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Susan Sanderman of Denver just forwarded this fascinating World Clock that shows the current status of major global health, environmental and social statistics, updated in real time.  It’s like an impact dashboard for the Planet!
This kind of ‘impact context’ should be a touchstone for any impact analysis– if focused down to the region where a company or organization does its work,  it makes a great starting point for what the “addressable market” is in terms of any of these social or environmental issues.  Working to prevent biodiversity loss?  Malaria?  Drowning?  Use your impact analysis to say not just, we’re preventing X instances, but also, “Here’s how much our solution will slow it from the current rate of loss.”  That makes it MUCH more meaningful.
World Clock’s makers compiled it from highly credible sources of statistical datasets, but they have not verified any of it and it may be spotty in parts, so it would be worth verifying if you use it.

Michael Edesess, Boardmember of International Development Enterprises (IDE), reports that “The Economist magazine has a highly favorable review this week of my friend and colleague Paul Polak’s book ‘Out of Poverty.’…The book describes the methods that Paul and International Development Enterprises (IDE), the organization he founded, use to help the poorest people in the developing world earn more income.” I’m delighted to see it’s for sale on Amazon, rather than only found on a foundation’s site!
IDE received a $13M grant about a year ago from the Gates Foundation to scale its work, which has allowed Paul, now 74, the time to write. It’s excellent to see a person with so much to teach have the time and opportunity to write up and disseminate his knowledge! I wish so many other social entrepreneurs with great wisdom had the time and resources to document their work. If I were a philanthropist I’d invest in such a library of books– this amazing moment in the transformation of the capital markets should not be lost to history.

For example I’d love to see Martin Fisher of Kickstart, which has been pursuing similar goals with excellence, do a book with Paul where they share and perhaps debate what the both have learned over decades about the nuances and issues of delivering sustainable tools to solve poverty; or Pati Ruiz Corzo of Sierra Gorda and Albina Ruiz of Ciudad Saludable document and debate the differences between their approaches to engaging community members in economically and culturally sustainable protection and restoration of ecosystems. I’m talking about the nitty gritty- how does this stuff really work and what are the hard-won entrepreneurial lessons for people working in the trenches.
Fortunately John Elkington (SustainAbility) and Pamela Hartigan (Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship) have also just written The Power of Unreasonable People capturing some of these lessons learned, but although I have only yet read the book jacket I suspect they’ve gone light on the nitty gritty of their own trench stories, which I think would be fascinating and useful to know– but perhaps I better read it and find out!

Thank you to the almost 40 people who joined us at Salesforce.com’s headquarters for the discussion on poverty alleviation and voluntary markets with Sierra Gorda, the Ecosystem Marketplace, Salesforce and SVT.

It was a lively and insightful discussion, but one that we hope is just the beginning of the dialogue. We invite you to use this space to exchange ideas about the next generation of carbon offsets and ecosystem services, to communicate directly with SVT or to think creatively about any of the panelists and their work.

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Thanks again for your participation!

~The SVT Team

Putting a price on poverty and the planet: The new voluntary market for poverty alleviation and environmental services

Two emerging trends in the social capital marketplace are Social and Environmental Return on Investment (SROI) Analysis and the markets for Environmental Services, which build on carbon credit markets. Do these trends create tremendous opportunity, or hamstring progress?

The Sierra Gorda Biosphere Reserve is the world’s leading laboratory for both trends, and has been grappling with the driving question: how can we compensate the residents of watersheds, forests and jungles for the ecosystem services that they provide and protect? Sierra Gorda has transacted one of the first trades of carbon offsets plus ecosystem services at $15/ton: a premium of $5/ton over carbon alone. Their ambition is to add a super premium product of carbon + ecosystem services + verified poverty alleviation.

Join us for a lively discussion about how the emerging market for this value might harness market forces to improve life.

Requested fee: $10 in advance or $15 at the door

Panelists:

Martha “Pati” Ruiz Corzo, Director of the Sierra Gorda Biosphere Reserve
Ricardo Bayon, Director, Editor-in-Chief of the Ecosystem Marketplace
Samjhana Upadhyay of Ashoka: Innovators for the Public’s Global Fellowship
Sara Olsen, Founding Partner, SVT Group
Corporate executive to be confirmed

Location: The Landmark Building, Salesforce.com headquarters
1 Market Street, San Francisco, CA
This event is open to the public, but space is limited. If you are interested in attending, please contact us at info(at)svtgroup(dot)net or call us

The two nonstop sounds day and night are hammering and honking: people are building and moving fast in Hyderabad, one of the beacons of India’s massive development. I just returned from giving the first of a two-day social impact analysis workshop here with the entrepreneurs participating in the second cohort of the Social-Impact International program. This two-year old incubation program was started by 3 high net worth individuals from Silicon Valley (Charly Kleissner, Eric Archambeau and Peter Wheeler) with inspiration from the Global Social Benefit Incubator they have advised. SI targets enterprises in the Hyderabad region with “proven traction that have the potential to scale significantly and that would benefit from the mentoring, training, consulting, networking opportunities and access to financing” the program aims to provide. It’s free and they’re accepting referrals and applications for next year’s cycle now.

On Saturday was the Asia Semifinals of the Global Social Venture Competition at the Indian School of Business, known around town just as ISB. This school is fast becoming legendary, given that not only is its campus architecture the stuff of the seven wonders of the world, but despite being only 8 years old it has already seen in-person visits by world leaders including George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and is looking forward to a visit this May by Arnold Schwarzenegger with “an entourage of 100″ according to one of the ISB’s entrepreneurship faculty. Excellent choice of a partner for the GSVC! (Although I don’t understand why the new Korean GSVC affiliate chose to send their plans to the semis held at London Business School instead of ISB. Hopefully that will change.) One gets the sense upon talking to ISBers that no door here is not open to them, and as a result everything feels amazingly possible. I’ll report on the winners in another message shortly.
At 9PM on Saturday night after the competition had ended, I took a stroll past a new faculty building whose work crew was in full sway. Elsewhere on campus numerous service crews were busily painting, breaking down (the multitudinous and impressive) GSVC signage, and guarding. I thought what a great, great deal is possible in a place where there’s both so much money flowing, and so many talented people can be put together to work such long hours at such low cost. it seems the future for Indian social entrepreneurship is truly brilliant!

[This posting and related links are also on xigi.]

I just got back from the first national summit of the Initiative for Global Development, which was formed after 9/11 “to make the elimination of global poverty a [US] national priority.” The initiative showed truly phenomenal convening power (in order of appearance: Madeline Albright, Colin Powell, John Shalikashvili, George W. Bush, Jim Lehrer, Jim Wolfensohn, Mary Robinson, Ted Turner, Carly Fiorina and Jeffrey Sachs to name only a few) and while I came wondering whether the very high powered business and government people who were convened there would be aware of or would recognize the value of the social entrepreneurial and investing innovation going on out there in the xigi community, given its inherent unconventionality and their inherent conventionality, I left feeling tentatively optimistic. While many there probably do not see this as an emerging capital market yet, many of them definitely have their sleeves rolled up in pieces of it, and through IGD there is an opportunity for the larger group to begin to see the more systemic picture and the roles they can play in relation to it and each other. But, I also left still feeling concerned that there’s a lot of room for unintended negative consequences, since this group has a lot of horsepower, but the execution still lacks any systemic way of either assessing what good and bad is actually getting accomplished, or systematically incorporating the voices of the people the whole initiative intends to help.
What was affirmed from every speaker, not least of whom was Bush himself (at some length no less, and with evident passion), was the notion that it is both a business imperative, a national security priority and a moral necessity to “get on with it.”I thought Wolfensohn and Turner said it best. Wolfensohn painted the situation in big, eloquent brushstrokes which I won’t do justice to now but which went something like: in the next 40 years we’re moving from a world of 6 billion to 9 billion people, and one where Brazil, China and India replace the European countries among the G8, and the growth in the middle class is going to be in the 100s of millions if not billions but almost all of that will be in non-western regions. There’s both an opportunity for continued business growth of our economy here if these peoples’ wealth increases, and an opportunity to avoid the backlash now that they can see on the internet and cable what they have and don’t have relative to us. Not only this, but America has lost moral standing in the world– people don’t dislike us, but they think Americans are selfish. There is an opportunity, Wolfensohn said, to redefine what this country stands for– to restore the nation’s soul. We can think about what is good for business, and what’s good for our kids… and if we do nothing, our kids will have to deal with the consequences of that.
Or, as Turner put it: “let’s stop doing dumb things, and start doing smart things.”
Like I learned a long time ago from Shorebank’s founders (who weren’t at this meeting but who should be next time), the old-fashioned way of doing business used to be that you couldn’t do business in a place where people couldn’t afford to buy your products, or where your products harmed them, so you had to invest in creating the conditions for people that enabled them to do business with you. That kind of business seemed to get lost when the market grew to be international, but now that the world is shrinking again– fast– this gathering tried to remind us that the old-fashioned ethic is true once again.

Welcome to SVT Group’s official blog! We will communicate regularly here on a variety of topics. This blog is designed to allow SVT Group and its affiliates to express ideas, innovations, concerns, events or just about anything that comes to our minds. We invite you to check back often and comment on postings. If you have something you would like to post, please email us at blog(at)svtgroup(dot)net. On behalf of SVT Group, welcome to our interactive world.

Last weekend I was invited to Hyderabad, India, by the up-and-coming Indian School of Business to judge the Asia semi-finals of the Global Social Venture Competition. As the de facto (and hopefully one day full-fledged) fourth GSVC partner with London Business School, Columbia Business School and UC Berkeley Haas School of Business, ISB makes the competition truly global at last. We vetted teams from Thailand, Phillippines and several regions in India competed for the chance to attend the final round in New York in April. One last written screening in two weeks will pare the ten teams we selected down to three finalists.
This is my first-ever visit to India, though my seventh GSVC finals. Hyderabad was a lot like I had heard India would be, both in terms of the simultaneously gorgeous and sickening chaos, the traffic weaving through teeming, colorful humans of all ages, and the Sunnyvale, CA-like corporate campuses springing up like a mirage where the city once ended.
What was perhaps most striking of all was that the ventures we saw in this competition were so remarkably similar in their essential themes to many startups we have seen before in the GSVC:
Thailand: a breakthrough water purification technology to treat agricultural runoff
Philippines: organic fertilizer that simultaneously improves the environmental degradation caused by large-scale pig farming
India: Employment of the Marginalized

- a branding, distribution and technical assistance provider that helps local artisans find markets

- a food products company providing supported employment and reintegration for at-risk women who’d been trafficked as sex workers

- an IT company that employs bright, ambitious teenagers from the slums
It would be tremendous if these aspiring entrepreneurs, who are in many cases grappling with very similar missions and industries to those of competitors in years past, could link up with their predecessors and compare lessons learned. Maybe some would be competitors, but this is ultimately still a very big world and I think in almost all cases they would find that they are fighting on different fields for a common cause, and could reinforce one another. SVT is already building a social metrics database, and I discussed with a few of the GSVCers in Hyderabad how we might build this feature into it too. I look forward to developing that possibility.

About a year ago we put out a call to the field for commercialization plans for technologies that could address the MDGs. We imagine there are a lot of technologies sitting around that have made it most of the way through R&D but their developers didn’t or couldn’t bring them to market for some reason– maybe there wasn’t a billion dollar market for it, or maybe it wasn’t in the company’s core competency. We attracted a powerful set of plans and decided to put them in a catalog called “SET MDGs”) last spring to see if we could spur connections between these technologies and the resources to get them into the world.

In the Catalog we played around with what information investors might need to inform a decision whether to fund a social venture. If investors are using conventional criteria, they’re trying to assess the financial risk and return of the deal. To get at this initially, they expect executive summaries to speak to the management team’s strength, the market opportunity, and the proposed solution or technology, so we put that into our new Catalog summaries. If they’re from the new capital markets, however, we imagined they’d also need to understand what the environmental and/or social implications of the deal are… and there are few conventions around how that should be summarized- let alone what the due diligence process would entail.

What do investors in this new capital market need to know in addition to the potential financial risk and return? Like a Sudoku puzzle, there are a few easy boxes to fill. One thing might be a check of whether the impact on the environment will be net positive or at worst zero compared to what would have happened anyway. Another has to be something about the kind of benefits a venture may have, and how likely those are to be achieved. It gets trickier when we drill into each of these, although many people are boldly going…

And then there’s the issue of how to present something that connects with that particular investor’s intuition or chemistry… hard to do on a page, but maybe more doable than we have assumed?