Last Tuesday morning, I arrived at Heathrow. Straight away, I head to Shell’s offices in Waterloo. Barely missing a beat on the train and tube to Waterloo, I arrive just in time for the global launch of the Aspen Network of Development Entrepreneurs (ANDE). It had been a long journey for me that prior 24 hours (6 trains and 1 airplane in the space of 24 hours…thank god for roller bags). And it has been an even longer journey for ANDE and its founding steering committee over the previous three years.
In the summer of 2005, Henrik Skovby, a founding partner of Dalberg Global Development Advisors, had noticed in a series of lunch meetings with some of our peers in the field that we were all talking about some of the same problems: how do we tap into the capital markets like microfinance has?; how do we prove the case that small and growing businesses can be a major force in fighting poverty?; and how can we work together to build more effective investment teams?
With the blessing of the Aspen Institute’s Peter Reiling, we were able to convene for a summer discussion in 2006 to imagine a movement that would find a way to reach the small farmer, the healthcare entrepreneur, or the community looking to finance and purchase a water filtration plant with the right capital at the right time. Patient capital for people too impatient to wait for the development industry to “solve their problems”.
Competitors showed up at the first two meetings wondering whether there was any real value there, and if so, what are the aims of the movement at this moment? In the crisp mountain air of Aspen, competitors became colleagues, and colleagues became friends.
Willy Foote at Root Capital, Christine Eibs-Singer at E+Co, Simon Winter of Technoserve, and Andrew Stern at Dalberg were the stalwart members of the voluntary executive committee, and we were joined by thought leader Stace Lindsay and Peter at Aspen to help push the boulder up the mountain for three long and sometimes lonely years.
It was thrilling, then, in the over-crowded and over-heated room to see old colleagues and over 100 new faces join together to talk about how we can work together to find ways to help today’s emerging markets entrepreneurs strive to build their businesses more quickly and more ethically, employ more people in high quality jobs, and serve more customers with products that fill urgent needs.
Randall Kempner, the new executive director, guided the day with energy, humility and humor, just the right recipe to fuel the momentum of the movement; ANDE was off to a great start. In a time when the world is questioning the very role that global capitalism should play in development, Tuesday morning’s launch of ANDE was a bright spot that may be viewed in 50 years as a turning point in a new approach to development and to capitalism.