Make Poverty Business

McKinsey Quarterly have this interview with Jacqueline Novogratz, author of The Blue Sweater: Bridging the Gap between Rich and Poor in an Interconnected World. Novagratz is CEO of Acumen Fund, a non-profit venture capital firm.

Make Poverty Business co-authors Craig Wilson and Peter Wilson are working to implement some of their book's ideas in a DFID-funded project in Bangladesh. The Bangladesh Social Enterprise Project aims to foster commercially-viable, poverty-reducing initiatives through cooperation between the private sector and NGOs. It is led by the Bangladesh Enterprise Institute and supported by Craig Wilson's organisation The Foundation for Development Cooperation and Peter Wilson's company Libra Advisory Group.

The inaugural session featured a keynote speech by the hugely impressive Fazle Hasan Abed, founder of BRAC.  BRAC is less well-known outside Bangladesh than Grameen but has a wide range of successful poverty reducing initiatives, including BRAC Bank which aims to foster employment by lending to small and medium enterprises, in addition to financing one-person entrepreneurs who are the traditional targets of micro-finance.

The project website will capture materials generated during the sessions and will record the initiatives that result from this innovative project. The project has already generated case studies of Bangladeshi social entrerprises and a literature review.

The UK's Department for International Development has launched a research portal, www.research4development.info which gives access to a wide range of development research and case studies.

In an earlier blog entry we discussed Kiva, which allows individuals to make loans directly to entrepeneurs in developing countries. Kiva does not pay interest and is primarily a philanthropic activity.  However other peer-to-peer lending networks are emerging which also offer a financial return. Zopa have just announced that their lenders made an average 9.1% return in the last 12 months, which is pretty good in current market conditions. You can lend to a pool of borrowers, thereby reducing risk, or select specific borrowers from a set of profiles, thus introducing a personal, more philanthropic element to your lending.

Click here to see the UNDP's report "Creating Value for All: Strategies For Doing Business With the Poor".