VisionSpring

The Skoll World Forum always culminates in the granting of the Skoll Awards for Social Entrepreneurship on Thursday evening. I came late, so I headed to the upper level, where broad wooden steps were vastly more accommodating than the benches downstairs.

Among this year’s award winners was Jordan Kassalow of VisionSpring, a social venture that Acumen Fund has supported since 2005. Jordan is truly a visionary, pioneering social franchising in India, wholesale partnerships with established organizations in Latin America, South Asia and Africa, and a lean supply chain to India. He is a new global capitalist, combining his business skills with his training as an eye doctor to reach the 400 million people in the world who suffer from being near sighted. The story that he told of when he restored vision to an older woman in Mexico, who had come to him clutching her bible wanting to some day read it again, brought tears to my and many other people’s eyes.

There were too many other memorable moments, including a stunning Jordanian women Soraya Salti, who is bringing business education to young people throughout the Middle East and a pair of human rights activists, Juan Mendez and Paul van Zyl, who have put their lives on the lines for the rights of the oppressed in their home countries, Argentina and South Africa, respectively, and 30 other countries transitioning from conflict to reconciliation.

But to prove Acumen Fund Sustaining Partner Donald Rubin’s point that you need both bread and roses (although it is hard to think of the Skoll Awardees as mere bread), the art stole the evening. KT Tunstall’s stunning voice and innovative rhythmic style lifted everyone’s spirits to join the angels on the ceiling of the theater.

Jordan Kassalow, Chairman and co-founder of VisionSpring, was announced today as one of the Skoll Foundation’s newest grantees. The award includes a 3-year, $765,000 unrestricted grant to VisionSpring, a non-profit social enterprise that empowers local individuals to become self-sustaining entrepreneurs by selling affordable eyeglasses to the millions of people in the developing world who need them. VisionSpring is also an Acumen Fund investee (and the Skoll Foundation is an Acumen Fund Leadership Partner - it’s all in the family!)

We’re thrilled to see Jordan - and the entire VisionSpring team - recognized in such a prestigious forum. Congratulations! And we’ll see you at the Skoll World Forum next week (rather, Brian Trelstad, Ann Macdougall and Varun Sahni will…)

Editor’s note: This post first appeared on VisionSpring’s Business in a Bag blog. Acumen Fund is an investor in VisionSpring, having made them a $500,000 loan in 2006. Thanks to Miriam Stone for giving us permission to cross-post this on the Acumen Fund blog.

BRAC, the largest non-profit organization in the developing world, is a dream partner for a small organization. But landing the partnership is only the first part. What happens next is where it gets interesting…VisionSpring’s Franchise Partner Manager Lalit Kumar reports from the field.

By Lalit Kumar

We often joke here at VisionSpring that working with BRAC is like landing a contract with Walmart. It’s the kind of opportunity that every small NGO dreams of – BRAC is known for its massive scale and incredible efficiency. This partnership will allow us to reach a huge new market of people in need in a time frame that would have previously been impossible. Now we just have to deliver!

We’ve been working with BRAC for two years now. For the last six months, we’ve been selling about 500 glasses per month by empowering BRAC’s network of Shashto Shebikas (community health volunteers) to sell our eyeglasses. Now, with our new plan to scale up, we will provide affordable glasses to almost ten million people in Bangladesh over the next three years.

Our biggest challenge by far is managing the inventory that BRAC needs. At the moment, we’re delivering about 30,000 pairs of glasses every four months, but soon we will need to deliver 30,000 every month. We are mainly focused on getting the glasses into Bangladesh, a complicated process involving multiple inspection agencies. A 2006 Doing Business (http://www.doingbusiness.org) report from the World Bank notes that when a Bangladeshi company imports goods, it has to prepare 16 types of documents and obtain 38 signatures, and that the whole process takes 57 days. I can tell from our experience that it hasn’t improve much in the last few years.

For example, we received a Letter of Credit from a bank in Bangladesh that was valid only from April through June. Simply getting it updated meant that we had to get signatures from BRAC’s bank in Bangladesh, VisionSpring’s bank in New York, VisionSpring’s offices in India and New York, and our vendor and inspection agency in China.

We at VisionSpring are working hard to understand the whole process and constantly improve our delivery time. The first order took us more than 9 months to clear customs and make it in to Bangladesh, and the next order took about 6 months. Our goal is to get the process down to 3 months, which we are able to achieve in other developing countries where we work. We are certainly going through a period of adaptation, but it has been a very exciting time and I look forward to making more leaps of improvement.

After business school at the Institute of Rural Management Anand (IRMA), I was surprised to find that the challenges we face are the same as private sector businesses, only we are addressing them in some of the most challenging markets in the world. There is a reason that most private-sector companies haven’t tried to reach rural markets in Bangladesh; the start-up and logistics costs are simply too high. However, if our partnership with BRAC is successful, we will be able to provide affordable glasses and business opportunity to millions of people in Bangladesh. For us, it is well worth the struggle.

It’s 9 a.m., day two of Net Impact.  I grab my compostable coffee cup and head into the session on social intrapreneurship.  The panel focuses on corporate changemakers working inside businesses to deliver innovative market solutions for the world’s toughest social and environmental challenges.  Among the panelists is Acumen Fund Fellow alumna Jocelyn Wyatt who currently serves as the Head of Social Impact and Business Factors at IDEO, a global design consultancy.

Jocelyn came to know about IDEO during her Acumen Fellowship while visiting VisionSpring in India.  IDEO was interested in bringing in someone to build out the firm’s social impact work, so she wrote her own job description – knowing nothing about design and having never visited the firm itself – was made an offer, and then started the job.

One of her biggest surprises was that she had to figure out her job once she got there.  She was also surprised to discover a thriving group of social entrepreneurs who were already on board at IDEO.  Jocelyn realizes that the biggest asset in being able to make changes in a company is having a team of like-minded people who share the values of bringing services to the poor.  She started an e-mail list called “social impact at IDEO.” After that, she launched a social impact wiki page where people post resources and social impact projects.  The group then started meeting over Monday lunch hours for strategy meetings and social labs with entrepreneurs in the field.  “Everything is really transparent and open,” said Jocelyn.

During a two-week trip in June to various IDEO offices, Jocelyn put out a call out for people to start social impact initiatives at the local level.  Some have started this, some haven’t.  But, according to Jocelyn, IDEO’s social impact work has been able to withstand the current financial crisis because it is fully integrated into its normal business operations and because social impact services are priced at market rate.

Unlike Jocelyn, Henry Gonzalez of Morgan Stanley only gets to spend 25 percent of his time on social impact work, but his work as a patient advocate enabled him to found and integrate a Microfinance Institutions Group into the firm’s work.

“Your interests could evolve in the firm – whether you are the cheerleader, taking on your issue as an extracurricular project outside of the 9 to 5 p.m., or whether the firm eventually fully integrates a base of the pyramid strategy into everyday efforts,” said Henry.  “The more you can embed your initiative into the current business practice, the more the social impact work is unstoppable.”

The two intrapreneurs agreed on the importance of name affiliation in their ability to create a social impact movement.  If you’re a new social entrepreneur, but don’t have the name backing of Morgan Stanley, SustainAbility or IDEO, you’re not going to get asked to speak at conferences like Net Impact, they said.

I just returned to my apartment for a quick break between Acumen Fund’s annual Investor Gathering (which was today) and our benefit Celebration (which is tonight). More on both events later - I have 7+ pages of notes from today that are waiting to be turned into a blog post (or two)!

One of the nice things about being in the Rubin Museum of Art all day today was that I didn’t have access to the Internet, which meant I wasn’t tempted to check my work e-mail compulsively (which is the norm for me, sadly). So, on returning home, I connected back to the world. Among the new messages in my inbox was a note from VisionSpring, an Acumen Fund investee, with the subject line “VisionSpring Wins Aspen Prize“.

Intrigued, I opened it to find out that Jordan Kassalow, the tireless co-founder of VisionSpring, was recently awarded the prestigious John P. McNulty prize, which “supports extraordinary young leaders making creative, effective, and lasting contributions to their communities” and comes with a $100,000 award. We at Acumen Fund are thrilled to see Jordan and his deserving team honored by one of our closest allies, the Aspen Institute. Congratulations to everyone at VisionSpring on this wonderful endorsement of what you do every day.

We’re happy to point out some new content available on Acumen Fund’s web site. 2008 Fellows Chris Walker and Catherine Casey, as well as 2007 Fellow David Lehr have captured the human faces, opportunities and challenges of investing at the base of the economic pyramid.

Ambulances that Save Lives and Save Energy: Chris Walker’s video on Mumbai’s “Dial 1298″ 24×7 ambulance service illustrates how the investment is not just saving lives, it’s also piloting an energy-saving system using solar panels. You can check out the video and learn more about 1298’s impact on its investment page.

Quality Healthcare in Kibera: Casey’s video features Dorah Nyanja, a nurse working in Kibera, Nairobi’s largest slum. She owns a clinic that is part of the Sustainable Healthcare Foundation (SHF), a micro-franchise investment with 64 clinics – including Dorah’s – throughout Kenya. Check out the video and learn more on SHF’s investment page.

Microfranchising at the Base of the Pyramid: David Lehr’s paper provides an in-depth analysis of microfranchising as a development tool. The paper highlights three leading microfranchising organizations that partner with Acumen Fund: Drishtee, VisionSpring (formerly Scojo Foundation) and Sustainable Healthcare Foundation. It’s one of a series of written articles that Acumen Fund has produced about the ways market-based approaches are changing the way we think about poverty alleviation.

In The Search for Social Entrepreneurship, Paul Light writes, “If the idea is matters, so does management…to the extent that management is essential for scale-up and impact, socially entrepreneurial organizations need to embrace it.”

Light’s idea that high performing organizations should invest in management and organizational development systems makes sense, but in order for many social businesses to do so, the philanthropic landscape will need to change.

William Foster, partner at leading nonprofit consulting firm Bridgespan Group, recently wrote about the need for foundations to provide “growth capital” grants to later-stage organizations with sound business plans, strategic clarity and a sustainable financing model. In his Stanford Social Innovation Review article, “Money to Grow On,” he suggests that funding organizations should approach grantmaking in a similar way that venture capitalists approach making investments: high performing organizations with proven success should be awarded larger infusions of unrestricted cash to ramp-up and achieve long-term social change.

Foster writes, “Before venture capitalists invest in a company, they conduct a thorough review of the company’s management team, business model, and strategic plan, along with an analysis of the company’s competition and market. More often than not, they walk away from deals that are in many respects attractive. Few nonprofit donors undertake such rigorous due diligence. But they should. ”

For organizations working in the base of the pyramid space, this idea is already starting to take root. VisionSpring recently announced a prospectus, which is aimed at attracting $5 million in growth capital. The prospectus details how resources will be leveraged to create and measure increased social returns. Donors do not have to look far to reference past financial statements or catalogue other partners who are investing in their model — all these details are easy to find and effectively illustrated in the report.

This post first appeared on Acumen investee VisionSpring’s blog, Business in a Bag. We’ll be cross-posting with Business in a Bag from time to time.

The post’s author is Tim Johnson-Aramaki, a student at the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business, who spent the summer with VisionSpring India working on a data-collection methodology to measure the long-term impact of VisionSpring’s work on the lives of Vision Entrepreneurs and customers. His project is part of a multi-year impact study conducted by Professor Ted London at Michigan’s William Davidson Institute.

Over the last few months, I’ve been working to develop a survey instrument with the VisionSpring team here in Hyderabad and the William Davidson Institute team in Ann Arbor. The first step was survey pre-testing, which involved conducting countless interviews in rural village throughout the state of Andhra Pradesh. These interviews are meant to help us discover whether the questions we’ve come up with are understood by respondents with varying semantic and cultural backgrounds, and if they prompt valid and appropriate responses. Some of the results we’ve gathered have been really interesting.

For example, one of the most critical pieces of data in measuring VisionSpring’s impact is the income of its Vision Entrepreneurs and customers. It also happens to be one of the most difficult things to measure as there are challenges when it comes to discussing money. Through our interviews, we’ve found that while people are relatively open in assigning a number to their income, that number may not be accurate. There are a variety of reasons for this, but one is that they fear the income figures may be passed on to state or national agencies, potentially jeopardizing the public assistance they receive. To avoid this, they often provide income figures lower than that which they actually earn.

Last week, I had the opportunity to sit down with Jordan Kassalow, Graham Macmillan and Miriam Stone – three staff members at VisionSpring – to conduct a long-form interview. Formerly known as Scojo Foundation, VisionSpring is the pioneering base of the pyramid-focused enterprise working to provide access to eyeglasses in low-income communities around the world.

Acumen Fund is an investor in VisionSpring, having made a $500K debt investment back in 2006. We’ve followed their progress for a long time, up to and including their recent name change and announcement of a 5-year fundraising prospectus.

Rob Katz, Acumen Fund: How, when and why did you get involved with VisionSpring?

Jordan Kassalow, Chairman and Co-Founder, VisionSpring: It was very practical. I spotted a market failure in my blindness prevention work (I’m an optometrist and public health expert by trade.) For many years, my specialty was river blindness control, and when I worked in low-income communities, I saw more people coming to clinics because they couldn’t see up close, while there were relatively few who were coming to us for river blindness. I saw this pattern regardless of whether I was working in Africa, Asia or Latin America. When you’re working on blindness, the overall market relative to general eye care is small. The normal need for eyeglasses is strong, but underserved in the developing world. After many months, I finally realized that, if no one else is doing something about it, why can’t I?

Acumen Fund Fellow John Tucker was interviewed by VisionSpring’s Miriam Stone. Read the full interview here, in which John reflects on what he’s learned over the past year working in India as a Fellow. Good stuff.