Case study on the impact of SunnyMoney on alleviating poverty on children age eight years and younger. SunnyMoney sells a wide range of solar products to BoP communities with limited access to electricity in Tanzania, Malawi, Kenya, and Zambia and markets the lamps through schools and existing entrepreneur networks.
Case study on the impact of Honey Care Africa (HCA) on alleviating poverty on children age eight years and younger. HCA of Kenya supplies smallholder farmers with beehives and harvest management services. In addition, HCA guarantees a market for the beekeeper’s honey at fair trade prices, providing a steady, consistent source of income.
Case study on the impact of Sanergy on alleviating poverty on children age eight years and younger. Sanergy builds 250 USD modular sanitation facilities called Fresh Life Toilets (FLTs) in Mukuru, a large slum in Nairobi, Kenya, and sells them to local entrepreneurs for 50,000 Kenyan shillings (KES) or about 588 USD. Franchisees receive business management and operations training from Sanergy and earn revenues by charging customers 3-5 KES (0.04-0.06 USD) per use.
Case study on the impact of Patrimonio Hoy on alleviating poverty on children age eight years and younger. Patrimonio Hoy provides construction materials to low-income consumers in Mexico, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Colombia and the Dominican Republic through a 70 week payment plan that allows its customers to build onto their current homes or build new homes room by room.
Assessment of the role BoP ventures can play in alleviating poverty on children age eight years and younger. This article aggregates impact findings across the six ventures including businesses that sell a product to the BoP, businesses that sell a service to the BoP, and businesses that source from the BoP. The ventures analyzed, work across a range of sectors including housing, renewable energy, sanitation, health care, as well as export-based and locally-based agribusinesses. It compares and contrasts the types of impact experienced by children across different stakeholders, both within the venture and across the six ventures.
Even organizations that are well-intentioned and carry out an impact assessment can end up with unusable data due to implementing a poor methodology. This post contains important considerations around research design, content development, and a data collection process to successfully collect data at the project level.
More than ever, business and market-based approaches in general are seen as critical parts of the solution to global poverty. Governments, NGOs and businesses – from startups to multinationals – have largely accepted this premise. Now, it is time to start talking more about how we, as a sector, can collectively share – and debate – the lessons learned so far in order to better create the future path ahead of us. But in order to do that, we need to be more of a community. To achieve this, we need a long-term vision not only for specific enterprises, but a shared vision for the domain as a whole.
A new ‘action agenda’ for base of the pyramid businesses presents four key initiatives to guide and enhance development of the domain over the next decade
London’s Base of the Pyramid Impact Assessment Framework explores how ventures influence the well-being of local buyers, sellers, and communities. It guides managers through a detailed look at an organization’s effects on those constituencies in three areas: economics, capabilities, and relationships. The framework examines negative as well as positive effects—for instance, whether activities that increase the income of the poor also prompt them to mistreat arable land. It helps managers focus success measures on the most likely high-magnitude outcomes.
With a goal of better connecting the BoP community to help move the domain forward, the William Davidson Institute organized and hosted the BoP Summit 2013: Creating an Action Agenda for the Next Decade on October 21-23, 2013 at Ross Business School at the University of Michigan. Participants took stock of the current BoP domain, identified success factors and on going challenges, and explored how challenges could be overcome. This document describes the summit design process, and details the outputs of each working group.