Darian Rodriguez Heyman's Blog, page 2

Universal Access to Sanitation: How Do We Get There?

The world achieved the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) of halving the proportion of the population without sustainable access to safe drinking water in 2010—ahead of schedule. But progress towards sanitation goals lags far behind, with 2.5 billion people still lacking access to improved sanitation.

Many factors contribute to this gap:

Unrealized demand: Most people understand the importance of clean water for well-being, but there is often a lack of understanding about why sanitation services, too, are essential for good health.
Behavior change is hard: It takes effort and resources to help people not accustomed to using toilets or washing their hands to transition to new systems and practices.
Sanitation systems are complex: Effective sanitation services require coordination between actors at different stages, from developing customer demand, to delivering services, to removing the waste.

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), set to be finalized this month, are expected to include universal access to clean water and sanitation by 2030. That is an ambitious goal, and if the world is to meet it, it has some significant catching up to do on sanitation.

Momentum is building, led in particular by the Clean India campaign’s pledge that everyone in that country will have access to a toilet by 2019.

This is an enormous undertaking. Though thousands of toilets have been built as a part of the campaign, a number of early reports mention difficulties with getting people to use them. The city of Ahmedabad is even implementing a one-rupee reward for residents who use public toilets.

The funding landscape has presented challenges as well. More funding is consistently directed toward water provision, despite the fact that the needs are greater in sanitation.

The goal of reaching universal sanitation access seems daunting, especially considering that the world did not meet the less ambitious MDG of halving the proportion of the world lacking access to improved sanitation services.

Given that sanitation has much further to go but still garners less attention and funding than clean water, how can the WASH sector accelerate to achieve universal sanitation access by 2030? What low-cost models should be embraced, and by whom?

At the Skoll Foundation, we’ve seen convincing evidence of social entrepreneurs making a difference in the lives of those who are under-served by existing sanitation systems:

They help develop community-led solutions, engaging with local governments and service providers to understand the business case for extending coverage to the poor.
They mobilize capital from the investment community to increase financing for services.
They monitor the solutions that have been put into place to track the durability of their interventions.
They empower local entrepreneurs and community groups to manage and maintain the systems that have been put in place.

This series features some of these approaches, as well as the perspectives of some of the leading organizations in the sector on how to achieve universal access to sanitation by 2030.

As we hear from these leaders, we start to get a clearer picture of what viable solutions might look like:

Joe Madiath, Executive Director of Gram Vikas, wants us to remember that sanitation solutions must be grounded in the dignity of the users, especially women. “The poor should not be humiliated by their sanitation facilities,” he argues.


Slum Dwellers International offers the experience of their alliances in 34 countries around the world. Community involvement, they believe, “is essential and non-negotiable.” Sanitation can improve only when the affected communities refuse to accept the status quo and innovate to change their situation.


IRC CEO Patrick Moriarty frames the relationship between private and public sector approaches. Of course we need social entrepreneurs and the innovation they bring, he argues, but if we want to achieve universal access to sanitation we also need government leadership and public money. The marginal costs of extending coverage to everyone are just too high.


So how should entrepreneurs approach sanitation? Eleanor Allen, CEO of Water for People, explains the sanitation as a business (SAAB) model. Scaling up requires partnerships that create “uniformity across sustainable low-cost sanitation models, access to financing, and data collection and sharing for learning and continuous improvement.”


Neil Jeffrey (CEO) and Georges Mikhael (Head of Sanitation) at Water & Sanitation for the Urban Poor offer a specific set of policy prescriptions that they believe will fix the market for sanitation services and enable universal access. Countries need to level the legal and regulatory playing field to enable entrepreneurs to do business; break through market barriers like over-complicated business registration processes; and do more to kick-start the market.


At Water.org, CEO Gary White stresses the powerful role that microfinance can play in increasing access to sanitation. To date, its WaterCredit program has reached 2.6 million people in 10 countries, providing users with small loans to purchase toilets.


Wash Advocates CEO John Oldfield sounds a hopeful and ambitious note, reporting on a recent conference in India where the leaders of 25 Indian states announced that they aimed to end open defecation and provide universal sanitation well ahead of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s already-ambitious 2019 target.

Getting to universal coverage by 2030 will be no easy task, but by drawing on their decades of experience in the struggle for sanitation, these social entrepreneurs offer us a vision and a way forward.

Technology for Development: Hammers Looking for Nails?

Earlier this year the Berkeley Lab released their “50 Breakthroughs” study – on the 50 most critical scientific and technological breakthroughs required for sustainable global development.

SkollWorldForum.org asked Diana Jue, social entrepreneur and co-founder of Essmart, to reflect on a pointed insight from the Berkeley Lab report:

 “Too often, technologies are hammers looking for nails, and incremental technologies with little impact are far too often over-celebrated because they offer compelling narratives about the technologists and entrepreneurs who create them.”

This quotation is very true. Unfortunately it’s these incremental technologies with little impact that get funded, because their inventors have a great back story or because the products photograph well and are promoted as the next world-changing device

But since there is actually no demand for the product, nobody buys it. Such new technologies only exist because funders think they’re “good” for people.

My Essmart colleagues and I have come across products that receive a lot of attention in the US and abroad, but on the ground, they’re actually the last things that people would want for themselves and their families.

These are products like the LifeStraw (because no one actually wants to drink dirty water from a puddle, despite a built-in filtration system) and Soccket (because no one really cares that a soccer ball will harness energy). There are entire technology sectors that only exist in the world of philanthropy and social impact, not because people want them, but because funders think people need them.

We spend time on the ground asking what people want, since most of the time, what people want is actually what they need to make a living, support their families, and move up in life.

One of the requests that we frequently get is for headlamps. Our customers have defined certain specifications for this headlamp and, as product distributors, Essmart has searched high and low for someone who already makes it. We’ve even asked existing manufacturers in the social impact space to consider making one.

But we haven’t found the product yet, and no one seems to want to take recommendations from customers. It’s surprising how passive certain companies can be toward their target market, and I think it reflects a problem that exists in the technology-for-development space.

What’s your technology?

My colleagues and I have been developing Essmart for three years now, working on the ground and fundraising. I cannot tell you how many people ask us at the beginning of our pitch, “So… what’s your technology?”

Essmart doesn’t have a technology. We’re a rural distribution company, and our innovation is in our process, not in some product.

Processes are where the real gaps are in development. Even in the public sphere, there are usually funds available for infrastructure projects, but there are frequently massive difficulties in implementation.

The same problem happens in the technology-for-development space. Technologies exist that have the potential to benefit the lives of low-income users, but the processes for getting the products to them are broken. That’s why Essmart exists: to fix the process of rural distribution.

Unfortunately, compared to a fancy new technology, processes are completely unsexy. They can’t be photographed easily, and they’re difficult to describe. But it’s more important for broken processes like rural distribution to be fixed so that new technologies can become actual solutions.

The difference between technologies that make it and those that don’t

Life-improving technologies that make it to the people they’re aimed at all have two things in common: paying customers and an ecosystem that supports sales. Products that make it have users who aren’t merely seen as beneficiaries passively receiving goods from charitable organizations.

Instead, the designer and entrepreneur understand that users are active agents who make their own decisions and will invest in a products when they see its value. The designer and entrepreneur also consider the processes by which the products are sold, as new technologies cannot be introduced in a vacuum.

Quite often, well-intentioned product designers create technologies to address needs that face the world’s bottom billion. And, quite often, although these inventions can solve the technical aspects of the problem, they fail to resonate with potential users. The products were designed without an understanding of what’s valued by the user.

For example, many designers know that the potential users of their products are going to be very poor. As a result, they design for affordability, removing features that they deem unnecessary and making the product as bare bones as possible.

We’ve seen that this strategy often doesn’t work. Within our network, customers want value for money.

In our catalogue, we have solar lanterns of different prices. There’s a $10 lantern, and there’s also a $35 lantern. Which sells more? The $35 lantern, because it’s better quality, brighter, and also works as a mobile phone charger.

There are many other examples of designers creating life-improving technologies without understanding how the end user values or undervalues the result.

Right ecosystem for distribution

Understanding what customers value is one aspect of getting products to them. The other aspect of getting life-improving technologies to people is ensuring that the right ecosystem is in place for distribution.

We’ve seen so many product-based social enterprises propose that their products will magically sell due to “word of mouth” once the first users experience the social and economic benefits of using the product. This just doesn’t work.

There need to be ecosystems set up that introduce innovative, life-improving technologies to customers. These ecosystems need to handle marketing and creating awareness about the technology and the problem it solves, distributing the product, and providing after-sales service for it. No life-improving technology will sustainably make it to customers without these elements in place.

Distribution: lessons learned

We’ve learned a lot of things through our experiences with distribution. It’s not an easy sector to break into, but there are huge potential gains from distributing products well. As one founder of a well-known solar lantern company once told me, “The product is king, but distribution is God.”

Trust is key, as products and information move through relationships. Our customers trust their shopkeepers’ opinion on products, and this is a relationship that we piggyback on when distributing life-improving technologies.

Our direct customers are rural retail stores, not villagers. Our job is to get the shopkeeper on board. He’ll do the rest.

After-sales service is not optional. This is what makes it possible to sell durable technologies. Villagers in our south Indian market are used to cheap products that are imported from China. These products break within three months, but people buy them because they’re affordable and available.

A more expensive, higher-quality product requires much more upfront investment, so you have to guarantee the end customers that their money is protected, through after-sales service.

Gender matters. Low-income, rural areas in developing countries are not the same as small towns in America. Male and female customers and salespeople are not the same.

We’re learning more about this through our work and research, but there is indeed a difference between how men and women use and value products. If you are a distributor, it would be to your and your customers’ advantages to be aware of these differences and to market your products appropriately.

Why Does Overhead Have Such a Bad Reputation?

A lot of non-profits feel compelled to talk about how little they spend on overhead. But when you tell donors and funders that 100 percent of the funds they give will go to the cause, what are you actually saying?

You are reassuring them that their dollars will go straight to the outcome your organization is working towards, but not the infrastructure that makes that work possible – so-called overhead expenses.

After all, everyone knows that donors will feel disappointed if their money is spent on overhead, right? Those are expenses that should be tightly managed and minimized.

The way we look at how charities work is wrong

Increasingly, donors are paying close attention to how their funds are being spent. There are investigations and exposés on charity spending habits.

Rating systems like Charity Navigator evaluate a charitable organization based on its expenses, assign them to broad categories like “programs,” “fundraising,” and “administration,” and then pit these against one another.

But when you tell your donors that you are trying to minimize your overhead costs, you are telling them that overhead is not important, that it has nothing to do with the altruistic, mission-focused areas of your work.

In fact, overhead includes things like:

operational expenses, like financial reporting and auditing, travel, attendance at conferences, professional development, program evaluation, legal and other professional services, and marketing
capital investments, like technology, tools, and workspace
key staff roles, such as bookkeeping, fundraising, public outreach, and research

These are not frivolous by any stretch of the imagination. If a charity is to achieve its vision, raising brand awareness, growing capacity, and properly managing day-to-day operations are absolutely vital.

Why you should be proud to invest in overhead

Consider how a year of program evaluation could help improve your work – third-party experts helping you set baselines and benchmarks, and establishing processes to gather and report qualified results. Think about how investing in technology and digital solutions could enable community building and drive your public mobilization.

Imagine how recruiting and growing top talent to deliver your programs and services could help you grow your organization and realize your mission faster. These are all things the corporate sector actively invests in; social purpose organizations need to uphold the same kind of thinking.

Financial accountability and transparency are as important to non-profits and charities as they are to corporations. But comparing the amount directly spent on the social purpose work itself and the operational expenses associated with making it happen is not the way to achieve greater accountability.

Crush the idea of a charity case

Enough with earnest appeals for funds that favor sizzle over substance. The most important measure of an organization’s work is the social impact: the outcomes being achieved every day and the long-term transformation it supports. Here in Canada, people say they trust charities and non-profits and yet they are quick to object that they spend too much money on things like administration and fundraising.

Organizations should build trust and then leverage it. Your donors have already declared their allegiance. Be proud to talk about how you are investing in good monitoring and in testing new approaches.

Deepen donors’ trust by making things more efficient as well as more effective. Invest in your growth, by developing new revenue streams and expanding your operations. Show your donors how confident you are that your theory of change works, and what it will take to deliver more “good,” more effectively.

If you are focused on the change you want to make in the world, your best donors will be more confident than ever that 100 percent of their money is being well spent, no matter where it ends up in the financial report.

Public Goods: Should Government Be A Broker?

This is the second of a three-part series by Dan Ebanks, where he asks how we can come up with an effective resource allocation model for government spend – making public money go further and getting it to where it’s needed.

In my last post I reflected on how stock market investors are looking more and more at social impact metrics because “new economy” companies are increasingly creating public goods. It’s no longer enough to rely on earnings per share, price-earnings ratios and cash flow.

Traditionally, government has provided public goods. Instead of acting as a direct service provider, could there be a role for government in the creation of new kinds of open platforms that facilitate the exchange of these goods? For example, platforms which broker connections between people – someone seeking care for an elderly relative, or trying to form a group to solve local problems. One could argue that government, local government in particular, is well positioned to take on this type of role.

Could this be an alternative to trying to squeeze ever more efficiency out of government? At what point do we start to ask, “is this the right system?”

The current situation

In the UK there has been much debate about the future role of the local council. Broadly speaking, there is a political and economic consensus that the council should enable the delivery of services, rather than providing them itself.

Compulsory competitive tendering in the early 1990s and the Labour governments of the late 90s and 2000s saw an increase in private provision of local public services. The global financial crash of 2008 accelerated this shift towards the commissioning model.

One outcome of the 2015 UK general election this past May will be a renewed drive to achieve even more savings in the public sector. Efficiencies have been the source of much of the savings achieved over the last five years – staff doing more, communities playing a role, services redesigned – but there is a limit to how much efficiency you can wring out of a system. At some point it might be better to ask, “how can we do things differently?”

Moving beyond the commissioning model

If councils are to move beyond commissioning, adopting an “aggregator” model may be the best strategy. Councils are at the center of local networks, have a high-level view of the needs of local residents and understand the current level of service provision. And there has been a big push in local government around the “personalization” agenda – public service users exercising complete control over their choice of provider.

Facilitated by technology, these drivers offer to reconfigure councils as aggregators – organizations that do not produce or deliver services, but collect information on them from a number of sources, and draw users to platforms that facilitate an easy matching of needs and prices.

Social Value as a game changer?

We need a coherent framework to effect this shift from deliverer and commissioner to aggregator. Government has to be at the heart of this new dynamic, with initiatives such as the Personalisation and Prevention Agendas, the recognition of the value of open data in service design and delivery, as well as the growing need for community-based public services, gravitating around this core idea of a new model for local government.

The Social Value Act could be an important part of this new framework. In the final part of this series, I will look at the transformative potential of this unusual and sometimes maligned piece of legislation.

Could Big Data Have Saved Cecil the Lion?

The response to the death of Cecil the lion in July was unique: after all, every year 600 lions are hunted legally, with minimal protest. After the initial backlash, a serious debate about wildlife conservation swept the world. For conservationists, this was an unexpected and welcome turn of events.

It is easy to dismiss the outrage around Cecil’s death as a fad, simplistic or hypocritical, but it would be a shame to let the lessons learned from the response go to waste. We should look for intelligent, pragmatic, and creative ways to apply what we’ve learned to support global wildlife conservation.

Whether through habitat loss, climate change, or poaching – which contributes to the world’s fourth-largest illicit trade – a staggering number of wild animals are being lost. Wildlife conservation is struggling; apart from pockets of public and private support, the life of an endangered orangutan in Indonesia, for example, has no place on the majority of people’s agendas.

For conservationists it is nearly impossible to juggle all the competing priorities: saving biodiversity, addressing systemic causes of environmental and social influences on habitat, and making people care enough to raise the funds needed to do their work. Cecil’s death has managed to put wildlife on the world’s radar, something that endless campaigning has been unable to do.

There is a bond between animals and people and it begins when we are children. All our stuffed toys, children’s books, cartoons, and movies are centered around animals. None of us, as children, would have knowingly done anything that would result in wild animals dying. Somewhere along the way many of us lose this feeling, until a Cecil or Satao captures our imagination again.

So what was it about these animals that made us care again, even though tens of thousands of animals are dying similarly, or even more brutally, every year?

While Cecil was indeed a beautiful animal, being tracked as part of a study, well known in Zimbabwe, and the story of his death was quite brutal, these were just contributing factors. The real difference is in the name. Luke Donald, program director for National Geographic’s Big Cat Initiative recently wrote that when animals become well known to people, as Cecil did, it “becomes easier to relate to them and communicate their tales, which creates an additional draw for tourism and human interest.”

Humans naturally gravitate toward things they can assign human qualities to, and simply putting a human name on Cecil made him more relatable, allowing him to become a celebrity of sorts. If he didn’t have a name, a cute one at that, there would have been far less attention.

When you hear about elephants dying or dolphins being slaughtered, it touches a chord. But except for the most committed conservationists or wildlife enthusiasts, it is soon forgotten. We simply don’t have a way of further connecting with those animals or feeling that we have a stake in their survival. We find it sad that they are disappearing, but it seems too far away for us to get involved.

Real-time, tangible evidence is what makes people pause. I am lucky to live in a place where I can witness firsthand the magnificence of a mountain gorilla, and also experience the trauma and moral outrage of seeing the carcass of an elephant shot by poachers. I have a bond with these animals, but transferring that sentiment to others is very hard.

I started Internet of Elephants to apply technology to facilitate that bond.

I want to see a world in which we care about animals on a daily basis – what they do, where they go, who they meet, and whether they survive. A world where we have a vested interest in their survival; where, when their lives are interrupted, so too are ours.

We have used technology to create stronger connections between people across the world and it has changed the way we interact, both with those we know as well as those we don’t. There are opportunities for us to make the same connections between people and individual animals. Our attention and reaction to Cecil seem to indicate that we are eager for that connection.

At Internet of Elephants, we are incorporating these lessons into our solutions. Technology can give more power to the conservation sector by building a stronger connection between a global audience and wild animals. Big data can empower the masses to help the cause, and to raise funds from avenues that have not previously been explored.

Animals such as Cecil and hundreds of others are already being tracked with the help of ever-advancing GPS collaring technology. Through educational and competitive games, and interactive visualization of data about animal movements, we are building solutions that bring these animals into our classrooms and into the palms of our hands.

If this technology had been deployed sooner, we think the world could have been as enthralled by Cecil’s life as they were by his death.

Internet of Things Presents Opportunities for Social Entrepreneurs

In recent years, we’ve been hearing a great deal about the Internet of Things and the ways in which it is beginning to impact businesses. The IoT is the name given to the network of objects embedded with electronics that allow them to communicate and exchange data.

Many aspects of the IoT – automated fitness tracking, for instance, or home thermostats that react to our preferences – are already seeping into our day-to-day lives.

The IoT has also become increasingly visible in industry, where a number of sectors are using it on a broad scale to improve efficiency. But the transition that has yet to impact some of the ventures that could make the most exciting use of IoT innovations.

Social entrepreneurs can make good use of technologies that fall under the IoT umbrella. Here are a few examples.

Health tracking ventures

Health tracking and disease detection are popular ventures for social entrepreneurs, particularly those operating in developing countries. Vera Solutions is a company that is working to sift through “mountains of dead data” to help health organizations better fight HIV/AIDS in South Africa. Health information on people with the virus already exists – it’s just being overlooked due to poor tracking and collection processes.

This is a natural fit for IoT technologies. Wired wrote a nice article on home medical tracking via app technology, and this same concept can work wonders in areas where health information is often lost in the clutter. While it’s a stretch to arm people living with HIV/AIDS or other illnesses with their own apps and wearable technology, a single iPad can allow a worker to gather health data on entire communities in a day or two. The potential improvements in efficiency for social entrepreneurs working on health tracking and illness detection can save lives.

Delivery of vital resources

The supply of vital resources and tools is another common focus among social business ventures, and one that’s illustrated by The Paradigm Project. Seeking to solve the issue of respiratory diseases caused by smoke from indoor cooking fires, The Paradigm Project has supplied people in developing countries with well over 35,000 clean-burning stoves. It hopes to get that number to an incredible five million within the next five years.

That’s an admirable effort with the potential to change and even save countless lives. However, where delivery of products and resources is concerned, how can companies best handle shipping?

This is another area in which the IoT has already shown progress in improving business efficiency. Networkfleet’s use of the IoT in shipping reveals that by equipping vehicles with GPS tracking, WiFi, and programs to measure vehicle diagnostics, companies can gain greater control over how their resources are getting where they need to go.

As of now, this sort of initiative has a greater impact on large-scale shipping industries that operate across countries and continents, but there’s certainly potential for automated shipping and delivery management to improve the ways in which a company like The Paradigm Project accomplishes its goals.

Environmental safety measurement

People in developing countries often cope with poor air quality due to things like the cooking fires addressed by The Paradigm Project. This is also the focus of One Earth Designs. This startup sells solar-powered tools that can cook, purify water, and even produce electricity. The company is operating specifically in rural China, but holds some interesting potential for purifying environments and providing clean energy.

Where the IoT comes in is in actually measuring environmental variables to make sure devices like the solar cooker from One Earth Designs are having the desired effect. Make Use Of highlighted a number of products that already exist to monitor air quality in a “smart” manner. They immediately alert residents to problematic substances in the air and can even connect to mobile devices for constant monitoring or quick communication.

Automated, intelligent air tracking quality could assist social entrepreneurs who are working in this sector.

From these examples it’s clear that social entrepreneurs can make good use of emerging IoT technologies. Don’t be surprised if the next wave of socially and environmentally conscious entrepreneurs looks to take advantage of some of these connections.

Behavioral Economics in Action: Using Theory to Drive Social Change

As social entrepreneurs we see the world for what it can be, not what it is. We are looking to inspire action and change the world. Mass social change starts with individuals, so driving behavior change at an individual level is an important task for social entrepreneurs. An academic discipline called behavioral economics offers some insights on how to achieve this change.

Behavioral economics sits somewhere between psychology and traditional economics and seeks to understand how we make economic decisions. Crucially there is an emphasis on uncovering how we make errors in our decision-making processes, errors which often stem from mental shortcuts called cognitive biases.

Our cognitive biases tend to serve us well and help us make quick decisions. However we often rely on a shortcut when a longer, more deliberative thought process is required. This can set us up for failure.

Anticipating how people fall short in their decision-making gives social entrepreneurs an opportunity to frame their messages in the right way to drive positive social change. Research from behavioral economics can therefore provide some much-needed inspiration when designing solutions to tackle the big social issues we face.

While this research helps us understand how we go wrong, it’s often hard to find concrete examples of how these lessons are applied in the real world, outside of the lab.

Let’s look at three examples of socially-aware organizations using well-known cognitive biases to drive behavior change in the real world.

Opower

Behavioral economics research has found that competition is a good way to motivate groups. Two particular cognitive biases are at work here:

Social comparison bias: People experience feelings of competitiveness when someone is perceived to be better than them. We are seeing this becoming ever more pervasive in the age of social media.

Social proof: People tend assume the actions of others in an attempt to reflect correct behaviour for a given situation.

Opower is a software company that has used the power of competition by leveraging social comparisons to inspire neighbors to compete for energy savings. They have taken this a step further through a social energy app on Facebook that encourages friendly competition among Facebook friends by providing social proof of energy use amongst friends.

It’s hard to raise awareness about important social issues like climate change. The leap to leveraging social networks like Facebook with this intervention is an incredibly powerful way to steer the conversation towards energy efficiency.

This is a great example of research applied at scale to drive behavior change that will help people live in a more energy efficient and sustainable manner. Opower are now working with more than 95 utilities and serving more than 50 million homes in nine countries.

Behavioural Design Lab

The Behavioural Design Lab in London leveraged two aspects of behavioral economics to help homeowners retrofit drafty, energy-inefficient homes with insulation.

The framing effect: People will react differently to a decision depending on how it is presented. The behavioral design lab framed the decision as a choice between a warm home and a cold home, and avoided using the alienating term “retrofitting”.

The default effect: In the question above, the team set the default option to “yes”, meaning people were compelled to choose a warmer home, thus taking action to retrofit their drafty home.

The project was a success; participants were recruited four times faster than for similar projects in the same region.

Which LED Light

The anchoring effect describes the common human tendency to rely on the first piece of information offered (the “anchor”) when making a decision. After an anchor is set, people make judgements in relation to the anchor, biasing the interpretation of subsequent information.

At Which LED Light we have used the anchoring effect on our page loading screen to show people how long LED lights can last and how much money they can save by switching to LED light bulbs. LED lights are more expensive than traditional incandescent alternatives, so we are testing if using the lifetime and cost savings as an anchor helps get over the higher upfront cost.

We have also made use of framing by showing the initial savings per year per light plus the lifetime of the light in our product results section to show the value of the light rather than the simple up-front cost.

There is a wealth of information out there illuminating how and why behavioral economics works. We hope these examples inspire you to put your own spin on the best-practice lessons emerging from academia, to drive your own social change objectives.

Leveraging Locals to Turn Poo Into Power

ZooShare is a unique renewable energy project based in Toronto, Canada, and funded by the local community.

We are working with the Toronto Zoo and Canada’s largest grocery chain to recycle 3,300 tons of manure and 15,400 tons of inedible food waste into renewable power for the provincial power grid. In addition to creating enough power for 250 homes each year, we will also produce a nutrient-rich fertilizer, which will be used to return nutrients to the soil.

We were able to fund our project by leveraging local supporters: We raised US $1.7 million in just over a year using a product called community bonds.

Community bonds fall under the category of crowd funding, but instead of using a digital platform like Kickstarter or Indiegogo to raise money and dispense rewards, we chose to create a local economic development opportunity by selling investment securities to the people who live and work near the project. This empowers local residents to put their money where their mouth is and support the development of renewable energy projects.

“Community bonds are an investment product that allows members of the public, people who may not be accredited investors, to directly invest in and then earn interest income from local projects,” says Daniel Bida, Executive Director of ZooShare.

He learned about community bonds from two other Toronto-based organizations that were ahead of ZooShare on the development curve: First, the Centre for Social Innovation (using community bonds to purchase real estate) and SolarShare (using the same model to fund solar projects).

But why bonds and not shares? As a not-for-profit, ZooShare was not able to sell shares with dividends. Shares are an equity stake in a business, whereas Community Bonds allow not-for-profits to pay supporters with interest income.

Being a not-for-profit ensured that ZooShare could embed its mission into the business model. After repaying bondholders, ZooShare reinvests its profits into growing the community-owned biogas sector, “so instead of a steadily growing snowball of profit, we will have a steadily growing snowball of impact,” says Bida.

The financing model works in a very conventional way, with a very unconventional twist. Just like most construction projects, ZooShare is investing equity that will be leveraged to contract debt and finance the project.

“It’s just that we are also borrowing the equity we are investing from our members,” says Bida, adding “I think this could be applicable to all types of social entrepreneurship: Many investors are looking to do more with their money than just earn more money.”

In ZooShare’s case, investors see the value in a local project that has a local environmental impact. Furthermore, investors see value in ZooShare’s educational mission, which teaches people about the value of waste.

“Currently we run in-school workshops teaching students about how waste is a valuable resource that can be used to create energy. Once the plant is operational, these workshops will be complimented by on-site tours, giving visitors an up-close and personal look at the power of biogas production,” says Bida.

Furthermore, our high-profile location at a popular tourist attraction, the Toronto Zoo, means that potentially a million visitors a year could learn about and experience the true value of waste.

This is part of ZooShare’s story. When it comes to successfully marketing bonds, Bida says his primary tip would be to “focus on the story…Making the impact meaningful, authentic, and tangible. Most of the ZooShare investors are primarily excited about the environmental impact and educational potential, not only the returns.

“Keep the messaging as simple and straightforward as possible. People are already hesitant to purchase investment products from new organizations, so do whatever you can to make your community bond seem like something familiar.”

GSBI Accelerator Program is “Better Than an MBA” for Global Social Entrepreneurs

“The Global Social Benefit Institute Accelerator program is better than an MBA.” So said Jonathan Mativo of Kenya, Executive Director of ICT For Development, a social enterprise delivering community-based and computer technology (ICT) and job training in three countries in East Africa.

Jonathan was one of the 15 social entrepreneurs in this year’s GSBI Accelerator program who on August 20 pitched their business plans to an audience of impact investors and members of the social entrepreneurship community. The Investor Showcase, the culmination of the 10-day in-residence portion of the GSBI Accelerator program, provides a perfect reminder of why we all do the work we do.

After the morning of presentations by the 15 social entrepreneurs – working in India, Haiti, Nepal, South Africa, Kenya, Pakistan, Mexico, Bangladesh, Nigeria, and the United States – a number of people came up to me to say what an amazing cohort it was and how compelling the presentations were.

Even more important, however, the presentations accomplished their practical goals, resulting in at least 45 individual meetings between impact investors and social entrepreneurs. And that is exactly what we try to facilitate with the Investor Showcase: connections between investment-ready social enterprises and impact investors who have the appropriate forms of capital for those social enterprises.

Who are the entrepreneurs behind these social enterprises? Here are a few examples:

In Haiti, Carbon Roots International converts agricultural waste biomass into renewable green charcoal cooking briquettes. With 98 percent of the country deforested, Haiti is locked in a cycle of poverty and dependence on charcoal for cooking. “Everyone deserves to live in a world where they don’t have to choose between food and fuel,” says Eric Sorensen, CEO and co-founder.


Practice Makes Perfect, based in New York, provides a summer enrichment program for low-income students that reverses the “summer slide”: a loss of proficiency that results in students falling further and further behind in their learning. “We’re narrowing the achievement gap, one summer at a time,” says Karim Abouelnaga, CEO.


“We empower women to power the world,” says Anya Chernoff, Executive Director of Empower Generation. The social enterprise trains rural women in Nepal as energy entrepreneurs – selling safe, affordable solar lights – while building clean energy distribution networks.


The Mobile Alliance for Maternal Action (MAMA) is reducing maternal and infant mortality by providing age- and stage-based vital health information to new and expectant mothers across the developing world, directly into their mobile phones.

The latest version of the program, MAMA 2.0, “will allow us to reach 40 million women in 20 countries, providing the glue that will bond fragmented health systems together,” says Executive Director Kirsten Gagnaire.

Banka BioLoo in India offers affordable, sustainable sanitation to the half of India’s population – 600 million people – who lack access to toilets and therefore must practice open defecation. Following the GSBI Investor Showcase, Managing Director Sanjay Banka wrote: “GSBI has added many dimensions to Banka BioLoo since our immersion in the Accelerator. Every GSBI team member left a strong mark on us and stole our hearts.”

Watching the presentations and meeting the latest GSBI Accelerator cohort, I was reminded of what makes the GSBI approach different and important:

We’re located in the heart of Silicon Valley, by any measure the world’s most successful entrepreneurial ecosystem. Our Silicon Valley location gives us access to an incredible network of executives who have decades of experience taking ideas and building them to scale.

From this pool of executives we draw our GSBI Mentors, who accompany the social entrepreneurs as they go through the 10-month GSBI Accelerator program. The mentors help the entrepreneurs discern their business models so they can sustainably deliver their goods and services to have an impact on the poor.

We’re a Jesuit university, so we have both strong intellectual resources and a pervasive humanistic and social justice orientation. This ethos is imbued into the entire GSBI methodology. The focus is on poverty eradication and protecting the planet, but the way that we help social entrepreneurs is akin to the way that we help students become future leaders.


We offer different programs for social enterprises, tailored to stages of venture development. Our three-day GSBI Boost program, delivered in-country, is for early-stage enterprises at the ideation or blueprint stage.

Our six-month GSBI Online program, with one entrepreneur matched to one mentor, is for enterprises validating their business models.

The GSBI Accelerator program lasts 10 months; it’s mostly online except for the 10 days in residence at Santa Clara University. Two Silicon Valley mentors work with each entrepreneur to delve into more advanced curriculum: go-to-market and get-to-market strategies, supply chain logistics, economies of scale, customer acquisition and support, governance, and so on.

We also take a rigorous approach to everything from the selection of GSBI Accelerator social enterprises to friendly but intensive mock investor due diligence meetings with the Accelerator entrepreneurs. Everything we do is designed to move us, and them, toward our BHAG—Big Hairy Audacious Goal (a term coined by leadership expert Jim Collins and his co-author Jerry Porras in their 1994 book Built to Last) – of positively impacting 1 billion poor people worldwide by 2020.

The 2015 GSBI Investor Showcase was one more indication that we’re moving in the right direction toward achieving that bold goal.

Make Sure Development Goals Live Up To Promises On Disability

This month world leaders will agree on a new set of development goals that will shape the lives of everyone around the world over the next 15 years. These Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) have the potential to lift people out of poverty, ensure the inclusion of previously excluded people, and do all of this in a sustainable way. But the adoption of the SDGs in September is just the first step.

Fifteen years ago world leaders agreed on an ambitious development framework consisting of eight Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). Unfortunately, the MDGs didn’t address the significant burden that disability place on communities in the developing world.

The SDGs present a new opportunity to make sure that another generation of people with disabilities is not left behind.

The leaders and groups that are currently finalizing these new goals have reached a consensus that disability must be incorporated into the mainstream of international development policy. Crucially, this consensus will give people with disabilities a tool to advocate for their inclusion in country-level policies.

While this is a massive step forward and a wake-up call to the international community that including people with disabilities is a core principle of sustainable development – not an afterthought – it is only the first hurdle. The next challenge will be to ensure that what is being promised by the goals will be delivered once this process goes from a global conversation to an agenda that must be implemented by countries at the national level. Funders, nonprofits, and other groups need to maintain pressure on governments to include people with disabilities in their development plans, even when inclusion is challenging or costly.

Why is this so important right now? Because around one billion people – or 15 per cent of the world’s population – have a disability, and 80 percent live in developing countries. On average, one household in every four in the poorest communities has a member with a disability, which means at least two billion people live with the impact of disability on a daily basis.

In many countries those with disabilities are the most excluded and hardest to reach of all groups in their community. They are less likely to have access to healthcare and education, and in turn find earning a living and lifting themselves out of poverty that much more difficult, if not impossible.

Last week I met an inspiring group of people in India who came together to form a disabled people’s organization. They have identified the drivers of their exclusion and have come together to call for accessible transportation, fair access to financial services, and for their voices to be heard by political decision-makers.

In a way, community groups like this are already pushing governments to meet the SDG commitments, before they have been put into action. And when the Indian Government – like the other 192 member states of the UN – puts pen to paper at the UN General Assembly this month, they will have just promised the one billion people with disabilities that they will be included. That’s another weapon in the arsenal of those fighting day-in and day-out to have their voices heard.

The SDGs are a huge opportunity to address some of the most urgent challenges of inequality, to take a step forward in support of human rights, and to protect our shared global environment.

Now we need to see the governments of the world agree to this ambitious text at the UN’s General Assembly in September and ensure that what gets agreed gets implemented.