Infosys to help farmers with supply chain management

 From Watblog.com

The solution, basically a supply chain management system (SCM), streamlines the supply of primarily fruits and vegetables from the farmers to the retailers, known in India as Mandis. The application takes care of a lot of aspects ranging from profiling of farmer clusters, scheduling, tracking, and traceability.

Job opportunity at d.light design

From NextBillion. d.light Design is a hot new BOP start-up with funding from who’s who of the social venture capital world. They are looking for a VP – Sales to be based out of New Delhi.

Position: Vice-President, Sales
Location: India
Organization: The goal of d.light design is simple – to eradicate kerosene lanterns from the face of the earth. To do this it will become the market leader in delivering safe and affordable lighting solutions to over 1.6 billion people who currently do not have access to electricity. d.light’s initial focus is India, where it will provide modern lighting to the 78 million families still using kerosene lanterns.

Position Description: d.light design is hiring a VP Sales Executive who will report directly to the CEO and build sales and distribution in India. This position is based in Delhi and is an incredible opportunity to work with a high growth Silicon Valley social enterprise funded by both US and Indian investors including Mahindra & Mahindra, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Acumen Fund, Nexus India Capital, Gray Matters Capital and Garage Technology Ventures.

For more details, visit http://www.dlightdesign.com/jobs/dlight-jd-vpsales.pdf

Middle of the Pyramid Real Estate

Millenum Spire, a global real estate company, is raising a $1 billion dollar fund that will focus on providing low-cost entry housing to the emerging Indian middle class. According to Ashish Bhalla (from VC Circle), who is a managing director along with his brother Abhijeet, this area of the market has largely been ignored by the real estate investment community.

Our investment philosophy is to concentrate on core fundamentals. We will target lower entry cost cities that will benefit from Knowledge and industrial sector growth, and infrastructure by the government. It has to work in sync with an ecosystem of a civic, social and real estate infrastructure. But, the planning policies are myopic in India. There is no centralised, compiled database for land records available, a lack of which ultimately makes the cost of the land expensive. Because you just don’t know the availability of water, roads and other infrastructural facilities around that area. It needs to be professionalised.

A lot of real estate development that is happening today in India is primarily keeping in mind the investor and not the end user. We want to create asset bases, which give people their value for money. We aim to address the “middle of the pyramid” class of people. We are not looking at a super premium, mega luxury kind of accommodations, but targeting the emerging middle class, who looks for affordable, comfortable housing, and the value for his money in return.

The entire interview can be found here.

Microfinance 2.0

Here is an interesting article from Spiegel Online (thanks Avashya for letting us know about it) on an entrepreneur’s efforts to utilize the power of private equity to scale up microfinance institutions more quickly and to provide them with the capital necessary for significant expansion. One issue that comes to mind, as is discussed further in this post, is the ability for such funds to autonomously control the direction of a microfinance fund away from their original core competencies.

In 2001 a pair of Europeans, Jean-Philippe de Schrevel and Cédric Lombard, discovered they shared a mutual conviction that the best way to cure poverty is through the capital markets. So they began lending money to microfinance institutions through a Geneva vehicle called BlueOrchard. Belgian de Schrevel, a former McKinsey & Co. consultant, got his MBA at Wharton, while Lombard hails from one of the families behind Lombard Odier Darier Hentsch, among Switzerland’s oldest private banks.

Despite the success of the $710 million in capital managed through multiple microfinance funds, de Schrevel wanted more control and say in their investment vehicles.

Water-Pump + Merry Go Rounds = Great Idea

This innovation has received widespread attention already, but for the sake of readers on this blog it is important to post about it just in case some of us just came back from vacations under rocks …

Problem: Getting water in places with low supply above ground but supplies underground …

Solution (from Triple Pundit):

How about a merry-go-round and a prefab water tower. Come again? Yes, it’s called the Play Pump. What is it? Basically, it’s a water pump, that utilizes the energy of children (and anybody else who cares to play on it) spinning around on a playground style merry-go-round, that serves as the motor behind the pump. Rather then give them away, these reasonably priced devices whose water tower has nice large flat surfaces could double as a billboard, providing income to cover the maintenance of them, and publicity for local businesses.

Eat it up … the less discussed aspect of sustainability

One ongoing topic on this blog appears to be the need to be forever conscious of the consumption dilemma that arises due to expanding markets to untapped communities, specifically BoP and the rural populous. Providing the fringes with first rate technologies and products to better their lives is an integral part of the development quest, but it comes with its own costs.

Triple Pundit writer AS directly discusses this issue with regard to the new effort for building globally sustainable businesses by talking about how consumption itself must also become sustainable.

I want to discuss something that rarely gets discussed in the sustainability world but which I think is going to be a subject of increasing attention. It’s the fact that sustainability is really a two-sided coin. On the one side is sustainable production, which is what all of us in business like to talk about–how companies can get leaner and greener. But on the other side is sustainable consumption, which is something that we don’t talk about much.

Mobile Banking May Get Watchdogs

Looks like mobile banking has hit the critical mass where bureaucrats feel the need to regulate it:

RBI Executive Director R B Barman said this week that a central bank committee is examining the regulatory challenges raised by mobile banking. The committee is expected to report recommendations next month, leading next to RBI drafting the requisite changes to the country’s regulatory framework.

In addition to regulation, RBI is also looking at new ways to use mobile banking to reach greater users. Mark Pickens of CGAP writes:

RBI is also closely watching several pilot schemes using mobile connectivity to improve access to financial services among low-income Indians. As the Economist reported earlier this month, one program in Andhra Pradesh is testing how to deliver pensions and unemployment benefits to around half a million people in villages, via specially-equipped mobile phones in the hands of local payment agents and smart cards issued to recipients. A parallel POS-based system is also being tested. So far, 40,000 cards have been issued.

New Service Marketplace for SMEs from creators of LimeWire

LimeExchange is a new service marketplace for SMEs in India that will let them bid for free on service contracts from providers. Lime Spot, the company that also started LimeWire, hopes to leverage its global platform to allow SMEs in India compete for contracts all over the world.

PluGGd.in writes that

LimeExchange provides buyers with tools to negotiate pricing; award projects; escrow payments; monitor, review, and approve work; and communicate with service providers using e-mail, instant messaging, message boards.

The service marketplace is huge and apart from incumbents like RentACoder, startups like oDesk has made strong inroads (60K Jobs, 53K providers around the world).

PluGGd.in also raised concerns that a late entry with a traditional pricing, it is unsure what niche the service hopes to provide.

Third is the one with the hairy chest

A new documentary made on the precarious situation of the American education system places a large amount of emphasis on how the quality of Indian and Chinese students far surpass those of America and that this situation will pose a serious threat to US economic and technological prominence.

High school often is measured by years or events, but across many nations, there is a common factor: Every student has 2 million minutes from the time he or she leaves eighth grade until high school graduation.

What happens — and doesn’t happen — in that span of time in the U.S., China, and India is the subject of the documentary Two Million Minutes: A Global Examination, conceived by Robert A. Compton, who also was the executive director.

HBS Working Knowledge Paper: Colonial Land Tenure, Electoral Competition and Public Goods in India

Abhijit Banerjee and Lakshmi Iyer have published yesterday a paper that attempts to explain

“the impact of a specific historical institution on long-term development, specifically the land tenure systems instituted during British colonial rule. The paper compares the long-term development outcomes between areas where controls rights in land were historically given to a few landlords and areas where such rights were more broadly distributed. The paper also documents the impact of these differing historical institutions on political participation and electoral competition in the post-colonial period.”

Link to the .pdf of the entire paper is here.

Social Capital Index Unveiled by Xigi.net

The other day, we posted an article by PSD Blog suggesting that the new development paradigm still suffers from the same shortcomings of the old guard. Today, we have come across one initiative to help address those concerns, as Xigi.net has released a new Social Capital Index that intends to be a tracking tool for investors to monitor and compare various blended value investments.

We have launched the Social Capital Index, a timely tracking of investments in the social capital market, including social enterprise, (health, education and workforce development) fair trade, digital inclusion, and some clean tech and microfinance investments. Over time we will be able to size the Social Capital market and its growth trajectory in each sector

See evil, Click evil …

Easily one of the coolest, and more useful, tools that I have come across. Maplecroft Maps has created interactive maps that flesh out all sort of major issues that affect humanity — from global water supply to financial risk to renewable energy usage. All in all over 65 maps are available for people to utilize to better understand the prevalence, scope and trends of a given issue. To check out this incredible tool, go here.

Thanks Sushil, for bringing this to our attention.

DhanaX-cellence?

A new Bangalore startup, DhanaX aims to be the primary lending platform for low-income borrowers. While at first glance it may look simply like a Kiva.org knockoff, with 70% of India still living in the rural areas and current access to such microfinance platforms still limited, another player in this field may not be that bad.

PluGGd.in writes:

Here is how it works:

• dhanaX identifies and partners with recognized microfinance organizations, NGOs and credit societies that look into the economic needs of the poor.
• As a lender, you can extend credit at a mutually agreed rate of interest to a suitable enterprise or individual through dhanaX.
  At the end of the stipulated loan period, dhanaX will facilitate the repayment of principal amount with interest with the help of partner organizations.

dhanaX’s core USP lies in it’s attempt to eliminate the intermediaries and be the platform to bring lenders and borrowers together.

New Idea, Old Problems

The World Bank’s PSD Blog posted yesterday on how despite the novelty of social entreprenership and its potential to change the way development operates, it still suffers from teh same pitfalls that plague traditional development models. The report cited suggests that we still have some ways to go before we can officially label the emergence of the social investment pardigm as Development 2.0.

However, the analysis of 24 online social markets leads the authors to conclude that, whilst they are “relentless innovators” that succeed in attracting a new donor base, their transformative power is hindered by an all too familiar problem to “old” development players – the lack of reliable performance data and a common reporting framework.

Whilst 83 percent of surveyed markets believed performance data to be important to encourage donations, only 68 percent report on progress of the offerings on a regular basis, and a mere 27 percent provide any kind of formal evaluation. “One searches in vain for well-defined criteria for assessing the performance and impact of the organizations listed in the markets” and “the information available to[…] social investors for making their decisions falls far short of any acceptable standard of systemization.” Perhaps even more tellingly, only 14 percent of the reporting presents some form of beneficiary validation – which, arguably, could be one of the greatest advantages of using interactive media vs. more traditional approaches (think about Amazon-style ratings provided by donor recipients).

The entire report can be found here.

New Scholarship Site for Indian Students

from Let Me Know

www.A2ZScholarships.com is an initiative by students of the Veermata Jijabai Technological Institute (VJTI), who have put together a directory of scholarships on offer from around the world.

The website has been put together by over 200 students, mostly hostelites at the Matunga-based engineering institute. Currently, the site provides details on almost 500 scholarships for various disciplines.

The site’s interface allows a student to fill up information about the course she/he desires to pursue, the cost of education, family’s annual income and the marks scored by the student. Once the form is submitted online, a list of trusts that would be willing to help the student pops up. Students plan to regularly update this site and currently information of 1,500 more scholarships is being collected.