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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!

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?