Lok Capital and Acumen Fund announce Rs. 7 crore investment in Hippocampus Learning Centres, a rural education services provider, signaling both funds’ first foray into education.

HLC improves education quality and generates employment through pre-school and after-school learning programs in rural India.

Bangalore, May 2012: Lok Capital, one of the largest dedicated funds in India for businesses focused on serving the lower income and base of the pyramid (BOP) customer segments and Acumen Fund, a pioneering nonprofit global venture firm addressing poverty in South Asia, East and West Africa, today announce Rs. 7 crore investment in Hippocampus Learning Centres (HLC), a for-profit rural education service provider in India. This is Lok Capital’s and Acumen’s first investment in Education and marks the launch of their respective education portfolios. Based in Karnataka, India, HLC provides affordable, quality education by employing and training local female teachers who coach students between the ages of 3-12 in both pre-school and primary instruction.

Education has traditionally been a public sector service but public education systems globally have struggled to meet the learning needs of low-income populations. In a rapidly developing economy like India, more than 50% of children between the ages of 15 and 19 are currently unemployed or out of school.  Those that go to school receive low-quality instruction that often focuses more on rote memorization than on real learning. Rural India faces the greatest challenges –more than half of rural 5^th standard students cannot read a 2^nd standard level text and only 28% can do a basic division problem.

“The private sector has a critical role to play in creating education innovations that serve the poor. These customers are increasingly demonstrating their willingness to pay for quality solutions and demand accountability for them,” said Ankur Shah, Interim India Director at Acumen Fund “That is precisely what we want to promote. We believe the public sector in turn must play a role in enabling these solutions to scale and see many opportunities to partner with governments.”

HLC’s goal is to create positive and tangible learning outcomes for children in rural India, using its in-house curriculum which allows children of various age groups to learn at their own pace. This curriculum is designed by veteran educationists. The learning and pedagogy at HLC is creative, facilitative (not chalk-and-talk), non-threatening and enjoyable, which is a clear contrast to the largely common rote learning approach. HLC not only aims to address the learning crisis for children in rural India but also unlock potential for local women by creating attractive employment opportunities. Currently HLC’s pilot in 39 villages has generated significant lessons learned with 50 teachers and 700 students across two districts in rural Karnataka. With this investment, the company plans to focus on delivering learning outcomes to over 7,000 students through 300 teachers in 100 villages serving in the next two academic years.

HLC’s founder and CEO, Umesh Malhotra has extensive education and entrepreneurial experience in India as the founder of Hippocampus Reading Foundation, a network of over 250 libraries, and as co-founder of Bangalore Labs, India’s first IT infrastructure management firm.  “Our emphasis must be on building strong delivery systems rather than just products,” Malhotra said. “HLC has a tremendous opportunity to provide quality education to a massive group of young children – forever changing their future. HLC’s pedagogy, ability to impart learning through centers, teacher training processes, center administration and focus on learning outcomes will ensure robust instructional delivery at scale.”

Announcing the funding, Mr. Ganesh Rengaswamy, Partner, Lok Capital said “We are excited to partner with Hippocampus Learning Centres as our maiden investment in the affordable education space. Education is a crucial game changer in addressing social and economic inequalities of present and future. Private investments in sound and replicable business models like HLC and joint PPP initiatives with government in school management are pivotal in addressing the primary education imperative.’

Going forward, Lok Capital and Acumen Fund will continue to partner with more entrepreneurs working in the sector focused on improving the quality of education, at an affordable price, with a clear focus on customers at the lower income or base of pyramid segments in rural and urban India.

About Hippocampus Learning Centres

The goal of Hippocampus Learning Centres (HLC) is to offer high quality education services to children in the villages of our nation.  We establish education centres which offer both Kindergarten and After School programs. The after-school programs teach English, Math and Kannada.  Each of our centres boasts of a library and a LEGO kit and conducts activities on art, craft and science to give these children a well rounded education. Our goal is to ensure that these children stay ahead of their class requirement and get an equal opportunity to participate in the progress of the nation. We employ women from the local community as teachers. They are then trained and provided continuous support. Within 2 years of its establishment, Hippocampus is working in 90 villages, employs 300 people and reaches out to 5,000 children.  For more information contact Umesh Malhotra on umesh@hippocampus.in

About Acumen Fund

Acumen Fund is working to create a world beyond poverty by investing in social enterprises, emerging leaders and breakthrough ideas. We invest patient capital in business models that deliver critical goods and services to the world’s poor, improving the lives of millions. Since 2001, Acumen Fund has globally invested more than $75 million in 69 enterprises across South Asia, East and West Africa. And we are building a global community of emerging leaders that believe in creating a more inclusive world through the tools of both business and philanthropy. In India, we have approved and invested over $30 million in 24 enterprises that have provided over 10 million low-income individuals access to water, health, energy, and agricultural services.

With anchor philanthropic commitments from the Af Jochnick Foundation, the World We Want, Giving Wings, and Motwani Foundation, Acumen Fund has launched a dedicated Education Portfolio that will support private sector innovations that increase access to low-cost, high-quality learning and employability services for the poor.  With this first investment in place and a pipeline of additional investments in development, Acumen Fund’s Education Portfolio is positioned to grow quickly in support of Acumen Fund’s global goal of impacting the lives of 150 million people by 2015. For more information on Acumen Fund’s activities and investments, visit www.acumenfund.org.

For additional information on Acumen Fund’s Education Portfolio and its investment in Hippocampus Learning Centres, please contact Molly Alexander at malexander@acumenfund.org (India) or Elizabeth Patella at epatella@acumenfund.org (Global)

About Lok Capital

Lok Capital is one of the most active venture capital funds investing in high potential financial inclusion and broader inclusion enterprises (Education, Healthcare, Livelihoods), serving the lower income and bottom of pyramid (BOP) segment.  Lok Capital has under management currently, two funds with a corpus of almost $90 million. Lok Capital aims at impact investing; to promote inclusive growth by supporting the development of social enterprises to deliver basic services to serve the BOP segment in a scalable, affordable and commercially viable manner. Lok seeks to partner with visionary entrepreneurs to help take these social enterprises to new levels of sustainability, scalability and professionalism and thus multiply the ‘impact’ on the BOP segment.

Lok Capital was founded by Rajiv B. Lall in the year 2000 with a seed grant from the Rockefeller Foundation. Other co-founders include Donald Peck and Vishal Mehta. The Lok portfolio includes the likes of Ujjivan, Basix, Janalakshmi, Asirwad, and RuralShores, among others. For more information on Lok Capital’s Funds and activities, visit http://www.lokcapital.com/.

Innovative model offers affordable extension services for crops and livestock to smallholder farmers through a wide network of trained personnel.

Mumbai, India, May 11, 2012 – Acumen Fund, a pioneering nonprofit global venture firm addressing poverty in South Asia and across Africa, today announced an equity investment of INR 9 crores (~$2M) in BASIX Krishi Samruddhi Limited (BASIX Krishi).

BASIX Krishi delivers productivity enhancing extension services—such as soil testing, seed treatment, vermicomposting, pest management and good harvesting practices for crop farmers; and livestock vaccination, para-vet services, fodder demonstration and milk market linkages for dairy farmers. The company provides this service to its customers through a network of trained Livelihood Service Providers who visit each customer at least twice per month. Incorporated as a public limited company in April 2010, BASIX Krishi is part of the BASIX Social Enterprise Group promoted by Vijay Mahajan, an accomplished social entrepreneur who is considered a pioneer in the areas of financial inclusion and rural livelihood promotion.

“The BASIX Krishi model can increase smallholder farmer incomes by an estimated 30% through a combination of improved productivity and reduced input costs,” said Siddharth Tata, Acumen Fund’s Agriculture Portfolio Manager. “In addition to helping improve farmer livelihoods, this investment allows us to build on our knowledge base in the agri-inputs sector, providing valuable insights into how smallholder farmers make decisions on improving their farm productivity.”

Of the more than 100 million farms operating in India, nearly 85% are managed by smallholder farmers with less than two hectares of land. Most of these farmers have no access to quality extension services, making it very hard to access simple tools and engage in practices that help improve farm productivity.

“Acumen Fund’s investment will help us scale BASIX Krishi’s activities to 67 branches serving nearly 350,000 farmer customers over the next two years,” said Arijit Dutta, CEO, BASIX Krishi. “Through our model, farmers receive personal visits from trained extension workers who support their productivity needs and provide on-call assistance for any questions or emergencies. Eventually, we envision a world in which all smallholder farmers have access to agricultural extension services that empower them to improve their own lives.”

For additional information on Acumen Fund India and its investment in Basix Krishi or in the Agriculture sector, please click here or contact Molly Alexander at malexander@acumenfund.org

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About BASIX Krishi

BASIX Krishi Samruddhi Ltd (Basix Krishi) is a BASIX Group company, and was incorporated in April 2010. Basix Krishi trains and employs a network of Livelihood Service Providers (LSPs) who provide services that enhance farmers’ productivity and reduce the cost of cultivation, thereby increasing farmers’ overall income. The services cover a wide range- vaccination, de-worming, fodder management for livestock and soil testing, vermicomposting, pest management for crops.

Late last March I boarded a plane to Great Britain after attending a conference on the European debt crisis at the Banque de France.  I was heading to the Skoll World Forum, hoping to replace the despair about the state of the world I had picked up in France with optimism for the future of a world transformed by social enterprises.  I was not disappointed.

For an intern at Acumen Fund, the Forum was an eye-opening experience.  Every person I talked to told me about amazing ventures, every conversation between the participants ended with excited promises for future collaboration, and every break-out session involved panel members and audiences pushing each other to think about how to take the impact of social enterprises farther.  Yet, after two and a half days, the conference was over and the 800 participants traveled back to their respective homes.

I don’t believe this is enough – the problems we are addressing are larger than two and a half days, larger than 800 people.  These discussions and these connections leading to collaboration need to be continuous and, even more importantly, they need to include everybody working for social impact, not just those who attend the Forum.  A job at a high-profile organization that will pay for attendance, or having a family friend who can secure two unused day passes at the last minute (my method of entrance), should not be necessary to take part in efforts to reach the upper bounds of creating social impact.

As I was mulling over these thoughts at the Forum, I stumbled upon the CoLab.  In this room, the Skoll Foundation and Cisco Systems were asking participants to draw the networks of the organizations they work for.  Skoll and Cisco promised to use these drawings as a basis for the design of a social network for social impact.  Perhaps with this “Facebook for impact,” I thought, Skoll and Cisco would be able to open up the closed system of the Skoll World Forum to everyone 365 days a year.

When I returned to Acumen and expressed my excitement for this type of network, the impact it could create and the new voices it could bring to the table, I was cautioned: social networks for social impact have been tried before. Networks built by a few big players in the space have not seen as much success as one would expect, most likely because people are pressed for time and are only regularly going to use one social network.  That network is increasingly becoming Facebook.  Moreover, connecting with someone for the first time in the beautiful Oxford spring is much different from interacting over the Internet.

Yet, I still believe there is reason to be cautiously optimistic.  Facebook succeeded where MySpace didn’t, and the Skoll Foundation and Cisco Systems are two forces to be reckoned with.  I hope Skoll and Cisco learn from and build on the history of social networks for social impact, as well as continue to reach out to all types of potential users.  If they succeed in creating a working network, in taking advantage of the explosion of Internet access across the world that brings together everyone from an impact fund in New York to a social enterprise in The Gambia, they might just change the world.

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Tristan Zucker is a Global Fellows Program intern at Acumen Fund

We Are Watching You is a campaign to create political accountability in Kenya by increasing citizens’ vigilance and civic participation. The campaign uses elements of popular culture to sensitize citizens and works in collaboration with civil society leaders. Created in the wake of the 2007-2008 post-election violence in Kenya, it is led by Ramadhan Obiero – an Acumen Fund East Africa Fellow. Ramadhan has experience as the Coordinator for the Vumilia Youth Group, the Stage Manager for musician Eric Wainaina, the leader of the Kale Leo Band, and the Chairman of the African Cultural Research and Education Foundation.

Acumen Fund launched the East Africa Fellows program to identify and train the next generation of leaders united by a common mission of harnessing the power of social innovation to create solutions to East Africa’s most pressing problems. The Acumen Fund East Africa Fellows Program is made possible through the sponsorship of KCB Foundation and the Edmond de Rothschild Foundations.

In 2009, Sasha Dichter ran a  ’Generosity Experiment’, an attempt to say yes in a world where you often hear ‘NO’. It quickly turned into a worldwide phenomenon, and became part of a broader effort to reboot Valentine’s Day as “Generosity Day” in order to reconnect the day to the core ideas of love and human connection. Three years later, the Acumen Fund India office recognized this ongoing effort and partnered with Teach for India (TFI) to run our very own generosity experiment with students from a school in a low-income community in Mumbai. The video above documents the class’ experience, and the blog below comes from the two TFI Fellows, Sapna Shah and Prateek Kanwal.  Video Credit: Mihir Desai.

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“The people who make a difference in your life are not the ones with the most credentials…the most money…or the most awards…they simply are the ones who care the most. We fail to remember the headliners of yesterday even though they are the best in their fields but we always remember those teachers and friends that aided our journey through school, helped us through a difficult time, taught us something worthwhile, and appreciated our efforts.”

-Charles Schulz

When we walked into our classrooms for the first time, we saw violence and a host of communal issues. The children lacked a value system and mutual respect. And our classrooms only reflected what our country at large faces; problems of poverty, starvation, hatred, terrorism, corruption and environmental issues. We believe at the heart of these problems lies a lack of the values of empathy, compassion, love, and gratitude; in short, all we saw was selfishness in thoughts as well as actions.

We joined the Teach for India movement because of our belief that education is the answer to a lot of the problems that plague our nation and the world at large. We defined excellent education as a means of putting our kids on a different life path and pledged to do all it takes to be successful in our endeavor. Throughout the year, we pushed our kids at every step to work hard, to reach the ambitious academic goals we had set together.

We soon realized academic achievement alone will not be enough to change the life trajectory of our kids, that along with academic excellence they need grit. The strength to overcome difficulties and challenges at every step, but also zest and optimism to face everything that life throws their way with a smile. They will need gratitude to be thankful for what they have and empathy towards others. Instilling these values in our children ensures that they grow up to be not only committed and hardworking but also loving, compassionate, empathetic and giving leaders.

Our first challenge was to show our students that many of the beliefs and actions they have grown accustomed to could be harmful to their fellow classmates. This process of change had to be slowly and carefully crafted to avoid backlash from society. When we were approached to try out this Generosity Day experiment, we recognized it to be an opportunity. We were asked to create a lesson plan that emphasized the importance of values and generosity, to teach our students how easy it was to give.

Once they started appreciating this new value, we had unknowingly instilled a cycle of positivity. Their academic performance leapfrogged and there was a visible change in the way they conducted themselves in their community. They started respecting their classmates and even went the extra mile to help each other. We could also see a difference in the way parents started conducting themselves around their children and how they also felt the inherent need to change.

The affirmation of this experiment came in the form of a generous act by one of Prateek’s students Pooja Patel. She spoke to him before school, one day, and asked if she could to sit with Tusshar Gupta, one of her classmate who was struggling to meet his end of year goals. She said, “Bhaiyya (elder brother), if I can get good marks, he can also do it, please give me a chance to help him”. From that day onwards for two months she relentlessly taught him before and after school hours and even went the extra mile by tutoring him at his house on weekends. The result was unbelievable. She showed the class that it was our collective responsibility to ensure everyone is on an equal footing.

Based on research done by KIPP schools a high percentage of their kids applied to 4 year college programs, but a very small percentage actually graduated. The ones who completed their course were not kids with the highest G.P.A but kids who scored high on C.P.A (character point average).

From our experience, we would strongly urge school leaders and teachers, to include value education in their curriculum and create ample opportunities for the kids to practice and cultivate these values. Children should be graded not only on their academic performance but also on character.

During this experiment we’ve learned that Generosity Day is about seeing the world from a different perspective, one perpetuated by selfless giving. Thanks to our kids, we too have learnt that there are many problems around us and we often pretend to not see them, choosing to remain blind in order to make our lives easier. We’ve taken a promise to make this world a better place by changing ourselves.  By giving a little more and complaining a little less. After all, if you want to make this world a better place, take a look at yourself and then make the change!

“Be the change you wish to see in this world” – Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi

Prateek Kanwal & Sapna Shah are Teach for India Fellows at a school in a low-income community in Mumbai, India.

We are proud to announce the Class of 2013 Global Fellows, a group that represents eight countries, speaks 11 languages, and brings a depth of global experience ranging from software engineering at Google to directing operations at a fashion house in Saudi Arabia.  This dedicated cohort is the latest addition to a growing network of individuals bringing a new model of leadership to the world.

The world is hungry for this new kind of leader – someone who has the humility to see the world as it is and the audacity to envision the world as it could be, equipped with the financial and operational skills needed to create lasting impact on the ground. Each year, Acumen Fund identifies and trains these leaders through our 12-month Global Fellows Program, which combines two months of multi-disciplinary leadership training in New York City with a 10-month field placement in India, Pakistan, East Africa or West Africa where each Fellow provides on-the-ground management support to one of Acumen Fund’s investee companies on the front lines of tackling global poverty. Since closing applications in November, we’ve reviewed over 1,000 applications from more than 100 countries and conducted 10 days of in-person interviews in seven cities in six countries.  Throughout this intensive process, we have been inspired by both the passion and professional caliber of the candidates. It was a difficult and humbling task to select this next cohort of Global Fellows, but we are thrilled to share the names of these 10 individuals with you today.

Please join us in welcoming our newly selected Global Fellows:

	Mustapha Abokede Mustapha is from Nigeria and has worked with KPMG as a Senior Associate, and with Mobil Oil. Mustapha holds a B.Eng. in Petroleum Engineering from the University of Technology of Nigeria.
	Abbas Akhtar Abbas is from Pakistan and has worked with Google and Apple as a software engineer, and also with UNDP. He is the founder of vidpk.com. Abbas holds a B.S. in Computer Science from San Jose State, and will complete an M.A. in International Relations & International Economics from Johns Hopkins this May.
	Shahd AlShehail Shahd is from Saudi Arabia and has worked with Global Giving, with SABIC Innovative Plastics, and was the Director of Operations of Al Qadem Fashion House, an entrepreneurial venture focused on supporting underprivileged women. Shahd holds a B.S. in Accounting from the University of Evansville, and will complete a Global M.B.A. with a focus in Entrepreneurship from Johns Hopkins this May.
	R. Michael Craig Michael is from Canada and has worked with KPMG in Canada and in the UK for most of his career. Michael started his career as an External Auditor, was laterally promoted to Restructuring Associate, and more recently acted as a Turnaround Manager. Michael is a Chartered Accountant, holds a Bachelor’s of Commerce degree from Queen’s University, and will complete his MBA from INSEAD in July.
	Natalie Grillon Natalie is from the US and has worked with the Peace Corps in Northern Mali as a Natural Resource Management Specialist. She also worked in environmental and sustainability planning for a Massachusetts town government and in sustainability strategy and marketing at SC Johnson. Natalie holds a B.S. in International Politics from Georgetown University, and will complete an M.B.A. from Cornell University in May.
	Nicole Iden Nicole is from the US and has worked with Capital One as a Bank Vice President, Grameen Foundation as Manager of its Microfinance Technology Readiness program, and Accenture as an IT consultant. Nicole holds a B.A. in Economics from William & Mary, and an M.S. in Management of Information Technology from the University of Virginia..
	Jay Jaboneta Jay is from the Philippines, and has worked with the Philippine government in the Presidential Communications Operations Office as New Media Head, with Procter & Gamble as an Accounts Manager, and with Australia & New Zealand Banking Group as a Marketing and Sales Analyst. Jay is also the Co-Founder of the Yellow Boat Project. He holds a B.S. in Commerce from Ateneo de Davao University.
	Mohammed Fahim Shelot Fahim is from Pakistan and has worked with Al Meezan Investment Management in Pakistan as an analyst, with Ernst & Young’s Global Islamic Finance team in Bahrain as a consultant, and with Capital Management House in Bahrain in private equity. Fahim holds a B.Sc. in Accounting and Finance from the Lahore University of Management Sciences and is a Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) Charterholder.
	Christina Tang Christina is from Hong Kong and worked at Bain & Company as a management consultant. She has previously worked on starting Rainwater for Humanity, a rainwater harvesting initiative based in India. Christina holds a B.A. in Economics and a B.S. in Environmental Sciences from Brown University.
	Junko Tashiro Junko is from Japan and has worked with McKinsey & Co as a management consultant. She has also worked with UNDP, the International Finance Corporation, and a Kenyan NGO as an HIV/AIDS peer educator. Junko holds a B.A. in International Relations from the University of Tokyo and will complete an M.P.A. in Economic Development and Management from Columbia University in May.

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The Class of 2013 will begin the fellowship year in September. We look forward not only to the positive social change they will create, but also to the transformational experience they will undergo along the way. We encourage you to follow the Fellows on their journey by reading their blog posts during the year ahead. In the meantime, please spread the word by sharing this update on Facebook or Twitter. And if you or someone you know is interested in joining the Global Fellows Program, we will re-open applications in October 2012.

For more information about Acumen Fund’s leadership programs, please visit:
Global Fellows Program
East Africa Regional Fellows Program
+acumen volunteer Chapters

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John McKinley is Global Fellows Program Manager at Acumen Fund.

April 12 – May 1, 2012

Seen & Heard is a collection of recent headlines in the news about our world, our work, and the spaces and places in between. In each post, we also share a list of job openings at Acumen Fund and in our sector. Seen & Heard appears twice a month on the blog. For those of you who like keeping a pulse on the latest news as it’s happening, please consider following us on  Twitter and Facebook! Finally, if you have ideas for how we can improve Seen & Heard, please don’t be shy and leave a comment below to let us know. Thanks for reading!
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Headlines

• Acumen Fund and Monitor Inclusive Markets release From Blueprint to Scale: The Case for Philanthropy in Impact Investing at the Global Philanthropy Forum

Articles of the Week

AF and AF Family in the News

• Jacqueline Novogratz gives a keynote presentation at the Global Philanthropy Forum 2012
• Café Coffee Day Chief Executive joins Orb Energy’s Board of Directors
• Lionel Barber of the Financial Times features GADCO’s Toks Abimbola

Impact Investing in the News

• The Rockefeller Foundation hosts a Twitter conference on May 2 focusing on innovation in farming, irrigation, and data
• The Huffington Post features the new report from Monitor Group and Acumen Fund, From Blueprint to Scale: the Case for Philanthropy in Impact Investing
• Maura O’Neill, Chief Innovation Officer at USAID, highlights the Blueprint to Scale report
• Morgan Stanley Smith Barney announces an Investing with Impact platform
• Leap Frog Investments invests $5.5M in Ghana’s insurance industry
• The Trouble with Impact Investing Part 2, from the Stanford Social Innovation Review
• Strategy+Business features Linda Rottenberg of Endeavor

Other Relevant Articles:

• The NYTimes writes about the “Cookstove Conundrum”
• The World Bank reports that 18 African nations lose $5.5B per year due to lack of sanitation
• IPA asks if cookstoves should be placed on the backburner
• OpenTable founder starts new accelerator for social enterprises
• Jane Wales of Global Philanthropy Forum on what’s to come in the social sector
• Public sector leaders face a set of complex challenges, reports the Financial Times
• What CEOs (and the social sector) can learn from Apple
• David Brooks on “Creative Monopolists”
• Sunny Bindra writes about using wisdom instead of shrewdness for your business

India:

• Concern over the effect of the Right to Education Act on education entrepreneurs
• What can India learn from Africa? via the Sierra Club
• One-third of High Net Worth donors in India are under 30
• Forbes India on “the Real Benefits of Capitalism”
• Solar powered micro-grids impact rural villages in India
• The world’s largest solar PV power station goes online in India

Social Entrepreneurs and Politics

• David Brooks writes on social entrepreneurs and political progress
• J. Gregory Dees responds to David Brooks
• Echoing Green thinks David Brooks got it wrong

Jobs

Jobs at Acumen Fund

• India Legal Counsel
• India Administrative Assistant
• New York Two-Year Analyst Program
• Pakistan Director
• Pakistan Portfolio Associate – Lahore
• Pakistan Portfolio Consultant
• Pakistan Business Development Manager
• West Africa Business Associate

Other Jobs – Do you know people on the job market? Tell them about these other opportunities:

• Villgro Fellows Program – Villgro, India
• Director of Business Development – StartingBloc, New York
• Chief Executive Officer – Sugha Vazvu Health Care, Tamil Nadu, India
• Marketing and Sales Analyst – Piramal Water Private Limited (Sarvajal), Ahmedabad, India

For more job postings, check out NextBillion’s Career Center, ANDE’s Jobs in the Network, GIIN’s Job Board, SocialEdge Job Listings, and this great list of Fellowships

Rohit Gawande is a Business Development Analyst at Acumen Fund. Follow him on Twitter @RohitG6

If you missed the road less traveled, here is your chance to correct it.

If your desire to make a difference to the world was somehow lost in your search for a stable career, here is your chance to rediscover it.

As a Villgro Fellow, you will work with a social enterprise for 1 year, applying your skills to create real impact in rural India. In charting a better road map for the social enterprise, you may find your own Road Less Traveled. Many Villgro fellows have gone onto work/consult for social enterprises or pursue further studies in the social sector.

What is the Villgro Fellowship?
Villgro works with social entrepreneurs who are transforming rural India with innovative ideas such as bee-keeping that increases farm yield and financial returns for farmers, Cost-effective anaemia testing machines to prevent maternal mortality, to name a few. Your expertise helps the social enterprise at a critical stage in its journey. Working hands-on with the social enterprises opens your mind to different possibilities. Villgro will provide training and financial support.

Who can be a Villgro Fellow?
If you are passionate about using your professional skills for social impact and have 3-4 years experience in any of the following areas – Strategic Planning, Finance and Accounting, HR, Sales and Marketing, IT and Operations – we would be happy to have you on board.

For more details and to apply please visit: http://villgro.org/index.php/the-fellowship-

Meet the Villgro Fellows from 2011 here.

DEADLINE: MAY 20, 2012

In honor of World Malaria Day, we wanted to shine a spotlight on one of our investees working on malaria control. Malaria remains a life-threatening disease, still taking the lives of approximately 655,000 people a year, mostly African children. In 2009, Acumen Fund made an investment in Durable Activated Residual Textiles (DART), which is developing an insecticide-treated wall lining for the interior of homes. This innovation in malaria prevention is currently being tested for application across multiple malaria infected regions, including Kenya and Liberia.

The success of durable wall-lining has been striking and shows great promise. When used as a complement to insecticide treated mosquito nets and in place of Indoor Residual Spraying (IRS), these wall linings have been proven to reduce the number of mosquitoes throughout thousands of homes in western Kenya and reduce incidence of malaria.  According to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, malaria prevalence in Kenyan homes that used a combination of nets and wall lining was a lower rate of 61% in the following six months, compared to 70% in those homes that received nets alone.

However, the benefits of this new approach go beyond increased protection. Lasting for 4 to 5 years, durable wall linings provide additional security for those who do not regularly sleep under bed nets, or for the many customers who improperly use them. Durable wall-lining installation may be considerably more cost-effective too, not requiring skilled labor for spraying houses once (or more) a year. Even from a practical perspective, it would be more appealing to put up aesthetically-pleasing wallpaper once every five years compared to having your possessions taken out of your house for it to be sprayed. And let’s not underestimate the importance of a product that is aesthetically-pleasing; to people living in houses built with brown clay, mud and sticks, having beautified interior decorating makes as much a difference in a malaria prevention product as the actual effectiveness against malaria itself.

What makes DART’s innovation so powerful and widely appealing for customers is that it combines the best from traditional bed nets and the best from IRS, while addressing the downsides of both: compared to IRS, durable wall-lining requires significantly less skilled labor and lasts four times as long, and unlike bed nets it does not require any major change in customer behavior.

To help develop the next generation of malaria prevention, DART is working with global public health organizations to address the sector-wide insecticide resistance challenges facing malaria prevention approaches around the world. DART was created in 2009 through a joint venture with Acumen Fund, the global malaria expert and social entrepreneur, Richard Allan and Vestergaard Frandsen, a pioneering European firm that specializes in developing emergency response and disease control products.

For the millions of people living in malaria endemic areas, innovations such as this wall lining and the possibility of a new class of effective insecticides have the potential to transform their lives. This unique joint venture, which brings together a variety of stakeholders to produce an innovative and high quality product, will result in improvements in their health outcomes and the many benefits that improved health can bring.

Vinay Nair represents Acumen Fund on DART’s Board of Directors.

Elizabeth Patella is a Communications Manager at Acumen Fund

“Meaning is not something you stumble across, like the answer to a riddle or the prize in a treasure hunt. Meaning is something you build into your life. You build it out of your own past, out of your affections and loyalties, out of the experience of humankind as it is passed on to you, out of your own talent and understanding, out of the things you believe in, out of the things and people you love, out of the values for which you are willing to sacrifice something. The ingredients are there. You are the only one who can put them together into that unique pattern that will be your life. Let it be a life that has dignity and meaning for you. If it does, then the particular balance of success or failure is of less account.”

- John Gardner, “Personal Renewal”

November 10, 1990

Vijay Mahajan, chairman and founder of the BASIX group. (Image credit: Sankalp)

Historically, when we hear the word “capitalism” we think: markets, businesses, goods and services. But more recently images of Occupy Wall Street, broken global financial markets, inequality and ‘Too Big to Fail’ banks spring to mind. Clearly, there has been a shift in our thinking. From a description of an economic system, capitalism, to many, now represents the big bad markets.

At the Sankalp Summit 2012 last week in Mumbai, the opening plenary, “Reimaging Capitalism” set the tone for the following two days. The panel talked about the need to ‘reimagine’ capitalism, pushing us to conjure up creative definitions of how markets function and what they can do. What would it take to imagine markets being used as more than just a money-making tool?

Listening to the panel, the word that immediately popped into my head was externalities. Economics teaches us that when a good is produced, there is a cost or benefit to society, which is often forgotten by us consumers in day-to-day life.

One of the panelists, Vijay Mahajan, chairman and founder of theBASIX group pointed at the bottle of water on the table next to him, when you look at price we only look at the Maximum Retail Price (MRP). Mahajan suggested that the cost of a product to a buyer is not only the price that they pay for it, but its actual cost includes factors that we often forget to acknowledge; the non-recyclable nature of the plastic, the impact on the environment when the bottle was produced and the water was sourced, the thirst that the water quenched. In other words, the negative and positive externalities.

Social enterprises in that sense have started to assign value to these externalities – it is something that we, at Acumen Fund are starting to try and tackle, along with a group of other organizations in the sector that look at impact investing rating standards. When we make an investment, we assign value to how many lives the company positively impacts, not only how many units are sold. It’s a complicated conversation though. When Acumen Fund investee LifeSpring helps a mother safely deliver a baby girl – it is not only the cost of delivering the baby, but the positive externalities that LifeSpring is having.  For example, how do you measure the impact of the young girl, who 30 years later may positively benefit society by, for example, starting up a school in her locality? This is something that would not have existed had she not been delivered safely in the first place, which makes the accounting difficult.

(The opening plenary at Sankalp. Image credit: Sankalp)

But it’s not just accounting for externalities. During the plenary, another panellist Pravesh Sharma, managing director of Small Farmers Agribusiness Consortium (SFAC), outlined panchsheel (a hindi word meaning five-principles). He suggested that by adopting these five principles of good business, we could successfully re-imagine capitalism. Companies and growing economies, have to be inclusive and open, fuelled by innovation and enterprise, be environmentally and ecologically sustainable, be built on a truly global model that can replicate itself across the world, and exist to provide a voice of choice to even the most marginalised individuals.

Enterprises choosing to target markets that are underserved, or where the market has traditionally “failed,” face a significant series of challenges, only one of which has been outlined above around accounting for externalities. This makes discourse on how markets can do good all the more necessary. The only way to truly innovate, and not regurgitate old ideas is to keep the dialogue open. It’s encouraging to see forums like Sankalp providing a platform to push the conversation further, and allow experts and others to debate how we need to re-imagine capitalism, to truly ignite change.

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Keya Madhvani is a Business Associate in Acumen Fund’s India office.

From left to right: Acumen Fund Community in Mumbai, the Orb Solectric Plug & Play, Damian and Jan in conversation

On Monday April 9^th, Acumen Fund in India hosted an event to talk about energy access at the BoP. The event was structured as a conversation between Damian Miller, Founder & CEO of Orb Energy and Jan Piercy, Executive Vice President of SBI, ShoreBank International, and a long time Acumen Fund Global Advisor.

In India, almost 290 million people lack access to electricity, according to the 2011 survey by the International Energy Agency. While people in the developed world have access to light with the simple flip of a switch, people in rural India and other parts of the developing world struggle at the base of the energy access ladder. Improving energy access for the bottom of the pyramid is a steep challenge – as the poor ascend this ladder, they move from using traditional fuels like wood and kerosene towards universal access –what most of the developed world takes for granted.

The Energy Access Ladder

This mobility up the ladder isn’t just a question of improving the quality of light – the repercussions are far greater than that. At the bottom of the ladder, kerosene and wood are not only ineffective and expensive (in terms of money, time and effort), but are also hazardous to health. Productivity lost and money spent on health treatment means lower incomes, trapping families at the bottom of the pyramid. Our goal at Acumen Fund is to help move individuals up this ladder, and achieve universal access by investing in innovative entrepreneurs who aim to solve this very problem.

Plug and Play Flyer

In 2011, Acumen Fund made an investment of $1.14M in Orb Energy to provide affordable solar energy systems for low-income households in India. With our investment, Orb is one step closer to making solar energy more affordable to these households with the launch of their newest product. The Solectric Plug and Play is a 5 watt solar panel with a Lithium battery, 2 LED lamps, a mobile charging point and a provision for grid charging – meaning it can be charged through the conventional power grid during intermittent times of electricity flow. The product is available at a retail price of Rs. 5,990, and Orb has successfully sold over 1,000 units in the one month since its launch.

When Acumen invested in Orb Energy, our hypothesis was that as BoP consumers move up the ladder to household energy solutions, they get more choice and flexibility as the economics of the business allows for customer service which is absent in most consumer durable sales to the BoP. Orb’s large portfolio of offerings, both Solar PV and Solar water heating, ranging from basic household systems to large commercial installations, provides the platform to support a retail network of over a 100 branches and a 600 strong field force.

Across brands, sectors and income segments, the most successful companies are those that provide customer service. In addition to the affordable price-point and sleek design of its products, what really differentiates Orb from its competitors is the service. On Acumen’s first diligence visit to Orb, it was apparent how important this concept is to the company. The Sales Engineer not only explained the entire process of installation, but noticing that the customer was nodding too readily, paused and started quizzing him to make sure he actually understood! No matter how innovative, affordable or attractive – most technologies fail to be adopted if consumers do not understand how to best make use of the product. The best way to increase adoption rates and fight competition is a happy customer.

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Karthik Chandrasekar is an Energy Portfolio Manager in Acumen Fund’s India office.

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Keya Madhvani is a Business Associate in Acumen Fund’s India office. Follow her on Twitter @keyamadhvani

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I sat in a conference room in New York with Brian Trelstad.  We were joined by Dana Boggess, a program officer from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which is a longtime Acumen Fund partner.  The conversation flowed naturally; as he is wont to do, Brian sketched concepts on the whiteboard.  At some point, we wondered aloud: how many of Acumen’s 60-plus investee companies have been supported by a grant at some point?

The answer, as it turned out, is nearly all of them – and our firms are no different than many of our peers’.  So began our year-long investigation into the role of philanthropy in impact investing.

We started with a simple premise: that the goal of impact investing is to back high-impact enterprises as they grow towards scale and financial sustainability.  This is not the first time we’ve looked hard at what it takes to build towards this goal, but beyond consciously choosing your path among mission, margin or mandate, we sought to understand how grants, patient capital, impact investment and commercial capital work together to fund these companies.

Today, we are thrilled to release From Blueprint to Scale: The Case for Philanthropy in Impact Investing, a new study by Monitor Group, in collaboration with Acumen, on the role of philanthropy in impact investing.  From Blueprint to Scale is based on Monitor’s deep expertise, 60+ expert interviews and 10+ years of Acumen Fund data; it shows how grants are needed to bridge the gap when developing new business models that serve low income customers.

I co-authored the report with Harvey Koh and Ashish Karamchandani, both partners at Monitor Group with deep experience researching and working in this area.  Harvey is an experienced venture philanthropy fund manager, while Ashish has led Monitor Inclusive Markets since its inception.  They have been ideal partners, bringing analytical rigor and intellectual curiosity in equal measures to what we initially thought would be a three month study.  It turned out to be close to twelve, and it has been a tremendous pleasure to dig into this topic with them during the last year.

Our analysis and research paints a clear picture: impact capital alone will not unlock the potential of impact investing for the global poor. Because of the extreme challenges facing those who are pioneering new models for inclusive business, truly realizing the impact in impact investing will require more, not less, philanthropy, and will need that philanthropic support to be delivered in new ways.

While affirming the tremendous potential for inclusive business and impact investing to help address the problems of global poverty, this report:

• Explains how impact investing is constrained by the tough realities of inclusive business, and introduces the phenomenon of the ‘pioneer gap’;
• Describes the emerging practice of ‘enterprise philanthropy’, and how it is the key to establishing the inclusive business models into which capital can then be deployed;
• Analyzes a number of company case studies from the Acumen Fund portfolio to understand both successes and setbacks;
• Sets out key recommendations for philanthropic funders and for impact investors;
• Provides some practical ideas for what and how to fund, in the Enterprise Philanthropy Playbook

The report was launched today at the Global Philanthropy Forum’s annual conference; the conference will shortly post video of Acumen CEO Jacqueline Novogratz’s plenary address about the new research.  In the meantime, please visit the Monitor Inclusive Markets web site to download and read the Executive Summary and full report.

Impact investing has come a long way in ten years, and there is no doubt that it has arrived as a concept and as an asset class.  However, to build social enterprises that will scale – and support themselves financially – we need philanthropy and impact investment in equal measures.

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As Acumen Fund’s Knowledge Manager, Robert Katz leads our efforts to understand where markets work –and where they don’t – in terms of solving the problems of poverty. In practice, Rob is responsible for applied research and writing efforts across the firm; he also oversees Acumen Fund’s knowledge management systems. Rob joined Acumen Fund in March 2008, managing online communications as well as knowledge before shifting full time into applied research work. Follow him on Twitter @robertkatz.

Nuru Project sells photographs to benefit highly effective non-profits. Acumen Fund has collaborated with Nuru Project previously to present the DIGNITY series,  one-night photo auctions and sales organized by +acumen chapters  featuring prints portraying the idea of dignity from the regions where Acumen Fund invests. You can purchase Nuru Project photographs to support Acumen Fund here. This post originally appeared on Nuru Project’s blog on April 11.

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“I’m roaming in Kabul’s old city amongst the cool shadows of the early morning. In a  tiny backstreet I pass a woman carrying a sack of rice, some cooking oil, and a balloon. She is not wearing a burqa. She sees my camera and whispers to me in Dari “take my picture”. An Afghan woman has never asked me to take her photograph before. I imagine it is forbidden, Haram, but she looks happy and our surroundings are quiet, so I take a picture. I wander some more and spot the child who sold the woman her balloon. He is walking on a parallel street carrying a big bunch of them. I move quickly and catch the balloons in the sunlight before he disappears onto a busy street.”

– photographer Ross McDonnell

Throughout time, balloons have served as a symbol of hope, wonder, and possibility. In the children’s classic, The Red Balloon, a French film from the 50s by Albert Lamorisse, a little boy named Pascal is on his way to school when he encounters a red balloon with a life of its own that decides to befriend him. The balloon follows Pascal around the streets of Paris — on the bus, to school, and to church. Soon, interest and jealousy arise, and a gang of boys sets out to destroy Pascal’s balloon. For those who haven’t seen it, I won’t spoil the ending, but it’s a brilliant tale that reminds us that while our ideas may be fragile and vulnerable, our imagination and dreams are the most powerful things we possess.

I’m struck by Ross’ story of the woman, armed with balloon, asking to have her picture taken. I wonder if, somehow, the balloon gave her courage to do something out of the ordinary, if it gave her a sense of innocence to absolve her of any wrongdoing. I’m struck that while returning from the market with cooking oil and rice in hand, she stopped and spent money on a balloon.

But, why am I surprised? Because my mind harbors notions of what women who live on backstreets in places like Kabul must be like — how they must think, how they must act, how they must make decisions. But no matter where we’re born or how we’re brought up, we all grow up learning to associate balloons with occasions for celebration and the promise of a good day. And what logical explanation does one need to give for desiring joy, happiness, or hope? If there is one thing that unites us, perhaps it is this.

When I see Ross’ print, I think of Pascal from The Red Balloon. I think of Carl Frederickson’s flying balloon-powered home in Pixar’s Up. I think of Professor Sherman’s adventure on Krakatoa in William Pene du Bois’ The Twenty-One Balloons. I think of Banksy’s iconic Balloon Girl. I think of all the balloons at every birthday party I ever had or attended under the age of 11. All the startling pops — intended or unintended, all the static clings, all the frightening clowns and their amazing animal balloons, all the times I went blue in the face inflating balloons with my measly breath, and all the helium intakes that would produce hours of hysterical high-pitched laughter. They were all good times (minus the clowns). Every memory, magical. And for me, that’s what this photo represents. Magic. The magic of joy, the magic of hope, the magic of imagination, the magic of dreams. But above all, the simple belief in magic.

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James Wu manages branding and online communications at Acumen Fund. You can find him on Twitter at @bunkywu or on Tumblr at dumplingboy.

A family served in Ghana served by Medeem Ltd, a company securing land-rights at the BoP

I often call affordable housing the forgotten stepchild of the social enterprise sector, but this dynamic may be changing.  With the launch of their new e-Book, The Big Idea: Global Spread of Affordable Housing, NextBillion and Ashoka are fostering an important dialogue about the need for increased access to affordable homes and best practices emerging in the sector.

Our contribution to the book, “Impact Investing in Affordable Housing,” serves as a call to action for social entrepreneurs and impact investors. It reminds us of why we often ignore housing—in sum, housing rarely fits neatly into the social enterprise box, it is slow, it is not sexy, and it hardly ever succeeds without some form of subsidy. Yet, it also reminds us that if we do ignore housing, we are mistaking the forest for the trees. When we look closely, we see that housing is tied to all the other issues we work to address – healthcare, energy, education, water and sanitation – and the impact of providing a quality affordable home is undeniable. However, in order to achieve the impact we seek, affordable housing needs more patient capital and committed entrepreneurs to take the plunge.

Yet “taking the plunge” is not easy, and housing is one of the most complex and challenging sectors. The e-book sheds light on many of these challenges and points to inspiring and creative strategies to tackle them. In addition to Acumen Fund’s contribution, the e-book includes pieces from Ashoka, Citi Foundation, Dow Corning, Habitat for Humanity, Hystra, micro Home Solutions, and Tara Nova. It contains a diversity of valuable perspectives, and is well worth a read.

Aden Van Noppen is a Housing Portfolio Consultant at Acumen Fund’s East Africa Office and a guest writer for Nextbillion.net. Aden holds a B.A. in International Development from Brown University.

March 17  –  April 11, 2012

Seen & Heard is a collection of recent headlines in the news about our world, our work, and the spaces and places in between. In each post, we also share a list of job openings at Acumen Fund and in our sector. Seen & Heard appears twice a month on the blog. For those of you who like keeping a pulse on the latest news as it’s happening, please consider following us on  Twitter and Facebook! Finally, if you have ideas for how we can improve Seen & Heard, please don’t be shy and leave a comment below to let us know. Thanks for reading!
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Headlines

• Acumen Fund celebrated its 11th anniversary on April 1 – thank you to all of our generous supporters!
• The Skoll World Forum took place from March 28 – 30 on the theme of “Flux” in the social enterprise sector

Articles of the Week

AF and AF Family in the News

• What it means to really stand for the poor – Jacqueline Novogratz writes about Katherine Boo’s “Behind the Beautiful Forevers” in the Huffington Post
• Husk Power Systems is featured as a successful early social enterprise in India

• World Water Day 2012: Pharmagen Healthcare Limited makes a dream of clean water in Lahore a reality

Impact Investing in the News

• CEO Nick O’Donohoe announces the launch of Big Society Capital, the UK’s dedicated social investment fund
• Dr. Judith Rodin reflects on the Rockefeller Foundation’s role in the history of impact investing
• Cisco invests in Aavishkar, a venture fund to drive rural entrepreneurship in India
• Vox Capital’s Daniel Izzo is featured in Forbes
• A new social enterprise accelerator in Argentina looks to ’swarm’ impact
• Lok Capital joins a $5M investment in IFMR Rural Channels in India

Other Relevant Articles:

• Ashoka and Nextbillion.net release an e-book from their affordable housing series
• Lessons from 10 years of the Global Social Benefit Incubator
• Why social innovation needs design thinking
• Food for 9 Billion: Brazil delivers on ‘no hunger’ promise
• In Chile’s slums, a lesson on how  to make mobile apps for good
• The East African ride to middle-income
• The NYTimes features Naandi Community Water Systems on ‘Fixes’
• USAID’s Development Credit Authority uses development dollars to substitute for missing private capital
• Alliance Magazine interviews Kurt Hoffman, CEO of the Shell Foundation
• McKinsey & Company and Nextbillion.net highlight the story behind the low-cost incubator, Embrace
• Residents of Dharavi address a housing crunch one floor at a time
• The lower-spending Nigerian middle-class switch brands to save

More on Kony 2012

• Teju Cole in the Atlantic on the White Savior Industrial Complex
• In Uganda, Joseph Kony is not the only problem

Measuring Social Impact

• Can better data end global poverty? Esther Duflo contributes to The Atlantic
• The IADB evaluates the results of One Laptop per Child in Peru
• Lunch with Esther Duflo
• Poor people do not live on eggs and bananas – Abhijit Banerjee on development misconceptions
• Is M-PESA increasing banking for the poor?
• The Center for Global Development examines the costs of the Millennium Villages Project
• Has India’s economic growth truly decreased poverty? Dowser.org sees how the numbers stack up

Jobs

Jobs at Acumen Fund

• India Legal Counsel
• India Administrative Assistant
• Pakistan Director
• Pakistan Portfolio Associate
• Pakistan Portfolio Associate – Lahore
• Pakistan Business Development Manager
• Pakistan Fellows Program Manager
• West Africa Business Associate

Other Jobs – Do you know people on the job market? Tell them about these other opportunities:

• Brazil Program Director – Global Citizen Year, Salvador, Brazil
• India Program Director – Global Citizen Year, India
• Fellow – Lok Capital, Gurgaon
• Junior Business Wizard – Sustainable Health Enterprises
• Program Manager – The Unreasonable Institute, Boulder
• Managing Director – The Rockefeller Foundation, New York

For more job postings, check out NextBillion’s Career Center, ANDE’s Jobs in the Network, GIIN’s Job Board, SocialEdge Job Listings, and this great list of Fellowships

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As a Business Development Analyst, Rohit supports Acumen Fund’s fundraising efforts, and manages Acumen Fund’s blog and social media presence. Follow him on Twitter @RohitG6

The agriculture sector in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia is expanding as population continues to grow and demand for food increases in-step.  In Sub-Saharan Africa, relatively large tracts of arable land are attracting investors seeking to establish large-scale mechanized primary agriculture production while smallholders’ productivity remains relatively low.  In many cases, smallholder farmers are under increasing land pressure as they subdivide small properties among their family.  But as these plots are subdivided, many young would-be farmers find agriculture to be a decreasingly compelling value proposition and look to urban communities for other opportunities.

Against this backdrop, there is real innovation that is accelerating smallholder farmers’ ability to close the production gap and improve their ability to achieve real market returns for that which they produce.  Acumen is committed to making investments that improve smallholders’ productivity and their access to markets which, we believe in turn, will help to address issues of local food security for farmers and their families, and issues of national food security that affect these rapidly growing geographies.

Acumen’s work in the agriculture sector is led by deep on-the-ground experience in West Africa, East Africa, Pakistan and India.  Working together, this sector team began to first focus on the issue of agricultural inputs.  Our first investments in the agriculture sector—Jassar Farms and Western Seed—reflected this focus.  Maize farmers in Kenya are five times less productive than their fellow farmers in Iowa, and dairy farmers in Pakistan produce over six times less milk than their counterparts in the US.  Lack of access to inputs is one key driver behind this, and Western Seed, Jassar Farms and others are working to innovate on product development and distribution to help bridge the productivity gap.

A farmer in Ghana sorts through his crop

As we built out our work in agricultural inputs, we came to understand that farmers do not necessarily adopt productivity improving inputs just because appropriate technology exists and is available.  Farmers are often reluctant to make an investment in a new technology due to a skepticism that fair markets will purchase the agricultural goods that they produce.  Many farmers sell to middlemen, and for years unscrupulous brokers have taken advantage of farmers—sometimes offering  a price to farmers at their farm-gate that is three times lower than that being offered at the market center.  These middlemen use the advantage of transportation and market pricing knowledge to put farmers in a price-taking situation.  Farmers are in need of the cash, and they understand the risk of leaving crops and produce on the farm, so dominant logic often forces them to sell. Reflecting on this, our agriculture team began to explore how investments in innovative and responsible agricultural processors could help change the way markets work in rural communities.  With investments in Gulu Agricultural Development Company in Uganda and GADCO in Ghana, we are seeing the potential to dramatically change the lives of thousands of smallholder farmers.

In addition to agricultural inputs and agricultural markets, there are important cross-cutting business models that help to stitch together an effective agricultural value chain.  Chief among these are access to finance and access to information.  Acumen has also explored business models that provide farmers with the information to chose the right agricultural strategy, the financing to purchase inputs and agricultural assets, so that they can close the productivity gap and access responsible markets for their produce.  Acumen has made investments in Juhudi Kilimo (Kenya) and NRSP (Pakistan) that are helping to change the way that farmers access capital and assets, and we are seeking to explore investments in the agricultural extension space as well.

Moving forward, Acumen will continue to seek investment opportunities in the agricultural inputs, agricultural processing, and livestock value chains, as well as other cross-cutting technologies such as financial services at agriculturally oriented IT business models.  Agriculture has been one of Acumen’s fastest growing portfolios in recent years, and we are excited to continue this growth in the years to come.

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Amon Anderson is a Portfolio Manager for Acumen Fund’s Agriculture Portfolio.

Hans Rosling at the Skoll World Forum

The 2012 Forum, held last week in Oxford, was no exception. Social entrepreneurship’s move into the mainstream, and the quality of the fringe Oxford Jam event running in parallel, has challenged the curators to stretch the conversation far beyond the ‘what is social enterprise’ starting point that, until even quite recently, dominated the opening of so many social enterprise conferences.

The Forum’s theme of flux accurately reflected the challenges and opportunities that we face today. The plenaries and breakouts addressed broad issues, including ‘Beyond GDP’ and ‘faith and social enterprise’, and specific topics such as education and renewable energy. The Forum’s attendees also reflected this broad range, with representation from large government agencies, investors, academics, philanthropists, foundations and social entrepreneurs operating around the world.

Hans Rosling’s opening talk (from 23:00) on population ‘fill-up’ and leveling-off set the tone, educating and enthralling.  Rockefeller Foundation’s Dr. Judith Rodin, who delivered Acumen Fund’s 2011 Investor Gathering keynote address, chaired the opening panelists and social entrepreneurs discussion (from 47:00), relaying their success in addressing some of the world’s major challenges.

In addition to ‘social enterprise’, a newer term commonly heard at the Forum was, of course, ‘impact investing.’ Several speakers and sessions focused on this, including the excellent pre-Conference discussion led by Cathy Clark from CASE at DUKE on The Impact Investor: A Dialogue on Essential Best Practices for a Maturing Field, examining multiple topics relevant to General Partners and Limited Partners engaged in the field.

Yet throughout this and several other plenaries at the Forum, a phrase that I heard from another conference, TED 2012, recurred to me. Bryan Stevenson spoke about keeping our ‘eyes on the prize’ in the context of injustice – and I believe this is also a challenge we face as a rapidly growing ‘impact investing’ sector.

In particular, it feels like there may be a risk of confusing the means and ends of impact investing. Understanding the type of impact that we set out to achieve should act as the starting point.  Each impact investor has an opportunity to more explicitly articulate the social impact they hope to achieve and resultant level of expected financial return. Otherwise, we run the risk of ‘investing’ moving from being the means towards tackling poverty, to ‘investing’ becoming the ends unto itself.  Without having this conversation, we risk confusion.

As our sector grows, these are issues that we will have to address. Following on from the fantastic Skoll Awards ceremony, a regular guest of the Forum, Annie Lennox (below), dazzled the audience with a performance and encore that will live long in the memory. As she ad-libbed lyrics to “Sweet Dreams” (Are Made of This), weaving in thoughts on social enterprise, it acted as a proverbial reminder to keep our eyes on the prize, and to remember what are the means and what are the ends in what we do.

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Vinay Nair is a Business Development Manager in Acumen Fund’s London office. Follow him on Twitter @vinaynair

It is easy, from a safe distance, to overlook the fact that in under-cities governed by corruption, where exhausted people vie on scant terrain for very little, it is blisteringly hard to be good.  The astonishment is that some people are good, and that many people try to be…

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Thus ends Katherine Boo’s extraordinary book Behind the Beautiful Forevers, an account of the lives of people living in the sprawling Annawadi slum outside Mumbai’s bustling airport, in the shadows of the city’s sparkling luxury hotels.  If you care about poverty and what it means to be human, then put this at the top of your to-do list.

At Acumen, moral imagination is central to all we do.  Indeed, we believe the practice of putting one’s self in another’s shoes is one of the most critical characteristics of the kind of moral leadership needed in our interconnected world.  Yet it is too rarely taught or even considered in our schools, our companies, our governments. Katherine Boo, with great humility, determination, patience – and what other word for it is there but love? – does what so few are able to do when considering poor people.  She writes from a place of clear-eyed acceptance, showing not a trace of romanticism, pity, disdain or any of the other lenses through which we keep low-income people at a distance. Through the stories of real people, we gain a privileged view of the complex realities of people living in slums struggling mightily to survive, often against all odds.

The words of Boo and the inhabitants of Annawadi rushed through me like a river, cracking open thoughts of how hard this work is, my anger at those who demand simple solutions and expect easy returns; yet, at the same time, pushing me more urgently to find voice, to speak truth when it hurts.  For all of this, I am grateful to the author for her courage, persistence, and openness.

At Acumen, we stand with the poor.  Boo’s book helped reinforce my understanding that building companies alone is not enough to solve problems of poverty. Rather, we need to find and support entrepreneurs who are thinking about what it takes to build systems that can truly break the back of poverty.

Making markets work for and with the poor requires serious experimentation and risk-taking.  Management talent is hard to find and often must be developed.  Even when early innovations start to succeed, it is not uncommon to see growing businesses sabotaged for threatening the status quo. We’ve seen our companies targeted with smear campaigns, threats, extortion and even bombings of their physical infrastructure.  Dealing with all of this – and doing it legally – is costly, not just in financial terms but in the most human of terms.

For these reasons, we insist that our early stage debt and equity investments be backed with philanthropy, not with investment dollars.  We hold as sacred the ability to take risks based on whether we believe we can help build sustainable companies that benefit the poor, rather than focusing first on investors.  Once the companies make it through the breach, if you will, and prove the business model, we can help them look for the next level of capital.  Standing with the poor also requires training a corps of talented leaders who understand what it takes to build markets where none have existed. And it requires sharing what we’ve learned – both successes and failures.

Standing with the poor ultimately means deciding to do what is right, not just what is easy. Standing with the poor means walking away from unethical leaders, even when their companies are “succeeding.”  It means sometimes spending outsized resources to help turn around companies beleaguered by sabotage or extortion. It means pulling out of deals when co-investors are known to be unethical in their dealings.  And the list goes on.

If the emerging field of impact investing loses its way, it will be because investors insist on financial returns above all else.  Building healthy markets that serve the poor requires a more expansive set of measures: whether individuals have more choice and opportunity, whether they not only can earn income but have the chance to save and invest it, whether they have affordable, quality healthcare, energy, clean water, safe housing, and education.

We see time and again – and this, too comes up in Behind the Beautiful Forevers – that low-income people are willing to pay for the things they value. And in all of this, the world has unprecedented opportunity to build a more inclusive economy.  It simply won’t happen by virtue of traditional investment alone, even if lower-than-market returns are expected. Instead, it will require a mix of capital – including grants and patient capital – an infusion of talent, and the moral courage to take on rotten systems, first and foremost by showing that a different path is achievable.

Katherine Boo is right.  What is amazing about people living in the worst of the world’s slums is not that they can do bad things, but that they can hold onto dreams, live with integrity and give until they can give no more.  They deserve better than they’ve been given. And while the poor are not asking for hand-outs, it is up to all of us to build a world that at the very least gets rid of the seemingly insurmountable challenges in their way.

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Jacqueline Novogratz is the founder and CEO of Acumen Fund.

PVRI's new hospital building, decorated for its inauguration

What is PVRI, and what do they do?

PVRI, the Pushpagiri Vitreo Retina Institute, is an organization treating preventable eye disease in India. PVRI provides a broad range of eye care services – from out-patient procedures to surgeries and post operative care. Focused on one of the leading causes of blindness – diabetic retinopathy, or blindness caused by diabetes, they’ve also found that this one of the most easily preventable causes of blindness. This is in part due to a complete lack of awareness surrounding this issue in at-risk populations, and lack of access to specialized services.

Loss of eyesight has a tremendously negative economic and social impact on low-income families, especially for agricultural and factory workers, artisans, and those that depend on production of small scale goods.

Where do they work?

Andhra Pradesh, the Indian state of over 83 million people, has been home to PVRI’s first hospital based out of Hyderabad since 2007. Of all Indian states, Andhra Pradesh has the highest incidence rate of diabetes, and consequently diabetic retinopathy. Diabetic retinopathy can occur in people suffering from Type I and Type II diabetes, and overall prevalence in India is estimated to be around 14% of all diabetics. These rates in Andhra Pradesh are far higher – ranging around 23-25% of those with diabetes.

On March 5^th, 2012 PVRI opened and operationalized the first of two new hospitals supported by Acumen capital in Vizianagaram, Andhra Pradesh. The second hospital, in Kadappa, Andhra Pradesh, is targeted for a July 2012 opening.

What is their business model?

PVRI is the only eye care hospital in the state to be sanctioned by the AP government health insurance scheme – ArogyaSri. This means that any BPL (below poverty line – approximately $2/day) card holder can avail free care at PVRI facilities. Beyond the cost of care – transportation to and from the facility, accommodation, and food during the post operative period is also covered by the hospital. PVRI’s overall model functions as a cross subsidy – their high quality of care and use of state of the art equipment enable them to charge the standard private care charges to those who can afford it, while still providing affordable care and lower prices to those who cannot – either through the ArogyaSri scheme or independently. PVRI is also in the process of acquiring NABH accreditation – a high quality standard independently conferred by the Quality Council of India.

Where is the break-through innovation?

PVRI’s major innovation is the dual accomplishment of being able to provide access to affordable and quality medical care. In a sector where there is an overload of new, unproven medical technology, PVRI stands apart with its sound business model.

Through a combination of regional camps, one flagship urban hospital and two new hospitals funded by Acumen Fund’s capital in rural areas of the state – PVRI will cover approximately 50% of the state’s population. These screening and treatment camps help spread awareness, facilitate access, and provide a much needed treatment for what can only be described as a growing epidemic.

Decorations adorn the wings of one of PVRI's new hospitals

The two new hospitals are located in tribal regions of the state – areas that are traditional neglected by conventional private care due to often volatile political conditions and lower income populations who often cannot afford traditional models of care. However, these are the areas with the highest incidence rates due to long term neglect – either due to distance from the treatment centres, inability to pay or even unawareness of the root cause. PVRI preservers to address all three of these factors.

The monthly one-day camps that take place in a radius around all of these operational or soon to be operational hospitals play an important part in education and awareness. PVRI also builds local capacity by hiring and training staff from these regions, though this process is often a lot harder than procuring urban talent. To jump start this process, starting next year with 30 students the recently opened Vizianagaram hospital will offer diploma courses post SSC exams.

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As a Senior Associate on the Portfolio Team in the Acumen India office, Manasa focuses on the health sector. Her responsibilities include working with and providing management support to existing health portfolio investments, as well as identifying and conducting diligence on new areas of investment opportunity. She holds a Bachelor’s of Science degree with a double major in Finance and International Business from New York University’s Stern School of Business.

“What is needed is a realization that power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice, and justice at its best is power correcting everything that stands against love.”

“When our days become dreary with low-hovering clouds of despair, and when our nights become darker than a thousand midnights, let us remember that there is a creative force in this universe, working to pull down the gigantic mountains of evil, a power that is able to make a way out of no way and transform dark yesterdays into bright tomorrows. Let us realize the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice.”

— Excerpts from “Where Do We Go From Here?” Martin Luther King Jr., 1967

Listen to excerpts from “Where Do We Go From Here?” below.

Martin Luther King – Where Do We Go From Here? (Conclusion) from MLK Speeches on Vimeo.

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ON THE HEELS OF A DECISION BY THE ROCKEFELLER FOUNDATION’S BOARD OF TRUSTEES TO EXTEND THIS INITIATIVE, DR. JUDITH RODIN DISCUSSES THE FOUNDATION’S UPCOMING WORK IN IMPACT INVESTING.

GIIN: What is the Rockefeller Foundation’s mission?

Judith Rodin: Our mission, given to us by our founder in 1913, is to improve the well-being of humanity. It is one that we have continued to reinterpret throughout our 100 year history — we try to understand what that means in the context of our environment. Today, it means trying to build more equitable growth and greater resilience to this century’s challenges, such as the impact of climate change or financial shocks. We think that adhering to this vision focuses us on work that helps more people achieve the benefits of globalization while mitigating some of its risks.

GIIN: What factors led the foundation, with its lengthy philanthropic history, to become interested in impact investing?

JR: We held several global meetings in 2005 and 2006 to try to understand the new forces that were shaping the world. Because the foundation has a history of building fields, including the field of public health, we wanted to determine how we could draw from our history and the work that our predecessors did to respond to their contemporaneous global challenges in ways that would be equally innovative and transformational. As we looked at a vast array of significant global problems, it became clear that there weren’t enough development and philanthropic dollars to solve all of them.

We identified the unleashing of private capital as the next transformational accelerator for social change. We feel particularly proud that in the past we’ve been the interface between innovation and making the investment that it takes to build fields, and impact investing has been a great extension of this tradition into the modern period. Innovating field-building in impact investing was an area that was in our organizational DNA.

GIIN: How would you characterize the role the Rockefeller Foundation has taken in the impact investing industry?

JR: From the start, we realized we ought to do a broad scan of private capital investing to see what, if any, social and environmental outcomes they were producing, how much capital they were investing, and what problems were hindering the flow of capital. We commissioned, along with a few others, the 2009 Monitor Institute report Investing for Social and Environmental Impact that then led to our formal impact investing initiative.

The Monitor report showed that the markets were fragmented, that there were no widely-accepted impact metrics, few platforms for intermediation, and that nobody had taken a hard look at what policy frameworks – whether global, national, or local – would enable this field to gain traction more quickly. In identifying those challenges, we felt that we could play, with others, a catalytic role in addressing some of these issues. We set out to help develop a platform that would share data, bring new ideas to the field, and aggregate investors — if not to invest together, at least to share knowledge and best practices. Those ideas led to the creation of the GIIN and other industry infrastructure and tools.

GIIN: The Rockefeller Foundation’s impact investing initiative supports both field-building grants and program-related investments (PRIs). Could you give us an example of a Rockefeller Foundation impact investment grant recipient and a PRI investee? Tell us how each has helped to advance your goals for this growing industry.

JR: We’ve made PRIs into Root Capital, IGNIA, and Acumen Fund. We’re trying to invest in funds whose social objectives align with our issue area. We’re also investing some PRI money in green energy funds, to forward our climate-related and environmental work.

In terms of the grantees, our largest impact investing grantee is the GIIN, because we felt that this institution needed to get off the ground quickly and do all the work that it is currently doing. Forbes recently listed 30 great social entrepreneurs — nine are Rockefeller grantees, and eight of those nine are specifically impact investing grantees. We think that we’ve been able to support “brains and innovation” in this field, as one of my predecessors used to say. We’re looking for good grantees that are making an impact, creative and innovative, and taking appropriate risks.

GIIN: Looking ahead, what is the next phase and focus of the Foundation’s impact investing and grant-making work?

JR: This initiative has been so important to us because philanthropy is needed at early stages to take more risks and do what other sectors don’t want to do or aren’t able to do, because they work to a different timeline or bottom line. We think impact investing has benefited from Rockefeller and other philanthropies that believe field-building in this industry is critical to unleashing private capital. We are now examining trends and looking at new issue areas because we’re committed to both deepening policy work and continuing to support market-building platforms as they mature so they’re sustainable.

We’re evolving from the current impact investing initiative to these next phases of work. We’re going to focus more intentionally on the demand side of capital in our next stage of work. We made a conscious decision in this first phase of the initiative to focus on the supply side and intermediation of capital, excepting our funding of the Aspen Network of Development Entrepreneurs and some of the social entrepreneurial funds that received PRIs. One clear trend is that there aren’t enough demand side entities able to utilize an accelerating source of capital supply. We will work with social entrepreneurs, small to medium enterprises (SMEs), and large corporations that are employing new ways of working. For example, some companies are implementing hybrid value chains, where the end of their value chain is intentionally collaborating with an SME or a non-governmental organization to accelerate a social outcome. We want to catalyze innovative financing more broadly.

The current investor base is fantastic and we need to keep them being effective. In our next phase of work we’re also going to try to accelerate funds and investors in the developing world, and we’re likely to announce work that goes intentionally into the developing, rather than the developed, world. In addition, unless more big institutional investors enter the market, we don’t think the field will get sufficient traction. To bring in institutional investor capital to the market, we’ll use our evidence base, influence, and the influence of others who are developing evidence bases about the industry. However, it’s not going to happen without policy work, so the next phase of what we do will also focus on policy.

Read the rest of the interview, on Dr. Rodin’s thoughts about the long-term success of impact investing, here.

To celebrate yesterday’s World Water Day, watch Yasmina Zaidman, Director of Communications at Acumen Fund, present on what we have learned from our Water Portfolio, and how it has informed expansion and growth.

Photo Credit: G.M.B. Akash. Akash is the winner of the WIN Photo competition in 2011. His winning photo (above) was exhibited in Stockholm during the World Water Week 2011, which Akash was invited to attend. He writes about this photo:

“In this particular photograph, I tried to portray the true picture of the scarcity of potable water in slums. In slums, people have to stand in queues from early morning hours to get the daily supply of free drinking water from the government water tankers. As they have no idea exactly when the government tanker will come, they line up their water jars & sit beside them for hours waiting for the water tankers. Even after passing the long queue, the water that they receive is not of purest quality. Rather this impure water causes sickness. Still the poor people feel that they are fortunate not to have to leave with empty pots. This is the plight of the slum dwellers in the Bangladesh capital city of Dhaka.In my winning photo of WIN competition, I wanted to convey the ultimate state of heart wrenching vulnerability and helplessness of the poor little child, who is fighting along with a pigeon for few drops of water.”

Source: http://www.waterintegritynetwork.net/south-asia-blog/using-photography-to-highlight-water-issues-in-bangladesh

A camp in Delhi home to about 4,000 migrant workers with no clean water supply. Workers are dependent on water tankers, and every day, they have to wait for the tanker and scramble for water. They are only part of the 1.1 billion people in the world without access to improved water supply.

Photo Credit: Sia Kambou/AFP/Getty Images. A woman draws water from a well in Gonate, in Ivory Coast. “Since 1990 over 2 billion more people in the world have received access to drinking water. And this progress has not been driven by just big middle-income countries – smaller, less well-endowed countries have also shown the way. The majority of people without access to drinking water – 479 million – live in countries that are not among the poorest. The country with the largest number of people without access to improved water – 119 million – is China, the world’s second largest economy.” Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/global-development/poverty-matters/2012/mar/06/mdg-drinking-water-target-met

A river in the Qayyumabad District near Karachi suffers from extreme pollution.

On the banks of the Yamuna River in Delhi, men and children are bathing and washing their clothes. A recent government audit found that the level of fecal coliform in the Yamuna was 100,000 times the safe limit for bathing.

Progress on sanitation delivery currently lags well behind other Millennium Development Goals. As such, private sanitation providers, from retailers to masons, from public toilet operators to latrine emptying business, are of vital importance to BoP communities. In developed countries sanitation is the role of the water utility.In developing countries however, the sanitation market is dominated by small private providers, usually very local in nature and often benefiting from little outside support.

The entrepreneurs featured in this video are:

Dr. Sono Khangarani, MicroDrip:

Asadullah Khan, MicroDrip

Tasneem Siddiqui, Saiban

Sweta Mangal, Ziqitza Healthcare

Sam Goldman, D.light design

Dr. Amos Kibata, UHEAL

Gyanesh Pandey, Husk Power Systems