GEWP

• Investee VisionSpring will be honored with the CASE Award for Social Enterprise Innovation from Duke University.
• IDE India, the organization behind our drip irrigation investment GEWP, will be featured in an upcoming BBC World News series. More details on where/when to watch, but in the meantime, you can catch a preview here.
• If you’re in the New York area, Jacqueline Novogratz will be speaking at the New School on February 17. The event is open to the public; RSVPs are required.

• CEO Jacqueline Novogratz was interviewed recently for the NPR program Speaking of Faith with Krista Tippett. Check out the show’s website for a podcast and lots of supplementary material.
• In a special section on business and food security, the Financial Times featured two Acumen Fund investments: drip irrigation company GEWP here and nutrition company Insta here. Similarly, the Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition (GAIN) includes an interview with Acumen Fund’s Ajay Nair in its latest newsletter.
• Talent Manager Blair Miller was recently interviewed on Dubai radio about the Fellows program.
• An Outlook Business article profiles GEWP, PVRI and other for-profit businesses serving our target market in India.
• There’s still time to order your Book Club in a Box! Get yours now and share The Blue Sweater with others.

Time for responsibility: As part of a special section on community service and responsibility, Time magazine just put out a list of “Responsibility Pioneers.” Acumen Fund is among them, along with investee D.Light Design, and peer organizations like KickStart, Ashoka and Living Goods. (Full list here.)

Ripple Effect makes a splash: IDEO and Acumen Fund have been partnering around innovation in the water sector, as this story on Forbes.com highlights.

Ecotact in the news: This video on CNN.com showcases the work of Acumen Fund investee Ecotact, which provides sanitation services in Kenya, as well as David Kuria, the entrepreneur behind the organization.

Outlook on GEWP: Outlook India recently featured this article on the success of drip irrigation and GEWP.

The pulse of Pulse: VentureBeat looks at the development and progress of Pulse as a platform for metrics in the social investing space.

Global Easy Water Products (GEWP), an Acumen Fund investee in our Agriculture Portfolio in India, is currently recruiting a qualified Corporate Strategy Intern to help the company build a new 5-year business plan and financial model. This is an exciting opportunity to work directly with the Managing Director and Board of Directors of the company to shape its future direction.

GEWP is the exclusive distibutor for KB Drip, a line of micro-irrigation products that drastically increase yields and incomes for small farmers, as well as reduce water and energy consumption by 30-70%. The company currently distributes through over 600 dealers in seven states in India, as well as exports across Asia, Africa and Latin America. GEWP has witnesses remarkable growth over the past two years and has proven that enterprises can operate profitably, while having a tremendous impact on poverty. The company is, therefore, revising its 5-year business plan and financial model to account for new growth opportunities.

The intern would be based in Aurangabad and/or Hyderabad for a period of eight weeks. To apply: Check out this position description, and send a cover letter and CV to khill@acumenfund.org, with “Application for GEWP Corporate Strategy Intern” in the subject line.

Reflections on the Dignity event: After a successful fundraising event on July 30, Michelle Mak of the Young Professionals for Acumen Fund reflects on the experience that raised over $24,000 and brought together a dynamic group of professionals.  Read her posts Part I and Part II.

Acumen Fund and Metrics: Kevin Jones, co-founder of SoCap09 Conference, in the Huffington Post and Nathaniel Whittemore from Change.org in a blog post highlight the panel for the upcoming Social Capital Conference on the  Global Impact Investing Rating System (GIIRS) and Impact Reporting and Investment Standards (IRIS).

Need a good overview of Acumen Fund? Acumen’s Rob Katz gives an interview with Latitude Responsable, a project filming many of the world’s social enterprises, where he discusses Acumen Fund and Acumen investee Global Easy Water Products (GEWP).

The company where I presently work as an Acumen Fund Fellow, Global Easy Water Products (GEWP) is a start-up with 25 odd employees distributed in four different cities of India. Our company is a product based company in the irrigation space and there is a daily, massive churn of material at our 4 locations. Information about this churn is chronicled in Excel and the corresponding spreadsheet is emailed everyday. Keeping track of all this information is a huge challenge.

Recently, we switched our modus operandi and started using shared spreadsheets on Google Docs. This has made a huge difference to our operational efficiency. There are no more swarms of daily emails, just a link that employees can bookmark and access whenever they need to.

Another cool, free feature is the Indic transliteration application. This is how it works : You type a Hindi word in English , for e.g, chai , hit the space bar, and watch as the text is converted to the Indian script, ???.

We recently drafted a document in English and then realized that we should switch to Marathi for clarity and effectiveness. One of our employees, typed up the survey in English and then had it transliterated to Marathi in less than an hour. We saved money and more importantly time and now have the option of transliterating to four other languages.

Finally, files in Google Docs can be converted to the PDF format for free. Save $$ on Acrobat License fees.

Start-ups often need cost effective, productive and easy-to-use solutions that can be implemented immediately to bring some order to their operations. Some of these web-based applications, might just do the trick until the time to invest in more sophisticated solutions arrives!

Have you seen any other cool applications?

During my first week in Aurangabad, I went to the agricultural fields and met a few customers of GEWP. One of them in particular, stood out. This short video captures my thoughts and impressions on that meeting.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_GqDny0m-Qk&hl=en&fs=1]

This past Friday, we were fortunate to have Pratyush Pandey, Managing Director of Global Easy Water Products (GEWP) join us for breakfast at our offices in New York. Joining Pratyush for breakfast were a number of Acumen Fund Partners and staff. GEWP is a for-profit company that manufactures, distributes and sells drip irrigation systems to smallholder farmers in seven states across India; Pratyush was in town following the final presentation for the Legatum Prize (GEWP was among the five finalists; unfortunately, they did not win the USD $1 million award).

In any case, back to the breakfast. Pratyush’s talk – and the subsequent discussion – left me with three key takeaways and an important reminder:

Takeaway 1: Building a successful business serving the low-income market requires listening to the poor and building a product or service based on the specific needs and constraints of those living at the base of the pyramid.

GEWP – and its parent company, International Development Enterprises - India (IDE-I) – sell four types of irrigation systems. The systems vary in cost and depend on the specific preferences of the farmer. Not only does this enhance affordability, but the modular system design allows the farmer to add acreage incrementally as they generate profits from increased production. For example, a typical GEWP customer starts by irrigating one crop; after a successful season, he’ll add acreage and drip-irrigate another two or three.

Takeaway 2: In order to scale, GEWP must recognize market opportunity while strengthening its in-house capabilities.

While the need for drip irrigation in India is acute, GEWP’s business there is relatively seasonal (in the monsoon season, sales drop significantly). Understanding this aspect of his business and global demand for drip irrigation, Pratyush developed an international distribution strategy that sells drip irrigation in nine countries in Africa and seven additional countries in Asia. GEWP has also ramped up its in-house manufacturing capabilities in order to lower the costs associated with purchasing the irrigation systems externally.

Takeaway 3: Successfully marketing to low-income farmers is about tapping into the current infrastructure of local non-governmental organizations and other embedded actors who have earned the farmers’ trust.

GEWP’s success is largely due to the 20-year track record and network built by IDE-India. These lessons can be applied globally. For instance, Acumen Fund recently invested in a new, for-profit company in Sindh, Pakistan called Micro Drip. Much as GEWP is associated with IDE-I, Micro Drip is tied up with the Thardeep Rural Development Program (TRDP), a 16-year old agricultural services non-profit with a long-established network of smallholder farmers for whom drip irrigation technology can have enormous benefits.

Three key takeaways: listen, understand the market and leverage trusted partners. In addition to these three key lessons – which, if you look at them, seem to be relevant to all sectors, not just drip irrigation – there was an important closing aside.

As the breakfast came to a close, Acumen Fund’s India Business Manager, Biju Mohandas, gave us an important reminder. Biju, on his last day in the New York office prior to returning to India, asked us to remember that while most Americans think a typical Indian is the man working at a call center or at an IT firm, almost 70% of the country’s population are farmers. And at the end of the day, India’s sustained growth is dependent of the success of its farmers – and those farmers’ success might depend on the growth of innovative enterprises like GEWP.