run by a woman, a social worker, would seem ludicrous, but he is only focused on results, and the potential upside of this particular investment. This all happened over a hundred years ago. (more…)

Water Advocates, an organization dedicated to increasing American support for worldwide access to safe, affordable and sustainable supplies of drinking water and adequate sanitation, recently announced a decision by Congress to support the appropriation of $300 million to implement the Water for the Poor Act. This press release points out that the appropriations bill still needs to be signed by the President, but if passed, this funding would represent discreet new dollars to address the critical global issue of lack of access to safe water and adequate sanitation. (more…)

This past Friday and Saturday, over 1,700 MBAs, corporate social responsibility professionals and non-profit leaders gathered in Nashville, Tennessee, at Vanderbilt University’s Owen business school for the annual Net Impact Conference. Since the 90’s, Net Impact has grown its network of MBA students interested in using their business skills to effect change, or as Ian V. Rowe of MTV and a Harvard MBA, said on his panel on malaria, “using our superpowers for good.”

Though in the opening keynote, Yvon Chouinard, founder of Patagonia, admitted he was pessimistic about the fate of the global environment, most speakers who followed exhibited a tremendous degree of optimism about the possibility of making a positive difference. It’s hard not to be optimistic when surrounded by so many talented students of business who are set on doing something with their careers that goes beyond making money. (more…)

This past Thursday and Friday I joined the Global Water Challenge for a learning forum on Innovative Financing for Water and Sanitation. The Global Water Challenge (GWC) is a committed group of leading organizations that have joined forces to catalyze change in the water and sanitation sector with members from non-profit organizations, foundations, academia and major corporations, including Coca-Cola, Dow and Cargill.  (The local NBC station did a short piece on the meeting - you can see it here.)

Partnership sounds great, I think we can all agree, but what does it really mean? With water being one of the most complex and politicized development issues, how feasible is it that distinct groups across sectors could sit in a room together and find meaningful ways to collaborate? My first question would be, can we even agree on anything? Despite these questions, Acumen Fund recently joined the GWC to do our own part in this effort to “join forces.” This was made easier by the fact that we had already been working closely with the GWC and several members. What I discovered through the course of this two-day meeting was that partnership, for this group, was not just a pretty word.  

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This piece in The Huffington Post by Marc Gunther highlights a really exciting trend in the water sector around the convergence of business and provision of safe water. This is an issue we have been working on since 2003, and we have been excited to partner with many of the organizations he cites, including the Global Water Challenge, WaterHealth International, and the Coca-Cola Company.

Gunther addresses what has been a controversial polemic between water as a resource versus water as a human right and makes the argument that treating water as a resource for those who can afford to pay will make it more readily accessible to those who can’t. He brings up some great points, and I wanted to add some of our reflections on the true cost of water faced by those who are often qualified as too poor to pay.

It might be possible that a government would cross-subsidize water, charging wealthier customers more and poorer customers less, but this is different from charging nothing at all. There are a few problems with any system, public or private, that provides water for free to a large segment of the population: First it eliminates the interest of entrepreneurs, distributors, innovators and investors to find cheaper and more reliable ways to make water available to those who need it most. (more…)

WaterHealth International (WHI) has been named on the “Ten to Watch” list of companies in The Clean Tech Revolution, a new book released by Collins, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. The book features clean technologies that can impact global development, fuel costs, security and climate change, among others. We are delighted to see WaterHealth International featured not only because we see WHI as an innovator in the water industry, but also because they are demonstrating the potential for new technologies to benefit low income consumers that have been excluded from the benefits of innovation in the past.

The economic incentives to reduce the costs of fuel, or mitigate costly climate changes, are understandable motivations for technology innovation. But it is only logical that clean technologies that create more sustainable access to sustainable and affordable services such as safe water, clean energy, and fuel efficient transportation, would hold the most value for those that live at the base of the economic pyramid (the BOP). A convergence between Cleantech, design for the BOP, and social investing could be the right combination to assure that development in emerging economies is inclusive and environmentally sustainable.

In the book, authors Ron Pernick and Clint Wilder identify ten companies in each of eight clean-technology industry sectors that bear watching for growth and industry influence in the near to mid-term. WHI has been included in the “Ten to Watch” list for the chapter titled “Water Filtration: Turning Oceans, Wastewater, and Other Untapped Sources Into Pure Water.”

This morning I heard a pitch from a team of designers that included MBAs, electrical engineers and mechanical engineers. Using a customer-centered approach and field research in Nepal, they had designed a prototype for a low-cost incubator for rural Nepal, and were looking for seed financing to complete product development and move towards field testing and roll out.

The exciting thing about this group is not only that they are working on an issue that is relevant to 50,000 babies born prematurely in Nepal every year and over 1.5 million in India, but they are doing it as graduate students in an innovative course at Stanford University. Taught by Professor Jim Patell, “Entrepreneurial Design for Extreme Affordability” gives student teams a chance to design products for organizations in the developing world that face pressing design challenges.

These students come from multiple disciplines, including business, engineering, development, and design. What they all have in common is a willingness to get outside of their comfort zone to hone their skills on real-world projects with the potential to have a tremendous impact on the ground. (more…)

This past Sunday, March 4, nearly 1,000 people gathered to learn and exchange ideas at Harvard’s business school conference on “Social Enterprise.” The phrase is sufficiently broad to cover a wide range of issues, from socially responsible business to business-like social change and everything in between. The aim of the conference, according to its co-chairs, is to engage a broad set of institutions across sectors to “turn dreams into reality,” and the theme of bringing pragmatic approaches to achieving lofty goals for social justice was woven strongly throughout the day’s discussions. Victoria Hale exemplified this in her opening keynote when she talked about the way that her non-profit pharmaceutical company was engaging with corporations, foundations and governments to bring critical health products to the 10 million who die needlessly every year from preventable diseases.

I had the opportunity to speak on two panels about different facets of our work: the first focused on investing in emerging markets, and the second on venture philanthropy. On both panels, I shared the floor with pioneering organizations that are changing the rules of the game, either by changing how capital flows to developing countries, or changing how philanthropy drives social change. At Acumen Fund, we are excited by the potential to merge both of these trends to demonstrate how philanthropy can catalyze changes in how foreign aid and private capital reaches those who have the greatest impact on the lives of the poor in countries such as India, Kenya, Pakistan and Uganda. (more…)

Yasmina Zaidman and Bhavika Vyas from Acumen Fund’s Water Portfolio are visiting East Africa to explore water and sanitation investment opportunities, starting their trip in Kenya…

During our three hour drive from Nairobi to Nakuru we witnessed an unexpected array of wildlife in patches of undeveloped land that still exists between growing towns in western Kenya. A few lone zebras look out of place outside a small but expanding settlement along the road, while Thompson’s gazelles and impala graze peacefully in a savannah in the rift valley. Bold baboons the size of German shepherds skirt the dusty semi-paved freeway between Naivasha and Nakuru, perhaps foraging for food in the garbage left behind by speeding cars. As we approach Nakuru, we pass Lake Elementia, a salt lake rimmed by white where thousands of flamingos flock. From the road, they are only a cloud of pink specks, but they are a major draw for tourists who have helped Nakuru grow into a bustling town.

While nature struggles to hold its ground in a rapidly growing country, the people who are gravitating to towns along this road and informal settlements in Nakuru, all looking for work in tourism and agriculture, face challenges of their own. As houses are built to accommodate a growing population, infrastructure fails to follow. The new towns we saw along the road may rely on contaminated river water for their water supply, and are likely to go without sanitation or sewerage of any kind. The development is uncontrolled and relentless. In Nakuru, we visit the informal settlements in the southern part of the city, where the only public provision of water supply or sanitation comes in the form of three standpipes – these are scarcely adequate to cover the needs of the one hundred and fifty thousand people who live in this settlement. In a city of half a million, there are four public toilets. (more…)

A recent series of articles in The New York Times highlights the everyday challenges of water access and sanitation in major cities all over India, and the significant consequences these challenges have on the lives of Indians. With over 700 million people lacking access to adequate water supply, and 2.1 million children under 5 dying from preventable water-borne disease, the toll is devastating. With both infrastructure and natural resources overstretched and misused, individuals take on a “me-first” approach, trying to get the water they need at any cost. This leads to accelerated degradation of pipes, which are illegally tapped, and water resources that are being drawn with little planning from depleted aquifers. Where in the midst of these governmental, social and market failures, is there cause for hope?

We see it in evidence that communities, local organizations and entrepreneurs can devise sustainable and equitable strategies to address the pressing needs that now affect almost every level of society. One Acumen Fund investee, Heritage Livelihood Services Provider, developed a model to bring water storage to peri-urban slums around Hyderabad so that women and children there could escape the fruitless cycle of waiting for water tankers. WaterHealth International, another member of the Water Portfolio, is providing safe and affordable drinking water to rural communities in India without relying on scarce groundwater resources. Technological innovators from India and abroad are looking to partner with local governments and NGOs to test decentralized approaches to tackling water quality and water access problems, and Acumen Fund is actively seeking ways to turn these bold experiments into scalable and sustainable models for reaching the vast and growing number of people who are ready for a change.

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. (more…)