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.

(more…)

Congratulations to Acumen Fund friend and ally Martin Fisher, who today was named the winner of the Lemelson-MIT Award for Sustainability.  Fisher - who co-founded KickStart - will be awarded $100,000 for his work developing a low-cost irrigation pump and the business ecosystem to design, produce, sell and repair them in base of the pyramid communities.

Media coverage of Fisher’s award is widespread; the Boston Globe has a good article on the announcement, and PopSci makes a mention as well.

To celebrate, be sure to watch “Don’t Wait for the Rain,” a social marketing rap video produced about KickStart’s signature MoneyMaker pump.

Yesterday in New York, I had the pleasure of attending a round table organized by the Council on Foreign Relations entitled The Commercialization of Microfinance: The Good, The Bad and The Ugly. Moderated by CFR Senior Fellow Isobel Coleman, the discussion featured comments from Mary Ellen Iskenderian (of Women’s World Banking) and Roshaneh Zafar (of the Kashf Foundation.)

I arrived early, set up my laptop and grabbed a bite to eat (if you’re curious, the CFR building is beautiful and they do a good lunch spread). Before I was through my sandwich, the room had filled to capacity and CFR staffers were scrambling to set up overflow seating – there’s clearly a lot of interest in the recent controversy surrounding microfinance. It was quickly apparent that women outnumbered men in the audience by a ratio of about 2:1 – interesting, though not completely unexpected given the importance of women in microfinance and the fact that the speakers and moderator are all women.

Coleman kicked off the session with brief introductions and quickly segued into the topic at hand – the good, bad and ugly of microfinance. She stated – without dissent – that microfinance now finds itself at an inflection point. On the one hand, there have been calls for microfinance not to profit off the backs of the poor, notably in the New York Times’ coverage of Compartamos’ IPO. On the other hand, those who know microfinance realize that it can’t scale – from 100 million clients today to its potential market of 4 billion – without the capital markets, and the formality capital markets require.

I thought Coleman did a good job setting the stage here. From my perspective as a quasi-insider, there wasn’t much new – but it is important to say nonetheless. Microfinance can and will go one of two directions, and it’s pretty clear that there are strong arguments being made by advocates on either side.

Mary Ellen Iskenderian was next to speak. She is President and CEO of Women’s World Banking (WWB), the world’s largest network of microfinance institutions and banks. Iskenderian leads the WWB global team, based in New York, providing hands-on technical services and strategic support to more than 50 top-performing microfinance institutions and banks around the world. Iskenderian told us that WWB’s network MFIs have a total portfolio value of $1.4 billion and an average loan size of just $500. Those MFIs serve roughly 9 million clients and there are another 14 million clients served through WWB affiliate banks. Of WWB’s 23 million clients, approximately 70 percent are women.

(more…)

Last week, Jacqueline and I attended the Global Philanthropy Forum, a three day conference convening donors, social entrepreneurs, political leaders, academics and activists to discuss problems and solutions in the areas of global security, human rights, violent conflict, resource scarcity and health.

Bishop Desmond Tutu gave an inspiring and wide-ranging talk at the opening plenary, notwithstanding a bad case of the flu. He spoke of the recent violence in Kenya and the vulnerability of any country to a similar situation when colonial structures persist, leaving one group as top dog. He spoke of his hope that Zimbabwe will come through its current difficult period and that Robert Mugabe will step down or otherwise leave office. Even so, Tutu warned, there is a long road for recovery ahead and one key element of that recovery will be a framework or platform for people to “say what happened” (as happened in South Africa with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission).

He also expressed a wish I heard several times throughout the Forum, a wish that more women should be at the table, as heads of government, the military and in major policymaking bodies. Tutu asserted that the “attributes of women” would bring more balance to the debate and to decisions like whether to go to war. As he put it, “I cannot imagine a woman who nurtures a child in her womb for nine months and then rears that child going on to let him be turned into cannon fodder.”

The Forum alternated between plenary sessions and smaller workshops and panels, some of which were very timely and relevant to Acumen’s work (Hunger, Agriculture and Inequality; Fragile Successes in Rwanda and Uganda; Predictable Surprises: Pakistan and Afghanistan; Maternal Health and Childcare). In the plenary session entitled “Entrepreneurship and Social Change,” we heard Fazle Abed (BRAC) and Larry Brilliant (Google.org) talked about the “missing middle” - the space between micro-finance and traditional investing - which is the next place (i.e., beyond microfinance) to move the needle on poverty alleviation through a business approach. Abed and Brilliant cited Acumen Fund as a good and established example of this approach. Mr. Abed hastened to add to that while the microfinance business model was mature, the need for more microfinance facilities was far from fully met. Both panelists said that women were often the “better bet” as entrepreneurs, social or otherwise.

(more…)

For me last week, it was a week of reunions, inspiration, and hope. We kicked it off with the 2008 Fellows’ Mid Year Meeting. The 3-day reunion allowed us to reconnect as a group, discuss challenges the fellows face in the field, share success stories, brainstorm solutions, support the fellows’ career development and - perhaps most importantly - just be together.

We designed the Acumen Fund Fellows Program to provide much-needed support to our investees, and to build leaders to push the sector forward. It is our sincere hope that they will do it together and support each other for many years in the future. As such, ensuring that the fellows grow as a cohort is an important dimension for us as an organization.

The importance of community was never more front and center than during the Skoll World Forum, on which Ann, Brian and Jacqueline have already commented. Session topics ranged social entrepreneurs’ engagement with governments to the role of women in our work to post-conflict environments to more operational topics, such as metrics, where Brian was a panelist.

One session in particular stood out – Replication and Scale. I had just come from a 3-day session where the fellows talked at length about the challenges they – and the entrepreneurs – face when it comes to scale and replication. From recruiting to business development and fundraising to defining distribution models like franchising, the issues that Chuck Slaughter of Living Goods, Martin Burt of Fundacion Paraguaya, and Dorothy Stoneman of YouthBuild discussed resonated quite closely with what the fellows struggle with as they too face similar challenges with our entrepreneurs.

(more…)

I had the privilege of participating in a panel during this week’s Skoll World Forum about performance measurement. Called Mirror, Mirror On The Wall What’s the Impact of This All?, I was joined by Joe Madiath of Gram Vikas, Jeroo Billimoria of Aflatoun, David Bonbright of Keystone and Fay Twersky of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. I think that, in the past five years, there has been a remarkable convergence among both funders and practitioners in our community regarding the need to develop rigorous performance metrics. Thankfully, there’s also an emerging consensus around the need to be careful about how much impact can be attributed to our various programs.

Roger Martin, Dean of the Rotman School of Management and a Skoll Foundation Board Member summarized the areas of convergence on the panel with the three P’s: positive, precision and pluralist. All five of us agreed that you should not measure if it does not add (positive) value. Too much time and energy is wasted on evaluations that don’t add real insight and distract from program execution. Joe and Jeroo both spoke of how real time information helps them manage their programs, and how their staff and partners have come to find real value in measuring. Whether it is Joe’s ability to claim that a $1 investment in sanitation and water infrastructure leads to a $10 return of community value, or whether it is Jeroo convincing her Aflatoun partners that real time information allows for them to improve and innovate their financial literacy programs, metrics must and can add value.

From positive to precision: as Fay pointed out, the field needs to be very careful about impact measures that require careful framing, controlled research and counterfactuals, versus measures of outputs (number of houses built, liters of clean water sold). A narrow focus on outputs, however, can shift the focus from the measurement of broader, system -wide change we are seeking to have. Then again, one needs to think with precision about what systems our programs are seeking to change and how.

Finally, pluralist: metrics need to account for the voices of the voiceless. As David Bonbright argued, measurement systems need to allow for the recipients of programs or services to be part of the feedback loop.

All in all, it was quite an event – kudos to the organizers!

Thursday afternoon of the Skoll World Forum also offered so many interesting panels that the choice of which to attend was hard. Editor’s note: this was not the first time Ann had a hard choice of panels this week. I buzzed between a panel called “Mirror, Mirror on the Wall, What’s the Impact of this All?” which tackled social impact and metrics to track it (Acumen’s Chief Investment Officer, Brian Trelstad, was a panelist) and another called “Addressing the Talent Gap,” on which Acumen’s Talent Manager, Deepti Doshi, was a panelist.

Marc Freedman, CEO of Civic Ventures, was also on the Talent panel and described his organization’s initiatives redirecting mid- to late-career executives in the private sector to work with social entrepreneurs and innovators addressing pressing issues. Civic Ventures has an innovative Senior Fellows program which selects high performing baby boomers and places them with NGOs or social entrepreneurs for a year. Half of the stipend is paid by the NGOs and half by the Fellow’s corporation. Freedman passionately described the Fellows as folks who feel “midlife is getting to the top of the ladder and finding it was leaning against the wrong wall.”

Through the first 2 days, the Forum’s highlight was definitely the evening speech by former U.S. President Jimmy Carter. He is 84; witty, erudite and humble all at the same time. He described responding to Jeff Skoll’s invitation with the question: what is a social entrepreneur? Jeff responded “you are one, Mr. President.”

(more…)

I had the honor to play a small part in the last session of the Skoll Foundation’s World Forum this year.

The first speaker, Paul Collier - author of The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries are Failing and What Can Be Done About It - is a longtime hero and advisor to Acumen Fund. He spoke of the need to move beyond thinking about the bottom billion as consumers of products but rather as producers. He went on to talk about the need to think in broader terms about bringing a combination of business skills, public finance to enable the business environment, and real and concerted public action to bear. Mr. Collier also discussed the critical need to focus on job creation and on bringing affordable basic services like water, healthcare, housing, energy and education to the poor. It was thrilling to hear him, and I could only feel pushed to get better and smarter in taking our models for service delivery - and job creation - to scale, in part, through more effective partnerships with governments and philanthropies.

Paul Farmer - founder of Partners in Health and an eloquent advocate for human rights and public health - spoke of the need to focus more on social justice issues, to realize we are truly one world now and that the rich need to change if the poor are ever to have a chance. The clinic he is building in Rwanda is world class and, most important to Paul himself, brings dignity to the low-income members of the community it serves.

(more…)

Last week, 600 individuals — including a number of leading professionals from India who sacrificed their Holi, Easter, Eid Milad and/or Navroz holidays with their families – gathered in Philadelphia for the 12^th annual Wharton India Economic Forum. This conference was founded in 1996 by then-Wharton student, Vinnie Badinehal, now Managing Director at Merrill Lynch (the lead sponsor for the conference), who recognized the value of a shared dialogue on the opportunities and challenges in India, long before India was in the media spotlight.

What was perhaps most exciting to me, as an Acumen Fund team member, was that every panel - not just the development panel - talked about the need for more inclusive growth in India, to take into account the 70 percent of the population that lives in villages or the 80 percent of the population that still lives under $1 a day - to enable the provision of basic services like clean water, affordable healthcare, and education.

Tejpreet Chopra of General Electric in India, discussed the challenge – faced by all companies in India – of bringing down the price of their products/services to a level that is affordable to a majority of Indians. It’s certainly a challenge that Acumen Fund and our entrepreneurs also confront, and we think sharing knowledge of what works and doesn’t in these markets is key to overcoming the distribution and pricing challenges that stand in the way of people having affordable access to basic services.

(more…)

Thursday morning’s break-out panels were difficult to choose among. I had every intention of visiting several, but ended up staying the full two hours at the panel called “Hybrid and For-Profit Business Models,” moderated by David Brancaccio, host and senior editor of NOW on PBS.

The room was packed. Tina Seelig, Executive Director of the Stanford Technology Ventures program talked about an international competition in which business school teams are given 5 days and one Post-It pad to come up with a project that “creates value” under any definition. 95% of the projects submitted were social enterprises.

We also heard from Tralance Addy, President and CEO of Waterhealth International (WHI), an Acumen investee. Tralance described a dam - built 40 years ago in his home country of Ghana - which displaced thousands of people during construction. Those people are still waiting for drinkable water today and the government is still debating what to do about it. This kind of paralysis inspired Tralance’s commitment to private-sector solutions.

(more…)

The opening session of the Skoll World Forum last night was a terrific reminder of the value of bringing different perspectives together and having the chance to stop and listen and reflect on the work that we do. The two most memorable speakers in the formal program, in my opinion, were Phil Hope, the Minister of the Third Sector in the UK, and Karen Tse, of International Bridges to Justice, a network of legal clinics and public defenders working for judicial reform around the world.

The Minister’s comments were the most forward thinking and provocative about the social enterprise that I had heard from an elected official: he talked about how social enterprises can tap into capital markets, how we might be able to create a social stock exchange, and the need for more transparency and accountability in thinking about impact.

Karen Tse was talking on a panel about how to navigate across cultures; she commented that the oversimplification of cultural difference often leads to mistaken assumptions. For example, she said that as an Asian woman, she often found the overt biases working in Asia to be easier to overcome than the subconscious biases she faces in the West, or that there are in fact some universal principles of justice that we should not be afraid of promoting globally. She reminded us that she and her colleagues view compassion and recognizing our interconnectedness as the essential tools to being personally effective in this work.

And of course, the value of any conference is who you meet in the halls and at the receptions. There are many personal friends, friends of Acumen Fund, and new faces who are on a shared journey of inquiry about how to make social enterprises more effective. More later.

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…)