Last week began the first session of Fledge Peru. To kick it off I spent the week in Lima, getting the team up to speed on the day to day operations of the program, meeting the teams, and learning about the local startup ecosystem. It’s always refreshing to relearn the lesson that business is business, whether in Seattle or Lima, or Oaxaca, Santiago, or Nairobi. People have problems. Startups...
Every SOCAP leaves me wondering what its like outside the West Coast, and specifically outside of San Francisco and Seattle, which seem to be leading the way into the world of impact investing and conscious companies.
How does your city compare?
The last site visit for Investors Circle in Nairobi was SunCulture, seller of solar-powered pumps and drop-irrigation systems for small farms across Kenya. Speaking of culture, one learning on this trip about East Africa was the blended nature of the populace. Not only are there dozens of tribes within Kenya alone, but added to that are the 100+ year old history of Europeans and Indians living in...
The other highlight of the Investors Circle visit to Nairobi was the visit to the factory where BURN Manufacturing builds its cookstoves. Charcoal cookstoves, as charcoal is the most popular fuel used for cooking by urban and peri-urban Kenya. Factory, as in a fully-modern manufacturing facility, little different from those found in the U.S., Europe, Japan, or China. One large building filled...
Continuing my visit to impactful African startups, yesterday my fellow Investors Circle members met with three (very different) startups tackling global health. First was MicroEnsure, an established, multi-country startup that is working in a very difficult space, selling insurance to the bottom of the pyramid. The key learnings from the meeting were the successful channels for reaching that...
Continuing on the Investors Circle trip was a day trip to western Kenya to visit two of the eleven Afya Research Africa clinics. First, the Afya Ubuntu Ruma Clinic. The clinic is on the grounds of the Ruma Women’s Center, a nonprofit run by a local church which provides services to women and orphans. The picture above provides no understanding on the remoteness of this location. We flew...
After visiting GreenChar, the next stop was another slum across Nairobi to meet Jibu, a multi-national for-profit startup tackling the problem of safe, clean, affordable drinking water in Africa. This has been a very difficult problem area for for-profits to tackle, do to competition with free, but unsafe water, along with the low purchasing power of the people who most need better sources of...
Impact investing is not a mindset, it is a spectrum of opportunities. A spectrum, as impact investing spans the plethora of investment opportunities, asset classes, and risk profiles, plus the vast array of impact. This post comes midway through my first trip to Africa, on a trip organized by Investors Circle, and thus with events focused solely on early-stage mission-driven for-profit...
The Social Entrepreneur podcast is for aspiring and early-stage social entrepreneurs; and for those who want to make an impact on the world. Stories about the grand challenges in the world and the solutions that they are creating. Listen to the interview on Stitcher or Soundcloud or download it on iTunes. Links to the talks and companies mentioned in the interview: 1st Fledge Demo Day, 50 years...
As nascent markets turn into established and proven industries, there comes a critical moment when the time is right for consolidation and scale. For clean cookstoves, that moment seems to be quickly approaching, if not already here. Five years ago was clearly too soon. Five years ago, the UN Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves was born, setting a goal of 100 million stoves by 2020. From...
