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This Lifestyle Brand Connects Mexican Artisans to Global Adventurers

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According to José Antonio Nuño, co-founder and CEO of Someone Somewhere, there are 10 million artisans in Mexico, and nearly 70 percent of them live under $2/day. The main reasons for this are twofold: first, the products created by artisans no longer match what people wear every day; second, current distribution channels prevent artisans in rural communities from reaching the vast majority of potential customers—or certain distributors take advantage of them with unjust prices.

Of the 10 million artisans in Mexico, nearly 70 percent of them live under $2/day. Tweet This Quote

After volunteering in communities like these during university, Nuño along with co-founders Enrique Rodríguez, José Miguel Cruz and Fátima Álvarez saw the opportunity to support artisan livelihood in their country by combining traditional handicrafts with modern products. In 2012, they quit their jobs and founded what was formerly known as Flor de Mayo. Now, with the help of a Kickstarter campaign, the team is on the verge of re-launching into new markets with a more global identity.

Someone Somewhere is an outdoor brand that connects adventurers around the world with the millions of Mexican artisans living in poverty, turning outdated souvenirs into stylish and functional attire and gear. Products include graphic tees, caps, backpacks, duffle bags and more (see all of the designs on their Kickstarter).

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“In the United States alone, the 10 percent of millennials who have an outdoorsy lifestyle and are fond of social impact are spending $60 billion shopping every year,” said Nuño. “This is why we’re really focused on entering that market by changing our name to be more accessible, building an online store, and forming partnerships with different kinds of retailers for our products.”

To create their products, Someone Somewhere’s in-house design team visits artisan groups around the country to learn about their techniques, production processes, and the overarching needs of the community. Then, they order samples to test for quality. Once the high caliber is confirmed, the team designs a prototype by integrating the artisan work with modern materials, depending on what styles the market demands. For example, the team orders small, traditionally embroidered pockets from the artisans to stitch onto classic t-shirts.

There are more artisans in Mexico than teachers, doctors, engineers, accountants, musicians and lawyers—combined. Tweet This Quote

As soon as the prototype is perfected, the team puts in an order to the artisans for the handmade portion of the piece. Ultimately, these products are sent to workshops across Mexico to finalize assembly and prepare the clothing and gear for domestic and international distribution.

Currently, the company works with 140 artisans in six communities across Puebla, Chiapas and Oaxaca—some of the poorest states in Mexico. Around half of the artisans are adults who use the money to take care of their families and send their kids to school; the other half are younger women, who in some cases save the money to attend college. Approximately 90 percent are women. According to Nuño, Someone Somewhere has increased their artisans’ monthly income by up to 300 percent.

SSbackpack

However, paying artisans fairly and consistently isn’t the only way the company supports the craftswomen and men. Additionally, the team leads workshops on entrepreneurship, administration, personal finance, design and other topics useful for artisans to further their personal development. More often than not, these educational opportunities don’t exist where they live.

“Some artisans love what they do and can live their whole life doing it, but others want to move on to other things,” said Nuño. “By giving them a job even just for one year, for example, allows them to expand their horizons. What really motivates us is knowing that in some way, we are allowing them to think beyond what they’re going to eat tomorrow or how to keep their kids in school. If you give someone with a lot of talent the chance to pursue whatever they want, in the end, everyone benefits.”

If you give someone with a lot of talent the chance to pursue whatever they want, in the end, everyone benefits. Tweet This Quote

The immediate goals of the crowdfunding campaign include production on a larger scale, forging relationships with new communities and artisans across Mexico, and incorporating new products, such as hammocks and swimsuits. The company will launch its online store by August 2016.

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In the future, in addition to expanding product offerings, Someone Somewhere plans to build a mobile platform, similar to Coursera, that will offer their educational trainings to thousands of artisans in a more widespread way. Currently, the team is testing whether to charge a small fee or make the platform free.

Adventurous people around the world are going to spend billions of dollars annually on fashion and gear. Nuño and his team have figured out that redirecting those resources to the skillful people who, for centuries, have gifted the world with their unique craft makes economic and ethical sense.

Want to Help Launch ‘Someone Somewhere’?

Learn More & Support Here!

 

The post This Lifestyle Brand Connects Mexican Artisans to Global Adventurers appeared first on UNREASONABLE.is.


This Massive Investment Portfolio is Making Markets Work for the Poor

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A version of this post was co-written by David Bank and Dennis Price and originally appeared on ImpactAlpha.

A new kind of strategic investor is sniffing around promising startups and innovative entrepreneurs.

These strategists are not corporate suits seeking a competitive edge. They are officers of private foundations looking for scientific breakthroughs on neglected diseases, technologies that can be steered toward disadvantaged populations and financing models that harness the power of markets for the benefit of the poor.

In the last seven years, the world’s largest foundation has become one of the world’s largest impact investors. Tweet This Quote

The biggest of these new suitors is the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. At the insistence of Bill himself, the foundation made its first “program-related investment” in 2009. Since then, it has made nearly 50 loans, equity investments, and guarantees to further the foundation’s charitable purpose, totaling more than $1 billion. In the last seven years, the world’s largest foundation has become one of the world’s largest impact investors.

To share what it has learned, the foundation provided unprecedented access to ImpactAlpha and Stanford University’s Paul Brest, a leading thinker and commentator on impact investing. Making Markets Work for the Poor is a deep dive into how the Gates Foundation leverages its immense balance sheet to make program-related investments.

“This is not all that different from what we’ve seen over last 40 years [from strategic investors],” says Larry Mohr, a veteran Silicon Valley venture capitalist who co-invested with the Gates Foundation in a promising EdTech company. “The parallel is that they both have objectives that are totally unrelated to the company.”

To create good business models that serve the poor, you have to get to high volume and large scale with small margins. Tweet This Quote

The strategic intent of the Gates Foundation’s program-related investment portfolio is to “make markets work for the poor.” That goal, lofty as it is, can sometimes create complications for entrepreneurs, co-investors and companies, as our set of narrative profiles shows.

The project, a 40-page supplement in the Stanford Social Innovation Review, includes narrative articles about eight of the foundation’s noteworthy investments, an explanatory overview and an in-depth Q&A with Julie Sunderland, the founding director of the foundation’s in-house investment team.

“How do we create incentives and how do we enable the most overlap between our objectives and the objectives of the company?” asks Sunderland, who recently left the foundation to pursue biotech investing more directly. “If there is a lot of overlap and we can de-risk or we can provide capital in creative ways to enable them to do the things that they want to do, those are our best deals.”

Foundations are aiming to close capital caps and fix failures left by a market that all too often doesn’t work for the poor. Tweet This Quote

For the project, ImpactAlpha reviewed hundreds of pages of investment memos, strategic memos, emails and other internal documents and interviewed more than three dozen entrepreneurs, executives, investees, co-investors and foundation staffers. In the package, we explore:

  • How the foundation lost its entire investment in one biotech company—and reaped a 17-fold return on another.
  • How a minor financial misstep earned Root Capital a dose of “tough love” that ultimately helped the agricultural lender grapple with the dangers of rapid growth.
  • How the foundation used its deep pockets and superior market knowledge to steer pharma giants Merck and Bayer toward a low-price, high-volume strategy for contraceptive implants for women in low-income countries.
  • How the foundation saw something more in the off-grid solar revolution in Africa: a way to expand commercial lending for the poor.

Private foundations are looking for technologies and financing models that harness the power of markets for the benefit of the poor. Tweet This Quote

Strategic program-related investments are not new. The Ford Foundation began making them in 1969. Since then, pioneers like the MacArthur, Packard and Annie E. Casey Foundations, and more recently, the Kresge Foundation have expanded their toolset beyond traditional grants.

The Gates Foundation has pushed the boundaries of the new tools. Many examples cited by the IRS in its expanded guidance on PRI use could have been pulled from the foundation’s playbook, including loans to smallholder farmer producers, equity investments in biotech startups and guarantees on loans to nonprofits.

“We’re not delusional about the private sector and about capitalism,” continues Sunderland. “We know that markets don’t work well for the poor for very, very good reasons. It’s not theoretical.”

By strategically investing to prove new models, reduce financial risks, increase liquidity and sometimes even boost returns, foundations like the Gates Foundation are aiming to close capital caps and fix failures left by a market that all too often doesn’t work for the poor. Sometimes such investments work, other times they don’t. A critical question we sought to answer throughout the report is: why?

Private foundations are increasingly looking for promising startups and innovative entrepreneurs. Tweet This Quote

The foundation’s PRI portfolio includes 20 equity investments totaling more than $200 million, 11 loans combining for more than $100 million and 12 guarantees reaching nearly $600 million. The foundation has made 14 investments, more than $167 million in sum, directly into biotech companies in hopes of a hit on vaccines and drugs for a range of neglected diseases such as malaria, HIV and typhoid fever. Most of the capital has been deployed for global development, including expanded access to finance and health services for the poor, and to agricultural development, primarily in sub-Saharan Africa.

The occasional home-run aside, the foundation anticipates an approximate 10 percent loss of capital on its PRI portfolio as a whole. “The reality is that the poor don’t have much money and therefore profit margins are slim,” Sunderland says. “The only way that you can create good business models to serve the poor is to get to high volume and large scale with small margins.”


Making Markets Work for the Poor is a collaboration between the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Paul Brest of Stanford Law School, and ImpactAlpha Inc.

The post This Massive Investment Portfolio is Making Markets Work for the Poor appeared first on UNREASONABLE.is.

How to Design for the Poorest Markets

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Over the past 30 years, I’ve looked at hundreds of technologies for developing countries. Some provided elegant solutions for challenging technical problems. Some were big and clumsy. Some were far too expensive. Some were beautifully simple and radically affordable. However, only a handful were capable of reaching a million or more customers who live on less than $2 a day.

Three-quarters of the design challenge for a new, radically affordable technology relies on a strong branding, marketing and last mile distribution strategy. Tweet This Quote

If you succeed, against all odds, in designing a transformative, radically affordable technology, you are only a quarter of the way there. The other 75 percent of addressing the problem is marketing it effectively, which requires designing and implementing an effective branding, mass marketing and last mile distribution strategy.

Any competent electrical engineer can design a beautiful solar lantern that provides enough light to read or cook by in a village thatched roof house. But designing it with the features that a poor family is willing to pay for, at a price providing them a four month payback from savings in kerosene, batteries and candles, is an entirely different matter.

Eight Practical Steps to Design for the Market

If designing a branding and marketing strategy and a last mile supply chain that will put a product in the hands of a million or more customers is three quarters of the design challenge, you will want to read these eight steps to make it happen.

1. Interview 25 likely customers before you start.
We planned to sell battery charging services to villagers in eastern India using affordable solar technology, but when we interviewed 30 customers in ten remote villages, we learned there wasn’t enough market demand to justify it. Many villages were being electrified, and when one village received electricity, the fifty villages around it within a half hour bicycle ride got functional electricity. Villagers preferred putting a battery on a bicycle and plugging it in at a village with electricity to paying more money to a village solar-powered battery charging service.

2. Design to a customer-derived target price-point from the beginning.
The reason $10 is a sweet spot price-point for solar lanterns for customers in developing countries who earn less than $2 a day is that most of them spend $3-$5 a month on kerosene, flashlight batteries and candles. If they save $2 a month after subtracting costs like battery replacement for the lantern, they get their money back in five months. This falls into the 2-300 percent return on investment most poor customers look for.

If you succeed in designing a transformative, radically affordable technology, you are only a quarter of the way there. Tweet This Quote

3. Select the tradeoffs acceptable to customers to reach target price.
These tradeoffs occur with price and effectiveness. For example, government standards for a subsidized solar lantern in India called for eight days worth of reserve light for days when the sun didn’t shine. However, when I interviewed 25 people who had used solar lanterns in Kenya for a year and asked them what their source of light was before the solar lantern, they said they used kerosene lamps (which they still had). So, one trade-off to reach the target price of $10 is to bring the number of days of reserve light to zero. That’s because any rational poor customer will gladly use their kerosene lamp on dark days if they can’t bring the price of the solar lantern down to what is affordable for them.

4. Create a proof of concept prototype.
When we designed the first proof of concept prototype for a low cost drip system in Nepal, we simply drilled holes as emitters in black high-density polyethylene pipe lateral lines and let water flow through them from a 55 gallon drum about 2 meters above the ground. Then, we put a glass under each emitter and measured how much water came out over a fixed period of time. The proof of concept prototype worked well. If yours doesn’t work right away, keep prototyping it until it does.

5. Put the prototype in the hands of at least 10 customers.
Give the customers a chance to use the product, then learn what’s wrong and fix it. When we put these prototypes in the hands of ten one acre farmers in the hills of Nepal for one growing season, they told us that water squirted sideways out of the holes away from the plants. Thus, we put plastic sleeves over the holes. Then, the plastic sleeves came away from the holes when the lateral lines were shifted. So, we designed and extruded a baffle that fit snugly over the holes and didn’t move when the lateral lines were shifted.

Create a proof of concept prototype, put it in the hands of at least 10 customers, learn what’s wrong and fix it. Tweet This Quote

6. Design strategies that are capable of reaching a million customers.
These strategies include branding, marketing and last mile distribution. With the treadle pump in Bangladesh, we used staff from a commercial marketing firm in Dhaka to create the name Krishak Bandhu, meaning farmers’ friend, which is also now being used in India. We implemented a strategy of recruiting 75 small manufacturers, 3,000 village dealers, and about 3,000 well drillers, each of whom acted in their own economic self-interest to make market and install treadle pumps. Then, we launched a national marketing initiative, including Bollywood style movies, to create sufficient volume sales to make each of the small enterprises in the last mile supply chain profitable.

7. Field test the technology and all strategies. 
Do this in at least five different villages for at least four months, and modify it from what you learn. For example, a few years ago, Windhorse International (the private company I founded) was testing our strategy to sell safe drinking water to people in ten villages for six months, with a full independent evaluation. We quickly changed our strategy in at least six important ways. For example, we introduced attractive jerry cans, but when they fell off the rack of customers’ bicycles, they dented easily, so we had to double their wall thickness.

Make sure to field test your technology as well as the marketing strategy. Tweet This Quote

8. Scale up systematically to reach at least a million customers.
IDE reached 1.5 million customers in Bangladesh simply by replicating the model of manufacturers, dealers, and well drillers supported by IDE staff to reach scale in more and more geographic regions, and putting a lot of emphasis on supporting the Krishak Bandhu brand and national mass marketing campaigns.

Design for the Market: Practical Examples

The following video is a little long, but if you can suffer through it for nine minutes, it describes how three real enterprises need to change what they are doing to reach a mass market.

Then, please watch this video to learn applicable tips for designing a product that can be commercialized.


A version of this post originally published in July 2013. It has been updated and reposted to inspire further conversation.

The post How to Design for the Poorest Markets appeared first on UNREASONABLE.is.

The Story of a Problem Solver Who Redefined Entrepreneurship

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“What can we do to help homeless folks in the streets, struck by poverty?” I posed that question to an uncle of mine when I was a teenager.

“You have a choice,” he shared with warmth in his voice. I still distinctly remember the words: “You can either give them a crutch, or you can give them your shoulder to lean in to solve their problem. Then, they have a chance to lean forward on their own—with pride and self- sustaining confidence.”

Problem solvers play a critical role in this world. Tweet This Quote

Those words echoed when I heard the story of entrepreneur, Paul Polak. He did not speak those words. Rather, he acted on them with his own twist.

Like many families in the Americas (dating back to varying degrees of ancestry), his family immigrated. His father had the fortitude to foresee the marching German army to Czechoslovakia. He had a flourishing plant nursery business, but he sold everything at a steep discount and moved his family to the Americas.

Paul grew up and became a psychiatrist, focusing on supporting the homeless population. As he prescribed medications to them, however, he noticed a recurring pattern: they consistently returned. He felt heavy that he was treating a symptom and not the real problem, so he imbibed the entrepreneurial spirit of his father. Without any formal business training, he naturally espoused two business tenets: 1) Fully listening, and 2) Showing up where customers are. By doing that, he helped one of the homeless men to start his own business of lending makeshift locker boxes to fellow vagabonds for a nominal amount.

People exit poverty not when organizations donate tools, but rather when they invest their own money and time on tools that can help them. Tweet This Quote

When he moved from just practicing psychiatry for the homeless to deeply listening to them, and in turn helping them build a future, a remarkable change happened. By not looking at a homeless person as a recipient of charity, but rather as an owner of a business, the recurring pattern was broken.

That experience sprouted the entrepreneur inherent in him. He bloomed for the next 40 years. He is now 82 years young, agile and active with great achievements to his credit.

The biggest of them, according to me, was shattering a long-held belief: “If you give a man a fish, he can feed himself for a day. If he spends the time to learn how to fish [with your help], he can feed himself for a lifetime.”

The implicit words never stated that we all assume are, “If he spends the time to learn how to fish with a fishing rod, he can feed himself for a lifetime.”

Where Paul found his life-long meaning was the changed words, “If he spends the time to learn how to fish with tools he bought with his own money, he can feed himself for a lifetime.”

What real problems we choose to solve define a lot of our meaning. Tweet This Quote

There are two subtleties here. First, every tool is not a fishing rod. Second, people exit poverty not when organizations donate tools to them, but rather when they invest their own money and time on tools that can help them and their business.

His life mission was to create tools that the people living below the poverty line can afford and learn from easily. That singular construct is the edifice on which he built his social empire—market-based solutions to poverty. He’s truly a contrarian and a self-described bohemian who brought meaning into money with something we humans take pride in—ownership.

Closer to home, I relate to his insight. As a parent, I am always looking for ways to help my two young daughters enjoy eating vegetables. I often ask them to help pick vegetables at the farmer’s market or the grocery store. Then, I sense their feeling of ownership when those vegetables are served to them at the dining table.

Opportunities to take ownership often lead to progress. Tweet This Quote

What is true with our kids is often true in a social setting—opportunities to take ownership often lead to progress. That never occurred to me until I read Paul’s life works. Like many great things in life, the lesson is crystal clear in retrospect. I was happy to learn that Paul was named by The Atlantic as one of the world’s 27 “Brave Thinkers,” along with Steve Jobs.

In all of this, one thing is clear: problem solvers have a critical place in this world. What real problems we choose to solve define a lot of our meaning. Serendipity and curiosity to solve real problems is the underbelly of Paul’s story—holding it together and nourishing it with thoughtfulness and success on what is truly meaningful.


A version of this post originally appeared in the Huffington Post.

The post The Story of a Problem Solver Who Redefined Entrepreneurship appeared first on UNREASONABLE.is.

Is It Immoral to Earn Profits From Poor Customers?

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There are at least 7 billion different perspectives on morality, but the viewpoint I like best defines sin as the failure to reach your potential.

There are billions of definitions of morality, but a good one defines sin as the failure to reach your potential. Tweet This Quote

By this definition, we have at least 2.6 billion deep sinners—the 37 percent of people who live on less than $2 a day. They are the future Steve Jobs’, Mohandas Gandhis, Madame Curies and Pablo Picassos who will instead eke out a living as drug dealers, child soldiers, prostitutes and slum dwellers.

The $3 trillion dollars or more we have wasted in misguided development aid probably represent an even bigger sin. But, it seems to me that the worst sin of all is our abject failure to achieve scale for the handful of projects that have produced measurable positive impacts on the lives of poor people.

Over $3 trillion dollars has been wasted in misguided development aid. Tweet This Quote

How can we successfully achieve scale? It takes planning and designing from the beginning, and the unleashing of powerful positive market forces at the locations where poor people are buyers and sellers.

The only way to unleash those forces is to demonstrate to global businesses that they can earn attractive profits selling transformative products to poor customers.

Is it immoral to profit by selling to the poor?

This is exactly what I have dedicated the rest of my life to accomplishing. But, I am not an economist. How do some of the world’s leading economists view the prospect of earning sizable profits serving poor customers at scale?

“No!” says Milton Friedman, the celebrated free market economist.

“…there is one and only one social responsibility of business—to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game.”

Friedman believes that a marketplace of enterprises earning profit within the rules is the most powerful lever to improve society.

“Yes!” says economist and Nobel Prize winner Muhammad Yunus.

“Poverty should be eradicated, not seen as a money-making opportunity.”

Yunus believes that investors in social businesses should only get their money back. In my view, that adds up to a sizable interest-free subsidy, which is a constraint to scale.

The only way to reach scale is to show businesses they can profit selling transformative products to poor customers. Tweet This Quote

My answer to extreme poverty

The microfinance movement and the work of iDE combined have probably helped about 50 million extremely poor people move out of poverty. Even if we have helped 100 million poor people move out of poverty, this amounts to less than 4 percent of the 2.6 billion people in the world who live on less than $2 a day. This is pitiful!

Even if we helped 100 million people move out of poverty, that’s less than 4 percent of the 2.6 billion people in poverty. Tweet This Quote

I define meaningful scale as any strategy or initiative capable of helping at least 100 million $2-a-day people move out of poverty by at least doubling their income. We desperately need to find ways to bring to scale the few comparatively successful models for development that are available.

What are the common features of initiatives that have truly helped extremely poor people move out of poverty?

  • They begin by thoroughly listening to poor customers and thoroughly understanding the specific context of their lives.
  • They design and implement ruthlessly affordable technologies or business models.
  • Energizing private sector market forces plays a central role in their implementation.
  • Radical decentralization is integrated into economically viable last mile distribution.
  • Design for scale is a central focus of the enterprise from the very beginning.

It is clear that all of these factors are integral components of a business system, but this takes us back to the original question: should it be a business system that enhances the livelihoods of poor people without making a profit for outside investors? Or, should it make a profit for investors as well as the poor people served by it?

Design for scale has to be a central focus of an enterprise from the very beginning. Tweet This Quote

To me, the answer is obvious. The only way for a business to help at least 100 million poor people move out of poverty is to follow the laws of basic economics, which means providing an opportunity for both poor and rich investors to earn what they consider to be an attractive profit from their participation.

I have no doubt there are huge profitable virgin markets all over the world serving $2 a day customers waiting to be tapped. By the laws of economics, creating a new market requires taking a large risk, but the reward should be commensurate to the risk. If the new venture is successful, all the investors—the poor customer who buys the product, the shopkeeper who sells it, the company employee who makes or transports the product or manages the supply chain, and all the financial investors in the company—should make an attractive profit.

Providing all investors an attractive profit

Here is an example. Coal contributes 40 percent of global carbon emissions and releases millions of tons of heavy metals and other pollutants every year, worsening climate change and sickening people around the world. Properly carbonized biomass can be substituted for coal and co-fired alongside it in proportions up to 80 percent.

The only way for a business to help at least 100 million people out of poverty is to follow the laws of basic economics. Tweet This Quote

The world’s farmers produce four billion tons of agricultural waste each year. If 100 million tons of this agricultural waste could be effectively and affordably carbonized in decentralized rural settings, a multinational enterprise finding a cost-effective way to make it happen could reach global sales of $10 billion a year within five to ten years. Such a company would not only provide attractive profits to investors willing to take on the substantial risk involved, but would furthermore double the incomes of at least 100 million $2-a-day enterprise participants in developing countries.

The only way a company like this can reach scale is with the financial backing of for-profit venture investments. The only way to justify those comparatively high-risk, early-stage investments is if the company provides the opportunity to make exceptionally good profits if it succeeds. We have two options:

  1. One is to keep hoping that governments will come through with billions of new aid dollars, keep asking individuals to dig deeper for charity dollars, and hope that the low-or-no-profit venture capital space takes off and becomes a truly global phenomenon. We could plod along full of hope but low on results, celebrating increases in impact of fractions of a percentage point.
  2. The other option is to blend the designer’s sensibility, the artist’s creativity, the ground-level aid worker’s understanding of local context, and the entrepreneurs’ dynamism and drive for success, and create profitable global companies that serve poor customers with products and services that help them rise out of poverty. We could unleash the full power of the greatest force in human history – profit – and start ending poverty by the hundreds of millions.

It would be immoral to do anything else.


Update: Please watch this video to learn my thoughts on designing the future corporation.


This article published in March 2014. It has been reposted to inspire further conversation.

The post Is It Immoral to Earn Profits From Poor Customers? appeared first on UNREASONABLE.is.

The Veil of “Energy Poverty”

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It’s flattering to be asked to be a poster child for a major international campaign.

The language was veiled but the implication clear: Would I help a big company undertake a campaign to end energy poverty? The client? Peabody Coal, the largest private-sector coal company in the world. I told the caller that I wanted nothing to do with his client or his campaign. The logic didn’t work.

Yes, energy poverty is real, and no, coal is not an answer to it.

I’ve been in the Central Highlands of Afghanistan. When night falls in December, the temperature drops by 30 to 40 degrees Fahrenheit — it’s real dark, and real cold. I’ve spent nights with families who cook with wood, the women, especially, dying young from smoke.

Yes, energy poverty is real, and no, coal is not an answer to it. Tweet This Quote

But sorry, coal won’t help them. Yes, the Afghans could have burned coal in their homes, but when used domestically, coal is nasty. And Peabody has no interest in selling their product door-to-door. They dig big holes in the ground for one reason: to flow megatons of coal to power plants — releasing gigatons of carbon into the air. From an environmental and health standpoint, mines are dangerous and polluting. In North Carolina, Tennessee, and hundreds of other sites, coal ash spills laced with heavy metals that cause cancer and neurological damage are polluting rivers, killing fish, and damaging communities. Big, coal-fired power plants are no longer an economical way to bring high-quality life and energy services to poor people anywhere on the planet. Nothing about it makes sense.

Central-station power plants aren’t cheap. In states from Montana to Texas, utility regulators have denied permission for new ones because they cost more than wind. In places like India, Enron flogged off power plants that no one in the U.S. wanted, saddling the government with massive debt before going broke themselves. Someone has to pay for power from a plant before it’s a viable business. But poor people are poor. They can’t afford electricity that is priced high enough to pay off the capital cost of the plant. So they don’t. The plant either gets cancelled half way through, or only sells power to the urban elites. Either way, it’s no answer to energy poverty.

Coal-fired power plants are no longer an economical way to bring high-quality life and energy services to poor people on the planet Tweet This Quote

If a country in an emerging market is going to sink a bunch of money into energy, why not invest in a renewable grid of the future? So they are. A recent Bloomberg study reports that many developing countries are bypassing coal and leapfrogging to renewable power. It points out that fossil electricity averages $147.90 per megawatt hour (mWh) in the developing countries studied. New wind costs $82/mWh and solar costs $142/mWh. While a new power plant takes years to decades to build, renewables can be deployed in only days to weeks. Think Progress quotes Ethan Zindler, a Bloomberg New Energy Finance analyst, saying, “Clean energy is the low-cost option in a lot of [developing] countries. The technologies are cost-competitive right now. Not in the future, but right now.”

The New York Times agrees:

Electric utility executives all over the world are watching nervously as technologies they once dismissed as irrelevant begin to threaten their long-established business plans… Many poor countries, once intent on building coal-fired power plants to bring electricity to their people, are discussing whether they might leapfrog the fossil age and build clean grids from the outset.

This an opportunity for entrepreneurs too. In Guatemala, Unreasonable entrepreneur Juan Rodriquez, founder of Quetsol (now called Kingo) provides solar lighting for $12 a month—already cheaper than the $16 a month that an average family spends on lighting.

Of course, Peabody has little interest in serving Guatemala’s poor market. Instead, they have created a veil of “energy poverty” that intends to put a moral face on its desire to keep selling coal in the U.S. But here, too, it makes no sense. Deutsche Bank analyst, Visal Shah, predicts that rooftop solar will be the cheapest electricity option for everyone in the US by 2016. This follows the Energy Darwinism report from Citi Group that has renewables cheaper than gas within ten years. Already, entrepreneurs are offering utility-scale solar at $50/mWh and new developments, such as solar cloth — a lightweight solar fabric that can be stretched across parking lots and rooftops — that could make solar ubiquitous and cheap. Stanford Professor, Dr. Mark Jacobson’s Solutions Project shows that energy efficiency and renewables can meet world demand better and cheaper than any future based on coal or nuclear power.

Energy efficiency and renewables can meet world demand better and cheaper than any future based on coal or nuclear power. Tweet This Quote

None of this, however, stopped Peabody’s marketing machine. It even ensnared Bill Gates to prove the line from the movie Dangerous Liaisons, “like most intellectuals he’s intensely stupid,” when in June, he trotted out the long-discredited Bjorn Lomborg to claim that coal can solve energy poverty. In an excellent exposé in Desmogblog, Graham Readfearn details the people supporting Lomborg’s project, and, you guessed it, they are the same ones who called me. Obviously Peabody found their poster child.

Perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised. The coal industry has a lot of money at stake. They’re desperate. Bloomberg New Energy Finance reports that the value of the shares of some coal companies has fallen 90 percent since 2011. The report also predicts that clean energy will attract $5.5 trillion between now and 2030, a number I suspect is low.

Bill McKibben’s divestment campaign is biting: In 2013 Bloomberg reported that Storebrand ASA, which manages $74 billion of assets for Norway, sold out of 24 coal and tar-sand companies, including Peabody Energy. Norway’s Labour Party proposed banning the country’s $800 billion sovereign wealth fund from coal investments. When the Rockefellers divest from ownership in fossil fuels, the trend is on.

Free speech does not include the right to deceive. Deception is not a point of view. Tweet This Quote

As I write, I’m on my way home from China, which is cutting its of rate of building coal plants as fast as it can. Coal use has fallen by 11 percent over the last year and imports have fallen 50 percent in 2014. Beijing even had clean air when we flew out this morning. All the coal plants and dirty industries were closed to impress the delegates in town for the Asian Pacific Economic Cooperation Summit. A senior business colleague told me that the Party, concerned that the poisonous air is undermining their legitimacy, is moving to renewable energy as part of the country’s new commitment to create an “Ecological Civilization.”

So no, Bill Gates, and no, Bjorn Lomborg, coal’s not the answer.

Desmogblog says it well:

Democracy is utterly dependent upon an electorate that is accurately informed. In promoting climate change denial (and often denying their responsibility for doing so) industry has done more than endanger the environment. It has undermined democracy.

There is a vast difference between putting forth a point of view, honestly held, and intentionally sowing the seeds of confusion. Free speech does not include the right to deceive. Deception is not a point of view. And the right to disagree does not include a right to intentionally subvert public awareness.

Get your hipboots on; it’s gonna get deep. You’re gonna hear “energy poverty” in every venue that money can buy. But you won’t be hearing it from me.


This article published in 2014. It has been reposted to inspire further conversation.

The post The Veil of “Energy Poverty” appeared first on UNREASONABLE.is.

Fighting Illiteracy By Night: A Solar Solution

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Worldwide, over 1.3 billion people live off the grid without access to electricity. That means nearly 20 percent of the human population is unable to flip a switch to instantly illuminate a room or to make use of the evening hours for reading or studying. More than 95 percent of these people reside either in Sub-Saharan Africa or Asia, the vast majority in rural areas and also areas where illiteracy rates are the highest.

With no electricity, most of these 1.3 billion people resort to burning kerosene, a liquid fuel distilled from crude oil. According to the World Health Organization, a day’s worth of kerosene lantern smoke is equivalent to smoking two packs of cigarettes. Every night, adults and children inhale these toxic fumes, placing themselves at increased risk for severe respiratory illnesses, cancer, and cardiovascular disease.

A day’s worth of kerosene lantern smoke is equivalent to smoking two packs of cigarettes. Tweet This Quote

Despite the exponential boom in the solar industry over the past decade and a heightened focus on off-grid consumers around the world, a major barrier lingers: the upfront cost of purchasing solar-powered products. While a year’s worth of kerosene costs far more than a single solar product — typically demanding 25 percent of a family’s weekly income — many people remain bound to this expensive and inefficient resource because they cannot afford to purchase a solar product outright with cash on hand.

For Lesley Marincola, a product designer and mechanical engineer from Stanford’s Design School, the solution to this financing obstacle was to develop a system that would allow off-grid consumers to pay for solar products in small, manageable installments.

In 2010, Marincola founded Angaza to develop a pay-as-you-go technology (PAYG) that makes products affordable for the over 1 billion people living off-grid. But Angaza’s ambitions extend far beyond providing access to healthier sources of energy. They also aim to improve access to education.

“We’re tackling illiteracy at night,” says Marincola. “In any off-grid family, once the sun goes down, the children have to read or study by dim, toxic kerosene. If you can actually replace that source of light with a clean, super-bright source that’s not dangerous at all, that means even the parents are much more likely to let the child use the source of light.”


As a result of these safer, brighter light sources, children can exponentially increase the number of hours dedicated to reading and studying each year.

Unlike many other solar companies in the region, Angaza accomplishes their mission through B2B licensing partnerships with manufacturers and distributors. This, according to Marincola, allows Angaza to specialize in their PAYG technology development while their partners do what they do best: produce quality products and reach customers at scale.

The manufacturers design the physical solar products, embed Angaza’s metering and remote monitoring technology, and then sell their products to distributors. Next, distributors tap into the software component using Angaza’s back-end billing system, CRM, and mobile app, to simplify the process for their sales agents.

Off-grid consumers, often in rural areas, learn of the solar products through these local sales agents. Consumers make a small down payment in order to purchase the product. When their initial payment runs out, the product deactivates. But, the embedded PAYG technology makes it easy for consumers to pay a small amount to reactivate it again.

Even the poorest off-grid family is still investing some money on kerosene, so you just have to make solar cheaper. Tweet This Quote

With this partnership model that fuses microfinance principles with automated technology, Angaza has made solar energy access cheaper on a weekly basis than what families already spend on kerosene. By spreading out payments over time, families often spend as little as $1 per week until the product is fully paid for.

To date, Angaza works with manufacturers and distributors across 15 different countries — from their headquarters in Kenya to countries as diverse as India, Nicaragua, South Africa, and Sierra Leone.

“We are trying to eradicate energy poverty around the world,” says Marincola. “We want to enable businesses to offer life-changing products to anyone, anywhere. Literally, with pay-as-you-go, no one should be excluded. Even the poorest off-grid family is still investing some money on kerosene, so you just have to make solar cheaper. You can do that with the right kind of financing and the right kind of technology in place.”

Angaza’s technology is embedded in products that range from small $15 solar study lights to 200-plus watt solar home systems. Moving forward, the company will expand beyond solar light to a variety of life-changing products — including clean cookstoves, micro-grid meters, and solar water pumps.

Energy poverty is a truly global problem, and off-grid communities exist in every single country. By leveraging local partnerships and focusing on cutting-edge technology, Angaza could power the world.


The entrepreneur featured in this story participated in Project Literacy Lab, a new initiative co-founded by Pearson and Unreasonable Group to wrap resources around the fastest growing ventures worldwide positioned to solve key challenges tied to illiteracy.

The post Fighting Illiteracy By Night: A Solar Solution appeared first on UNREASONABLE.is.

Hacking the Future of the U.S.A.

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The United States of America has enjoyed a century of being the best, brightest, and wealthiest of nations. We enjoy a historic list of “firsts” in flight, computers, food processing, automation, and culture.

But, as Larry Fink, CEO of Blackrock — the largest investment firm in the United States — says, today we live in a divergent world. Our status as a nation is being fracked by challenges in infrastructure, demography, and character. So far, we have more challenges than solutions.

Our nation’s greatness lies in the mindfulness of its people to overcome problems once they realize the facts. Tweet This Quote

The headlines today say that U.S. middle-class incomes rose five percent over 2014, the biggest jump since data was first recorded in 1968. Incomes are up and joblessness is down. This may be election year effervescence, or it may be a trend that will tug us out of our 2008-induced Big Recession. We can dream.

Still, these factoids do not remove hard realities. Below are some of the biggest challenges we face right now.

It used to be that poverty was for other people.

Poverty doesn’t just exist in Africa, India, or Latin America. Even as one of the world’s wealthiest nations, the U.S. has the largest percentage of children — 15 percent (roughly 1 in 6) — living in poverty.

Data shows that even at the height of the 2006 economic bubble, nearly eighteen percent of the U.S. was living near poverty levels. Today’s numbers vary but show no improvement, and the number of poor on our planet is 1.4 billion and growing.

Even as one of the world’s wealthiest nations, the U.S. has the largest percentage of children living in poverty. Tweet This Quote

Poverty crushes rural communities in Nebraska, Minnesota, South Dakota, Missouri, and Pennsylvania, as well as zip codes in California, New York, and Florida.

The question becomes, how can we bring the poor’s tremendous curiosity, resourcefulness, and innovation to bear on their own progress? How can we encourage children living in poverty to prosper, succeed, and become the seeds for their own future?

How can we bring value to rural areas that does not rely on plundering local natural resources for coal, oil, forests, orchards, and croplands? The provocative thought that needs thinking is, how can poor populations become profitable and self-sustaining markets?

The U.S. education system once put man on the moon.

But in international comparisons today, U.S. high school students rank 35th in math and 27th in science. That puts the United States not only behind Poland, Latvia, Slovenia, and Finland, but also major U.S. competitors like China, Russia, Germany, Japan, and Britain.

That’s not all. Approximately 49 percent of all African-Americans and Hispanics drop out before they finish high school.

The education of our middle class is also sliding backward. We knew this in our soul of souls every time Jay Leno or Jimmy Fallon approached random strangers and posed questions like, “What is President Obama the president of?” Answer: Embarrassed giggles, dumbfounded stares. The routine has become a national meme.

Meanwhile, education for the upper classes is rising. Over time, knowledge disparity will cause economic disparity, with predictable consequences. Some parents have taken it upon themselves to teach their children: home schooling grows at 7 to 15 percent annually, according to advocacy organization National Home Education Research Institute.

Of all the industrialized nations, the United States has the highest percentage of its population in prison. Tweet This Quote

We need to re-learn the ABCs of education and invert the student/teacher ratio from 30-plus students per teacher to 30-plus teachers per student. Internet experiments like Khan Academy are helping with some of the heavy lifting. Writing lab 826 and Time Warner Cable’s “Connect A Million Minds” are initiating ways to promote creative writing and science, technology, engineering and math. Pearson, the world’s largest educational firm, is also pursuing new efforts to promote literacy levels in the U.S. and around the world.

Pop quiz. How do we evolve every student’s innate curiosity and develop their natural wonder into something useful, productive, and self-enhancing for their own lives as well as for society?

Is orange really the new black?

Of all the industrialized nations, the United States has the highest percentage of its population in prison. We have the highest population of women in prison. And the number of American youth in prisons is at least five times higher than other industrialized nations. According to census data, the United States accounts for less than five percent of the world’s population but has about 22 percent of the world’s prisoners. While older generations look at “doing time” as cause for shame, some might view it today as the new normal.

Public servants were once looked upon as the moral high ground, but today dozens of politicians have prison records, including a few governors, state senators, and aldermen (four of Illinois’s last seven governors have been imprisoned).

The number of American youth in prisons is at least five times higher than other industrialized nations. Tweet This Quote

Martha Stewart, who built a tidy empire by teaching us where to put the sherbet spoon and how to cook Thanksgiving dinner, spent five months as a jailbird. Celebrities from Mark Wahlberg to Lindsay Lohan have spent time behind bars for everything from assault to partying too hard. While some might look at “doing time” as cause for shame, today it might be a badge heralding the new normal.

As states have become economically challenged, prison management was even turned over to private management companies. This act ignored the challenge of ensuring prisoners were not alienated from their “inalienable” human rights. Fortunately, private prison management has recently been overturned.

And still, the U.S. is the only Western nation that continues to mandate capital punishment, ranking fifth behind China, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Iraq.

I am a rainbow.

The assumption of a white majority is changing all over these United States. In fact, Caucasians are already the minority in New York City, our nation’s largest city. The largest population of Somalis outside Somalia is in Minneapolis, Minnesota, a land of historically French, Irish, German, Italian, and Scandinavian descendants. The largest population of Hmongs outside of Vietnam is also in Minneapolis. The largest population of Hispanics outside Los Angeles is in Chicago.

(Countdown: The United States of America is shared by 317,887,918 people and counting. Census 2010 figures show 231,040,398 whites, 42,020,743 blacks, 50,477,594 Hispanics, 17,320,856 Asians, 5.2 million Native Americans, and 1.2 Hawaiians and other Pacific Island citizens.)

By the year 2025, the number of people living in the U.S. will grow by more than 72 million persons. Tweet This Quote

By the year 2025, the number of people living in the U.S. will grow by more than 72 million persons.

Asians are the fastest-growing segment (Chinese, Japanese, East Indians, Philippines, Vietnamese, Laotians) and account for over half (56 percent) of the growth. California’s Hispanic population will more than double by 2025, and states like Illinois, Texas, New York, and Florida will also experience higher Latino populations. (Remember that education statistic about half of all Hispanics dropping out of high school?)

Caucasians will be the slowest growing segment.

Question: If the basis of society is its ability to communicate, what does it mean when the majority of the largest populations — English and Spanish — cannot talk to one another?

Where else does it hurt?

In the 1950s, other countries visited U.S. hospitals in order to imitate U.S. systems and standards, considered to be the finest in the world. But today our health care system is ailing.

U.S. health care ranks tenth of all the industrialized nations (United Kingdom is first), and U.S. life expectancy today ranks 42nd in the world, despite the fact we spend more on health care per person than any other country.

Some Americans are deciding not to be treated by their local physician or health care plan at all: an estimated seven million Americans will take a medical vacation this year. They fly to Mexico, Thailand, or Malaysia for medical services, either because they can’t afford to undergo treatment in the U.S., or our national sense of bargain hunting leads us to Singapore (or any one of 41 other countries) for better care.

The pig is reaching the end of the python.

Famously self-pampered, self-indulgent, and self-motivated, Baby Boomers gave us Woodstock, BMWs, Nikes, personal computers, designer jeans, and smoothies.

And Boomers still are looking for ways to kick the world in the ass, retiring at the rate of ten thousand a day. But many experienced professionals continue to work as mentors and investors. You can spot them as volunteers on projects in developing places like Africa, Asia, and South America. Others are creating their own jobs as entrepreneurs and business owners.

U.S. life expectancy today ranks 42nd in the world, despite the fact we spend more on health care per person than any other country. Tweet This Quote

Yet, experts warn, even with over $17 trillion transferring into 401Ks over the next two decades, some Boomers reaching retirement age will not be able to pay their own way. A study by the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College estimates over 60 percent of households may be unable to live the way they prefer, or to pay for their healthcare. The Employee Benefits Research Institute estimates that couples will need over $300,000 to help cover health expenses alone.

What this means is that some retirees will continue to work, even if it’s just to continue employee health benefits. Vitality, resilience, openness, and curiosity are not just for the young.

Questions. If we can identify an aging population that doesn’t want to retire in the gated communities of Florida and Arizona, can we design communities where older persons feel they belong? How can we create meaningful work for aging citizens with lifetimes of experience, knowledge, and training?

There is no end, only new beginnings.

It is no longer enough to paintbrush these problems as “challenges.” Our nation’s greatness lies in the mindfulness of its people to overcome problems once they realize the facts. Dramatic disadvantages call for dramatic solutions.

Solving these problems starts by imagining what you can do. Tweet This Quote

We can hope for positive transformation.

It’s already started. All over the country, corporations and communities are no longer waiting for government agencies to find solutions. They are taking back the responsibility for social progress and committing their own solutions and monies toward those solutions. We have already mentioned above the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, TimeWarner Cable’s “Connect A Million Minds” effort, Pearson (an Unreasonable Group partner), and the Khan Academy. And recently, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan committed $3 billion to fighting disease.

But the real solve is for each of us to face these problems as individuals. Start by imagining what you can do. Hack away.

The post Hacking the Future of the U.S.A. appeared first on UNREASONABLE.is.


Why These Are Some Of The World’s Most Exciting New Entrepreneurs

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Forget the hoodie.

The world’s most exciting new entrepreneurs look nothing like the Silicon Valley stereotype. They live in rural communities and support their families on less than one dollar and 25 cents a day. Yet many of these entrepreneurs are mapping their own road out of poverty. One way they’re doing so is through Fundación Capital’s program Graduation.

With this model, entrepreneurs at the base of the pyramid will play a critical role in meeting the UN Sustainable Development Goals’ top priority to end global poverty by 2030.

Poverty influences virtually every sector of development. Because of poverty, children remain uneducated, preventable diseases spread, maternal and child mortality rates soar, and climate change is worsened due to resource exploitation. An estimated $450 billion of GDP is lost every year from reduced productivity, poor health, and lack of education associated with poverty.

The world’s most exciting new entrepreneurs look nothing like the Silicon Valley stereotype. Tweet This Quote

Entrepreneurship confronts these widespread systemic issues. Since they inherently disrupt the status quo, these budding entrepreneurs are also forcing the world’s development community to rethink everything we once believed about what’s possible.

This change in perspective has not come from top-down solutions or from ideas designed at desks in faraway places. Rather, it’s born from empowering individuals to design their own solutions. From a woman opening her own local business to the man starting his own gardening project, modern entrepreneurship provides a compelling path forward to the eradication of global poverty.

A Missing Road Map

When it comes to teaching entrepreneurship to this group, we have much to learn. Yet, this has not stopped the actual work of training entrepreneurs. We at Fundación Capital have spent the past four years working with governments throughout Latin America to train tens of thousands of the most vulnerable citizens in entrepreneurship and financial education.

The business plan Doña Sol Altamar drew before opening her store called "La Estrella."

The business plan Doña Sol Altamar drew before opening her store called “La Estrella.”

During this time, the common understanding of entrepreneurship has evolved. Common wisdom once believed entrepreneurship was an intrinsic talent. Now we know better, operating with a roadmap and established methodology that involves a series of steps to validate and refine an idea. Tools such as the Business Model Canvas, which detail this method, have now become the standard in any business school.

Entrepreneurs at the base of the pyramid will play a critical role in meeting the UN Sustainable Development Goal to end global poverty by 2030. Tweet This Quote

That doesn’t mean this road isn’t without pitfalls and potholes. Many advances and methods remain out of reach and inapplicable to the poor and vulnerable individuals with whom we work.

Nor can we ever forget the difficulties of life on the margins of society where survival is a day-to-day concern.

Charting a New Course

Training programs take place in the homes of participants across Latin America, where program mentors (themselves members of the community) travel every week to teach participants how to become business owners.

Astrid, a respected mentor in a region of Colombia particularly affected by decades of conflict, has been through the same things as the people she works with.

“I feel more empathy when I know that Astrid ‘is one of mine,’ that she also lived and suffered something similar to what I lived and suffered,” said one of the women participating in the Graduation program there.

About $450 billion of GDP is lost every year from reduced productivity, poor health, and lack of education associated with poverty. Tweet This Quote

But it is about more than what mentors and entrepreneurs share in common. To reach the poorest members of society and empower them for entrepreneurship, we start with a critical, yet simple approach: less is more.

Studies demonstrate that people can only pay attention for 20 minutes at a time before losing focus. We design 15-minute sessions, take frequent breaks, and repeat the lessons throughout to improve retention.

Our curriculum follows this streamlined approach to teaching entrepreneurship, broken down here:

  1. Dream it: Participants identify a business opportunity by taking into account what they know how to do, what they like doing, and what people are willing to pay for. They are then asked to draw how their business will look in two years.
  2. Share it: Participants are asked to share their idea with family and friends. This allows them to gain support, validate that their idea satisfies a demand, and identify available resources.
  3. Prove it: During this phase, participants must demonstrate profitability. Contrary to traditional approaches, participants first identify their selling price, as opposed to calculating their costs and then adding a profit margin, since the market determines most of the products they sell.
  4. Start it: Once they complete the steps mentioned above, participants receive seed capital to start their business and receive biweekly visits and feedback from a coach.

Each week, the program mentors also bring an app we created that teaches new methodologies to participants. They sit with the entrepreneurs as they go through the week’s lesson answering questions, reinforcing lessons, and generally supporting participants in the process.

A Graduation entrepreneur in Colombia with an early version of the app.

A Graduation entrepreneur in Colombia with an early version of the app.

The process is rarely a straight line. Consider the case of Aurora, who initially wanted to open a stationery store. As she went through the entrepreneurship course, though, she discovered the potential she had in her own backyard. When one of the other women in the course shared her story raising and selling chickens, Aurora decided to do the same. This was something she had the space for, knew how to do, and enjoyed. Her flock is now up to fifteen, and she is working towards building a chicken coop to help grow her business.

The Road Ahead

Our dedication to human-centered design and iterative processes means we constantly learn from those we work with, evaluate our work, and work to make our programs and products better.

For example, we often revise the language of the workbooks and workshops. Our first version asked, “What’s missing where you live?” The goal was to help participants to think through potential business ideas (such as “a convenience shop”). Instead, the answers were focused on what was missing in their actual homes, which missed the larger exercise of identifying opportunities. Slowly, with their help, we revised questions that provoked proper instruction and focused progress.

Entrepreneurs force the world’s development community to rethink everything we once believed about what’s possible. Tweet This Quote

We must continue to evolve as our participants do. For example, one day Yois lost her contract as a nurse, so she began our training. Yois decided to invest in selling her personal smoked chorizo recipe. She doubled her sales in her second day. Now, she supports her family with the income from her business, and her chorizos are well known regionally.

Yois said she remembered the golden rule learned in the fifth chapter of the entrepreneurship course: “The ability, and responsibility, of moving forward is in your own hands.”

From setbacks, new opportunities emerge.

Doña Sol Altamar and her store "La Estrella," in Sitionuevo, Magdalena, Colombia.

Doña Sol Altamar and her store “La Estrella,” in Sitionuevo, Magdalena, Colombia.

The post Why These Are Some Of The World’s Most Exciting New Entrepreneurs appeared first on UNREASONABLE.is.

How Hundreds of Mexican Homes Save Money and Spare the Environment

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This post is part of a series documenting entrepreneurship in Mexico and the companies that participated in the Unreasonable Mexico 2016 program.


According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), Mexico has the highest rate of income inequality in its group of 34 countries. The top 20 percent of Mexico’s population owns 14 times as much as the bottom 20 percent. Yet, nearly half of all Mexicans still live under the poverty line, a rate that has hardly changed since 1992. This disparity lands the average household disposable income at $12,806 USD annually, compared to the OECD average of $29,016 USD.

Of this disposable income, housing costs comprise the largest single expenditure for Mexican families, according to the OECD’s Better Life Index. Gas makes up a major part of this monthly expense, and according to business partners Aljoscha Zimmermann and Sam Neuenschwander, 80 percent of a typical household gas bill goes to heating water.

The top 20 percent of Mexico’s population owns 14 times as much as the bottom 20 percent. Tweet This Quote

Neuenschwander, a Swiss mechanical engineer, had been traveling the world when he settled in Mexico ten years ago. Quickly identifying the potential for solar energy, he started prototyping the first version of a solar water heater. A few years and several lab tests later, he was ready to launch operations in Mexico. In 2012 Kessel was born in Mexico City.

But as the founder and eventual Chief Technology Officer, Neuenschwander knew that in order to thrive he needed someone with a financial and business background to make it work – and a Mexican citizen who truly understood the market. That’s where Zimmermann came in.

“I had the chance to study in Europe, I was an investment banker in Zurich, and I had a career a lot of people wish for in Mexico,” says Zimmermann. “But, I always had this feeling of not doing anything substantial for anyone. I was blessed with opportunities, but at some point, I realized I wanted to do something to impact my own community where people actually need it.”

Having recently quit his job at UBS in Zurich, Zimmermann moved back to Mexico and was working at a pharmaceutical company when he learned about Kessel and met Neuenschwander through a mutual friend. “I only needed five minutes to understand that I wanted to be part of it,” he says. “I was going into something uncertain, and that was a difficult decision, but it was the best decision of my life.”

Zimmermann assumed control of all business development in Mexico, and the company moved ahead with its first product: a residential solar water heater that shares the company’s name.

Half of all Mexicans still live under the poverty line. Tweet This Quote

The Kessel heater is comprised of a cylinder water tank and a solar panel, typically installed on rooftops. According to Zimmermann, its durability ensures no maintenance for the consumer, and it lasts for over 10 years. The best solar photovoltaic technologies on the market, he says, only transform around 20 percent of solar energy to electricity. Solar thermal technology, such as Kessel’s solar panel, transforms 55 percent of the absorbed energy to hot water. The tank’s capacity reaches 200 liters, which produces enough hot water for at least four people per day. In places with a lot of sun, it heats enough water for up to seven people.

“We believe this is how we decentralize energy distribution and shift the process towards energy autonomy for your home,” explains Zimmermann.

The Kessel costs just under $400 USD to pay in full. In less than a year and a half, most customers can pay this off. After that, it’s free hot water. Right now, though, only about 30 percent of customers are willing and able to pay for it upfront. Most people see that purchasing a traditional gas boiler costs less upfront, but they don’t factor in the ongoing fuel costs.

I strongly believe we can serve at least 80 percent of Mexican homes with solar water heaters. Tweet This Quote

Thus, Kessel is partnering with Kiwi, another Unreasonable Mexico alum, to create a financing option that will widen accessibility for their clean technology.

“In Mexico, people spend a high proportion of their monthly bills on gas,” says Zimmermann. “Although this solves an ecological issue and an environmental issue, it’s also the issue of helping people save. We’re giving them a product they need and use every day.”

According to Zimmermann, the Kessel helps low- to middle-class households save up to 90 percent of their monthly gas bill and up to 10 percent of their monthly income. Additionally, it significantly cuts down on the amount of carbon-based fuel burned per household.

Since 2015, the team has installed Kessels in over 500 individual households across the central region of Mexico. But the team’s vision extends much further to enhance the water heater with technology that could light homes and purify drinking water.

“I strongly believe we can serve at least 80 percent of Mexican homes with solar water heaters,” says Zimmermann. “That doesn’t mean it needs to be a Kessel. It can be a different brand. If we can incentivize other companies to do this work, that would be amazing.”

The post How Hundreds of Mexican Homes Save Money and Spare the Environment appeared first on UNREASONABLE.is.

A Strategy to End Poverty In All Its Forms… Why It May Just Work

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This article was adapted from a speech given by Daniel Epstein at Global Partnerships Week, hosted by the Secretary’s Office of Global Partnerships of the U.S. Department of State in Washington D.C., on March 6th, 2017.


Our team at Unreasonable Group strives to give entrepreneurs best positioned to define progress in our time an unfair advantage.

The good news is that, of course, we are not the only ones trotting on this path towards achieving social, economic, and political progress. As a hallmark example, let’s look at one institution that has inspired and shaped much of our thinking at Unreasonable to date: the United Nations.

As you may know, in September of 2000, the United Nations brought together 189 countries that collaboratively signed what were called the Millennium Development Goals (or MDGs), committing themselves – amongst many other goals – to halving the number of individuals living in extreme poverty by 2015 (i.e. individuals living on less than $1.25 a day). This was a real moment in history, and it shouldn’t be overlooked. At the time, the MDGs represented the single largest gathering of world leaders. Ever.

In this 15-year timeframe, enormous resources were committed to the cause of achieving the MDGs. Between 2000 and 2015, official development assistance increased by an estimated 70 percent. In 2014 alone, development assistance was over $135 billion. In other words, over a trillion dollars was invested in development assistance during the course of the MDGs between 2000 and 2015.

Over a trillion dollars was invested in development assistance during the course of the MDGs between 2000 and 2015. Tweet This Quote

Beyond this astronomical number, philanthropic giving also skyrocketed. Total contributions in the U.S. alone across philanthropists, foundations, and donations from corporations reached an estimated $373 billion in 2015, setting a record for the second year in a row.

So with many trillions of dollars and 189 nations supporting the MDGs, what was the end result on the number one goal of halving the number of people living in extreme poverty?

A Reason to Celebrate, Yet Recalibrate

Well, in 2015, the UN and much of the world celebrated. This is a quote from the official Millennium Development Goals Report published in 2015: “Extreme poverty has declined significantly over the last two decades. Globally, the number of people living in extreme poverty has declined by more than half, falling from 1.9 billion in 1990 to 836 million in 2015.”

Reading this excerpt from the report, it would seem we should all be celebrating. But in reality, if you look at the data more closely, I think you may agree with me that we should be inclined to feel otherwise.

According to the World Bank, during the last 30 years, about 790 million individuals in China were lifted out of absolute poverty. An incredible feat indeed, and one that should be applauded and studied by the rest of the world. But this, of course, skewed the UN’s data significantly. The World Bank goes on to estimate that 72 percent of poverty reduction in the developing world in the past 30 years happened in China. So what of the rest of the world?

50 million more people live in poverty on the African continent today than in 2000. Tweet This Quote

Let’s zoom into one region in particular, the one hardest hit by poverty. In Sub-Saharan Africa, between 2000 and 2015, according to a 2016 report also conducted by the World Bank, because of population growth, the most optimistic scenario shows that there has been an increase in at least 50 million individuals now living in absolute poverty in 2015, who weren’t in 2000. We as a global community spent trillions of dollars and carried out the largest global accord of world leaders in history, and yet 50 million more people live in poverty on the African continent today than did in 2000.

Albert Einstein is famous for his definition of insanity: “Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” Something needs to change. Clearly, our traditional approaches are falling short of achieving our goals as a global community.

Now What?

And this brings us to today. Immediately following the 2015 deadline of the MDGs, the UN announced a new set of goals to be reached by 2030 known as the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). This time, instead of 189 nations signing onto the goals, 193 member states of the United Nations did. The new Global Goals now mark the largest signed pact amongst world leaders in history.

And to be clear, the SDGs have a more ambitious agenda than the MDGs did, seeking to eliminate rather than reduce poverty and including more demanding targets on health, education and gender equality. They are universal, applying to all countries and people.

We are scaling companies that are already effectively addressing our most stubborn global challenges with profitable models. Tweet This Quote

So what are we going to do differently to ensure different results?

It is this question that is at the root of a new initiative we are launching in collaboration with the U.S. Department of State, aptly branded Unreasonable Goals. Rather than leaning on patterns of development that have failed us over the past century, we are looking to the world’s most effective solutions on the bleeding edge of what is possible, and we are scaling them through unlikely partnerships with some of the largest institutions of our time.

Not Another Accelerator…

As you read this, you may very well be thinking, “Not another accelerator for entrepreneurs promising to end poverty through startups.” I’m happy to let you know that our approach will be unique. Rather than working with early stage companies and prototypes that could have the potential for grand impact on the world, we are scaling companies that are already effectively addressing our most stubborn global challenges with profitable models.

We just selected the companies, and on average, they have each already secured $18.8M in financing and generated $12.5M in revenue. They have operations in over 50 countries. In short, their solutions work. Now, we just need to scale what works. This is the premise of the Unreasonable Goals partnership. Let’s find the 17 most effective entrepreneurial solutions to the 17 Sustainable Development Goals and radically increase our odds of meeting the Global Goals by 2030.

An Unreasonable mentor and personal hero of mine, Paul Polak, who is responsible for bringing an estimated 21 million farmers out of poverty through the organizations he founded, put it better than I ever could when he said this: “It is not a question of ideology, it’s a question of what works.”

So What Are We Actually Doing?

Once a year, we will host multi-week programs through 2030. At these annual gatherings, we will bring together 17 growth-stage entrepreneurial solutions and wrap the participating entrepreneurs with world-class mentors. We will strive to drive not millions but billions of dollars of investment into their solutions, and we will give them access to an exclusive global network designed to help them scale further, farther, faster.

When it comes to solving the SDGs, we believe impatience is a virtue. Tweet This Quote

Knowing the SDGs are global goals, each year we will run the gathering with a new international portfolio of entrepreneurs and with a new country as our national host.

By 2030, we will have worked with over 200 high-profit and high-impact entrepreneurs worldwide, we will have partnered with a cadre of multinationals, and we will have worked directly with 13 national governments. This is where the real impact of Unreasonable Goals comes into focus. It’s this collective global network and this hodgepodge of public and private actors – all oriented around scaling what works – that we believe will help ensure we achieve the SDGs by 2030.

I’m privileged to say that for the inaugural Unreasonable Goals program, we have partnered with the U.S. State Department as our host partner and Johnson & Johnson as our cornerstone multinational partner. This summer, just outside of Washington D.C., we will bring together what we believe will mark the world’s most impactful portfolio of entrepreneurial solutions and technologies to solve the SDGs.

We chose to announce this new initiative on stage at the Global Partnerships Week’s opening forum because Unreasonable Goals will only succeed if we are pathologically collaborative.

If you are a company, institution, or foundation eager to reach the lofty vision of the SDGs, I hope you will join us. Tweet This Quote

For July’s up and coming program, we are looking to bridge 17 partnerships with 17 multinationals and foundations, each of which will underwrite the support of a particular SDG, just as Johnson & Johnson has chosen to support and collaborate with us on Goal #3: Good Health and Well-Being. Though time is limited, as the program kick-starts in July, when it comes to solving the SDGs, we believe impatience is a virtue. If you are a company, institution, or foundation eager to reach the lofty vision of the SDGs, I hope you will join us.

Imagine A World…

In closing, I want you to imagine the world in September of 2030. When we look back and track the world’s efforts to reach the Sustainable Development Goals, we have succeeded. In 2030, imagine that we, as a global community, have eradicated poverty in all its forms. What would that world look like?

It would be a world in which no one is limited by their circumstances. It would be a world in which I imagine we would all be proud to live.

Towards that vision, this is my formal invitation. Join us. You can find out more information and identify multiple ways to get involved on our new website unreasonable-goals.com.


Of course, I would be remiss if I didn’t wrap up this post by saying thank you. If you took the time, thank you for reading through this initiative announcement, and thank you for the future partnerships I know we will work towards. Once more, thank you to the U.S. State Department and Global Partnerships Office for being our founding partners and for helping to ensure Unreasonable Goals wasn’t just a pipe dream, but rather a reality.

The post A Strategy to End Poverty In All Its Forms… Why It May Just Work appeared first on UNREASONABLE.is.

The Most Responsible Fabric on the Planet: Q&A With Thread

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The clothing industry is the second largest polluter in the world; only oil contaminates more. “Fast fashion” emphasizes getting the latest trends from catwalk to consumer as fast and as cheaply possible. This perspective on the clothes we wear every day devalues the materials, mistreats the laborers, and obfuscates the supply chain.

Thread is bringing transparency and fair treatment back into apparel by producing fabrics transformed from plastic bottles found in the streets of some of the poorest communities on the planet. More importantly, this company is on a mission to end poverty by creating dignified jobs alongside nonprofit partner Team Tassy – their stories inextricably linked after the devastating earthquake in Haiti in 2010.

The clothing industry is the second-largest polluter in the world; only oil contaminates more. Tweet This Quote

Today, over 1,300 Haitians collect the plastic bottles that become Thread™ fabric. Each yard of fabric is tracked from the “first mile” to the last, where it winds up in the products of global brands seeking smarter sustainability practices. According to its most recent Impact Report, Thread created 3,845 income opportunities in Haiti and Honduras and exported over 378,000 pounds of plastic waste in 2016 alone.

Most recently, Thread launched its new collection with Timberland called Thread X Timberland. The shoes, t-shirts and bags incorporate Thread’s fabric and tell the story of what it means to go from Ground to Good™ and reframe what it means to be fashionable.

Unreasonable sat down with Ian Rosenberger, founder of Team Tassy and Thread, to discuss why he went to Haiti in the first place, how he formed his philosophy on poverty, and why we need an apparel revolution.

What emotion or feeling made you decide that you had to go to Haiti after the earthquake in 2010?

Ian: It’s so hard to say. When 9/11 happened, I felt I wanted to go to New York City. I just felt like I could be useful. I didn’t go, and I regretted it. I told myself when something like that came along, I was never going to let myself regret that again. So when the earthquake in Haiti happened, and that was nine years later, I said I’m going. It’s all about timing. Everything that had happened up to that point brought me to January 12, 2010.

I had to kind of throw away all the things that I knew. Like, I knew I probably wasn’t supposed to go, and I would probably be a pain in the ass and be in the way. But it felt like I had the permission from myself to go. I wasn’t going with any intention of starting a business; I just wanted to figure out how to help.


How did that experience lead to Team Tassy? How did you meet Tassy?

Ian: On the last day, there was this kid I met. He hopped into the back of the truck that I was in, heading to his local church, which at the time was this old burned out gas station. This kid had this huge tumor on his face. I mean, the size of a grapefruit. At first, I didn’t think anything of it. I thought it was a birth defect. Later I learned that it started growing when he was 12, and at the time he was 17, and it turned out he was dying from it. I asked why, and he just didn’t have access to healthcare. He didn’t have access to a regular check-up. His name was Tassy.

Two weeks after that first trip, I went back to Haiti. Tassy asked me for help. I said yes. At the time, I had no clue how I was going to help him. So I came home and tried to figure out what he had. That’s kind of what kicked things off.

We have to reverse the idea that the cheapest is the best. Tweet This Quote

I took my slides to this fancy country club in Pittsburgh. I finished the presentation and sat at the bar. At this time, I was in pretty terrible shape. A guy game up to me and asked me what I need. I said, “Well, what I really need is an ear, nose and throat surgeon who can operate on this guy’s tumor. And he was like, “I’m an ear, nose and throat surgeon.”

So, I went back to Haiti the next week, and I took Tassy to the U.S. Embassy and got him a refugee visa. Two weeks later, he was living in my apartment with my roommate, my basset hound and me – and he got the operation. He lived with me for 13 weeks, and I took him home to Haiti after that. That’s when I realized the entire experience was selfish. I wanted to make myself look good. This whole exercise was an exercise in vanity, and I was really disappointed in myself for that. I decided to stick with Tass until Tass didn’t need me anymore. That begged the question, what does it mean for the poor not to need you anymore? What does being poor mean?


Did you find the answer to that question?

Ian: I spent about a year trying to figure that out. In the process, what I realized was that people want the same stuff. Everyone, universally, wants the same thing. We all want a roof over our head and for our kids to have a better life than we had. That unlocked the entire world for me. That’s when I realized that Tassy not needing me anymore meant having a decent job.

So I created my philosophy around the poor that led me to start Team Tassy, which places the poorest of the poor into jobs in the worst neighborhoods we can find. But in Haiti, it’s like 70 percent unemployment. Everybody was homeless. There weren’t any jobs to go around.

That’s when I went back to my journal, and I wrote: “If Haiti could turn trash to money = good.” I kept rotating around the idea. I thought, maybe I’ll try to convince Patagonia to build a factory here. That was the idea for a long time. Finally, I was like, why don’t I just do it myself? For the first time, I decided I was going to start a company because we needed to create some jobs.

Nadine Philippe, Thread collection center owner in Les Cayes, Haiti. Photo by Taylor Freesolo.

So from there you founded Thread?

Ian: Thread was a project for a couple of years. We had our fifth birthday in 2016. For the first two and a half years when we started, no one on the team knew how to make fabric. No one even had a background in textiles. We posed as graduate students and got into a textile factory in Massachusetts. They gave us a tour, and I was taking pictures and notes. “Oh, we can do this in six months!” Three years later we made our first bolt of fabric.

Now, we’ve set up the whole supply chain. We take trash from the very poorest neighborhoods in the world and turn it into fabric. That fabric is being sold to brands that are turning it into boots, bags, jeans, jackets, and more. I look at waste as a natural resource. In an area where there aren’t a lot of natural resources, trash can be one of the most valuable.


What is your philosophy on poverty and the poor?

Ian: Well, I believe that poverty is a disease. Ending it is possible by the time we’ve got grandchildren. The cure is a dignified job. So that means attacking it like a disease, attacking it like a global health crisis. How do we do that?

Well, we diagnose the symptoms, we figure out the follow up, we accompany that person all the way through that process as they heal, and then we offer the opportunity for them to come back in every once and awhile to see how they’re doing. I think you have to approach it like it’s bacteria.

That depends on a few different things, though. First, you have to be radically committed to walking alongside the people you serve. It can’t be, “We’re doing this to them,” or “We’re doing this for them.” Instead it’s, “We’re doing this together.” That is the commitment that’s important.

We have to solve the problems of the world with business. Tweet This Quote

Second, I think you have to work in a very specific area. I talk a lot about origin of goods; I talk a lot about the neighborhoods we serve. All of that’s really important to me. We can’t be effective at scale by just trying to sprinkle our ideas over a group of people. It has to be hyper-focused. Finally, like I mentioned, most people just want the same thing we all want: a job. Something they can find purpose in. If you don’t have those three ingredients, you’re not on the road to success.

I also really believe strongly that it doesn’t matter if you give somebody a job if you don’t go through the process of preparing them for the job. So you have to fill in the hole of poverty. People have to be healthy. They have to have their Maslow’s needs figured out. All the stuff that makes them fret and feel anxious. If they’re thinking about that, they can’t think about their future.

Products from the Timberland X Thread collection.

What does the world look like if you succeed?

Ian: When Thread succeeds, it changes the way that apparel buys the materials that it needs to make clothes. And that, by the way, changes the entire way we source goods. Then, we source for goods rather than convenience, understanding that there’s intrinsic value to the product that you are making. Just buying that product based on price literally devalues it.

We have to reverse the idea that the cheapest is the best. I think we’ve looked at clothes as these throwaway items, and they don’t have to be. It’s the thing that touches us more than anything else. And if there’s one thing we get right, the world will be talking about what our clothes mean in the same way we talk about what our food means. I don’t think apparel is far behind.

So I think we’ll be helped along by the idea that in the next version of our world, there’s going to be less resource, and it will be harder to throw things away. Hopefully, Thread pushes that idea along, too – that waste is a natural resource, not garbage. If Thread succeeds, we’ll change the industry, and that literally means millions and millions of people will be affected.

If Team Tassy succeeds, we’ll help development organizations understand that the work they’re doing is valuable, but not unless there’s a job at the end of it. We have to solve the problems of the world with business. And if we’re not, then we’re on a seriously wrong path.

The post The Most Responsible Fabric on the Planet: Q&A With Thread appeared first on UNREASONABLE.is.

The Power to Transform 100 Million Lives by 2020: Q&A with d.light

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Energy is essential to generate a livelihood and improve quality of life. Over one billion people around the world, though, continue to live without access to electricity, the majority of them in Africa and Asia. According to the World Bank, nearly another three billion people rely on wood or other biomass for cooking and heating, which produces air pollution that causes millions of deaths every year.

Simply put, access to affordable, reliable and clean energy is fundamental for a healthy planet. Founded in 2006, d.light manufactures and distributes solar lighting and power products designed for those who need it most. To date, d.light has sold more than twelve million solar light and power products in 62 countries. Their goal: improve the lives of 100 million people by 2020.

Unreasonable spoke with Founder and Chief Product Officer, Sam Goldman, about building d.light from one janky prototype to a multinational enterprise that at a rate of nearly every second provides solar light to someone, somewhere in the world for the first time.


Growing up, was there a pivotal moment that attracted you to environmental problems?

S: No, I don’t think there was one pivotal moment. My hypothesis is that I was living in a lot of big, developing cities like New Delhi, where the environment is a mess. I lived overseas because my parents worked for USAID. My mom worked in health and nutrition mostly, and my dad worked in environment, energy and economics. So my whole world was a development mindset.

But the thing my family did every year for vacation is go back to this one island that’s actually close to where we live now, off of Vancouver. It’s so beautiful in British Columbia. So every year, I had the juxtaposition of the degradation and destruction I saw in all these countries, and then this amazing place. So I think all that came together to create this desire to fix it, mostly centered around, how do we have more equity in the world? How do we have more people rise up to the same standard of living?


What would you say is your personal North Star? Or what problem is most important to you, and why?

S: You know, I think if I had to boil it down, it’s just climate change. The thing I’m most worried about and the thing I want to work on the most is, how do we make sure that we don’t mess up the world so badly, not only for humans, but for everything? How do we not – in a very short time – destroy what took hundreds of millions of years to create and was working pretty well before 200 years ago?

I’m really passionate about how we preserve what’s been created and not do irreversible damage. In the process, if we can help as many people and animals and other things as possible, then that’s great. But I really want to do more conservation, and I think climate change is the biggest problem to work on.

How did d.light get its legs, and how was the technology created?

S: I joined the Peace Corps in 2001, mostly because I wanted to understand what it would be like to live as a subsistence farmer. I was an environmental action volunteer, and during that time, I was in a village with no running water, no electricity, no phones, no paved roads, nothing really. Before I finally got hold of an LED lantern, I used a kerosene lantern and really did not like that experience.

How do we make sure that we don’t mess up the world so badly, not only for humans, but for everything? Tweet This Quote

But the real thing that had the massive, massive impact on me was what happened to my next-door neighbor. A young boy had a kerosene fire accident and got third degree burns, head to toe, except for his face. He nearly died. That was what got me researching. It turns out like a million people a year die from kerosene-related fires and burns, and that just got me thinking that this is not some isolated problem of not having electricity in my village; it’s all over the place.

That’s when I started really researching LED lights and thinking about it as a market failure and market opportunity. I decided to abandon biology and environmental studies and go for an MBA instead. Luckily, while I was getting my MBA, I had a chance to work with a group of great people on a class project we called d.light to look at how we would bring affordable, clean, bright light to families who don’t have electricity.


At what point in the development of d.light did you realize it was actually going to work?

S: By the time the class project ended, my co-founder Ned and I begged, borrowed and found money to spend our Christmas in Myanmar in 2006. While there, we saw that if they could afford it, people would get power through these homemade batteries, which is so gross because kids would take lead, melt it down, and then pour it into plates and dump out the acid. Then, every couple days, the kids would carry the batteries on a stick in between their shoulders and walk them to some person who had a really gnarly old Chinese generator, who they would pay to charge up the battery. They would say the more the acid bubbles, the better it’s charging.

We’re not doing it for personal wealth, we’re doing it because we want to make people’s lives better. Tweet This Quote

It was this messed up system, and we realized we could do something awesome here with LED lights. We had this really janky prototype that we gave to this one family. When we came back a couple days later to hear about the experience, the lady – her name was Maya – was crying because this thing had transformed their lives. Her family made mud bricks, and they would wake up at 10 p.m. – the kids too – and go out and set up. There’s no kerosene allowed in Myanmar, so they would burn diesel while they made mud bricks all night long, so that during the day, the sun would bake the bricks. So with the LED light, they didn’t have to pay any money for diesel, they could work really efficiently, and they didn’t have to inhale all the fumes.

So when we came back from that trip with all of the insights, that was when we said we have to work nights and weekends. We found an electrical engineer who was willing to work with us, and we basically said let’s make this thing happen.


You guys forged the way for a lot of other companies in this space. What does that feel like, being in that position?

S: Well, on the one hand, it’s really awesome. We were also right there when social enterprise generally started to blossom in a major way. When we first started, there were barely any impact funds, there weren’t really any conferences, and there were only a couple schools with maybe one course. Now, it’s relatively huge. So one of my goals in the whole enterprise sector is changing capitalism. A lot of people who worked for us or got inspired by us in one way or another are now doing all kinds of other projects, which has a magnifying impact.

The downside of doing what we’re doing is that when you trail blaze, it’s really expensive and takes a lot of effort from employees and investors. You spend a lot of time and money. Sometimes you get the benefit, sometimes you don’t.

When times get hard, what gets you up in the morning to keep going?

S: We are riding a really big wave, and we got a good start on it. It’s challenging, but we’re in a good position. I also have a great co-founder in Ned. Times get tough, but when you’re with somebody else who’s on the same journey, you manage through it. Especially now, we have a really incredible team, and everybody’s in this for the right reason, so you count on each other and you pull through. We’re not doing it for personal wealth; we’re doing it because we want to make people’s lives better.

And then I think when we take the time to get out and go meet our customers, we see that these products totally change people’s lives instantly. Whenever we’re down, we just need to go find a customer and hear their story.


What’s next for d.light? What gets you excited about the future?

S: I think the whole theory of change was that we needed to introduce really low-cost products at scale to introduce people to the idea of clean energy, and just having basic access. So they got their light and mobile charging. But now, we’re seeing that there’s an energy ladder. So as you get more energy, you want more things to make your quality of life better. The whole game is, how quickly and how affordably can we make that dream available to these customers?

I just don’t think quality of life should be determined by where you’re born. Tweet This Quote

We’re looking at more power and more appliances that change people’s lives. The game is expanding, and we need to bring people up the energy ladder, and that’s super challenging but super exciting. I think because we were one of the trailblazers in this space, we’re known as a solar-lantern company, but we’re working hard to makes sure everybody knows we’re a solar products company. Ultimately, we’re going to provide all the rungs of the energy ladder.

What do you want the world to look like as a result of the work you’re doing? What does it mean for a person’s life?

S: I just don’t think quality of life should be determined by where you’re born. It really doesn’t take much energy to have the same quality of life as people who have huge amounts of electricity. Specifically, our mission is to create a brighter future by making clean energy products universally available and affordable. My vision is that anybody, no matter whether or not they have access to a grid, can have the same quality of life – and that d.light can enable that.

The post The Power to Transform 100 Million Lives by 2020: Q&A with d.light appeared first on UNREASONABLE.is.

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