The Long Haul

March 31, 2015March 31, 2015 ~ Sasha ~ 4 Comments

“I’ve just heard about a great new ______ that will solve the ______ problem!”

And so goes the optimistic, well-intentioned refrain. The blanks can be straws or a well or a hospital on a boat or a cheap rugged laptop or or or….it doesn’t matter, because the trope is the same: there’s a thing that someone has invented (usually in the West) and it will finally solve such-and-such problem for good. (And, implied, it will be quick and easy!)

I’m torn about how to react to this. There’s a version of this story that I find hugely energizing, and another that feels like a modern, techno-optimistic belittling of a faraway problem, one that creates a caricature of the problem and of the people living with it…and this is never a good thing.

On the plus side, I deeply, emphatically believe that one of the biggest opportunities in the world is to get our best and brightest minds focusing on solving the most important problems of our generation. I don’t need a toothbrush that might deliver caffeine, or “mega” and “mini” sized M&Ms (thanks Tim), or a razor with 22 blades.

But just because we (sometimes) turn our attention to the big problems in the world doesn’t mean we will flip a switch and easily solve them. That great idea may be great, but after it’s made into a great product, that product will still have to be manufactured, it will have to get through customs, it will have to survive contact with customers and distribution and dealer margins and fraud and theft and warranties and repairs…usually all of this far away from reliable sources of power, good roads, good anything that makes things easier to pull off. That’s a long-term play.

The notion that any big, thorny problem will “just” be solved by a better gizmo not only runs the risk of pouring resources into the wrong initiatives, it also belittles the problem and, in so doing, belittles the people who are struggling to live without access to safe water, to affordable, reliable power, or to decent, affordable schools.

Yes, we are desperate for breakthroughs, the kinds that leverage technology platforms to deliver better information and banking services, or ones that capitalize on and accelerate declining cost curves for solar to engineer all sorts of products in new and better ways – ways that cut the costs by 100-fold while not sacrificing quality.

But achieving these sorts of breakthroughs gets us to the starting line, not to the finish line, and anyone who tells you otherwise is either naïve or is angling for a fast buck.

Getting whatever that miraculous invention is to a few billion people is always going to be a long road, one with twists and turns and endless surprising pitfalls along the way. Navigating this road will take grit and determination and perseverance beyond the capacity of most people. Indeed, this is the “sacred trust” of leadership that Chinua Achebe speaks about so eloquently, it’s what we must look for in all leaders who are making real change in the world.

The problems they are working on are not insurmountable. Not by a long shot. But there are also no quick fixes.

Indeed, everyone I know who is changing the world is in the long-haul business.

5 tough questions

November 17, 2011November 18, 2011 ~ Sasha ~ Leave a comment

Today is the second annual NextGen:Charity conference. To commemorate the conference, Ari Teman, co-founder of the conference along with Jonah Halper, asked me to respond to five questions about innovation in the developing world, leadership, faith, blogging, and failure. Here’s the interview (the link to yesterday’s Huffington Post article is here).

1. There’s a lot of talk about sharing our innovations with the 3rd world — let’s flip that around. What are some of the lessons the “developed world” can learn from the innovators you support (who have to operate on pennies a day)?

Extreme frugality, a relentless focus on customers, the ability to navigate complexity and take nothing for granted. In 2003, Acumen Fund connected with the visionary entrepreneur Amitabha Sadangi who realized that he could reverse-engineer drip irrigation systems originally developed in Israel and make them infinitely scalable and radically affordable to poor customers in India. Amitabha knew that poor farmers would need to see an extreme value proposition – the ability to test the system on 1/8^th acre plots and to see payback in less than a year – and that even so the road would be long and hard to change farming practices. Eight years later, Global Easy Water Products has served more than 300,000 farmers, and Amitabha has a lot to teach entrepreneurs globally about creating the minimal viable product to meet the needs of customers for whom value per dollar is paramount and the willingness to take risk is limited. He’s also about the most persistent man you’ll ever meet.

2. The Acumen Fund has a prestigious Fellowship Program where you develop young talent and you also work with some amazing visionaries — what do you see as the key traits of a successful leader?

We expect the Acumen Fund Fellows to possess a unique combination of traits – operational excellence, financial acumen, and what we call moral imagination, the ability to see yourself in another, to walk a mile in her shoes. Each year we select 10 Fellows from a global pool of 700 applicants from 60 countries, and the Fellows are an amazing group from all walks of life. We’ve had people like Jocelyn Wyatt, who has created IDEO.org to bring design thinking and user-centered design to address problems of poverty; Jawad Aslam, who is now pioneering low-income housing for the poor in Pakistan through his company, AMC; or Suraj Sudhakar who, in addition to his day job, has thrown 40 TEDx’s across the slums of Nairobi. In addition to the incredible combination of skills these Fellows bring to the table, what differentiates them is a deep and abiding commitment to seeing the poor not as passive recipients of charity but individuals with hopes, aspiration, and dignity.

3. On your blog you frequently muse on various faiths’ approaches to giving. How does faith inform your leadership and charity work?

When I started blogging I thought I was going to write about philanthropy and social enterprise, but as I continued my exploration I kept on getting to more fundamental questions of service and giving. While I’m a huge believer in the need for innovation to solve some of the world’s toughest problems, there’s also a deep wisdom that all of the faiths have to offer – we just need to be willing to open up our ears and hearts to what they have to teach. Sometimes I worry that we might get too smart in how we approach solving problems and lose our rooting in this centuries-old wisdom. The notion that giving is part of the circle of life is central to all religions and cultures – it connects us to one another, strengthens community, and is an acknowledgment that if we are in a position to give, then we have ourselves been given a great gift.

4. You mentioned you blogged publicly about your Generosity Experiment to encourage yourself to follow-through. How else do you keep yourself motivated?

It’s incredibly easy to stay motivated when you feel like you’re making a difference – it’s when you’re trying to make a difference and failing that your energy drains away. I think we all crave a better world and the moment you get a taste of helping create that, you can never let it go. I sometimes joke that I never knew what I was getting in to when I started blogging, and it’s just as well – it helps to be a little naïve because if you’re not you’ll never jump in. Whether through the crazy, unexpected success of Generosity Day 2011 or when I watch one of the Acumen Fund investees reach its millionth customer served with a product that really improves people’s lives, I know I’m doing the right thing and that I need to keep working harder and smarter.

5. And the question we ask everyone: What’s your most spectacular failure?

Some of the big failures come from fear – like times when I didn’t have the courage to look someone in the eye and ask them to make a big funding commitment for fear they would say no. Really, though, I’m not sure how I feel about putting “spectacular” and “failure” together. The big, real big failures often aren’t the go-down-in-a-blaze-of-glory variety, they are when you wrong someone, disrespect someone, make someone feel small rather than raise them up – and just as often these are sins of omission rather than commission. Those are the ones that sting.

I promise if you blog daily you are going to fail often. You have to decide in advance that you’re ready to fail – if anything it’s the commitment to being open to failure that frees you to ship, to push your ideas to the edge, to dream big. And that all sounds great but that doesn’t mean you won’t write posts that don’t hit the mark, because you will.

This idea that failure is rare is what really holds us back. We are perfect so rarely, and if we stick to our guns the rest of the time, we will learn so much less and share so much less than we have to offer.

Two markets

August 3, 2010August 2, 2010 ~ Sasha ~ 1 Comment

I’ve just finished reading Michael Lewis’ The Big Short. I’m a big Michael Lewis fan so I’m not surprised at how much I enjoyed it (though Lewis’ Moneyball is still at the top of the list for me, especially for anyone who’s interested in using data to make high-stakes decisions – I know you’re out there!!). If you care about markets and the workings of the global economy, I’d say you should run out and read both The Big Short and Too Big to Fail by Andrew Ross Sorkin. Yes, both tell like soap operas, but I know I wouldn’t have slogged through all the subprime bond arcana without a good story and a healthy crop of heroes and villains.

The dispiriting picture Lewis paints is one of huge firms who make the rules by which they make money, and nearly impotent oversight bodies (the ratings agencies) who abdicated responsibility. So, for example, in the run-up to the subprime mortgage crisis, the ratings agencies knew much less than Wall Street (whose main players, in turn, knew much less than they should have) when rating subprime paper; Wall Street firms primed the pump with stories of “low-risk” and “uncorrelated” assets (CDOs) that, as we all now know, were incredibly risky and incredibly correlated; and for many years, Wall Street firms seemed to have enough power over information and prices to create fictitious profits that led to real bonuses the likes of which we’ve never seen.

And of course I’m reading this all a week after the initial public offering by SKS, the first IPO for a microfinance organization in India, about which debate raged online last week.

What has struck me as I follow the SKS debate and then end my days reading about synthetic subprime mortgage bond-backed CDOs, is this: if we are going to forge a new kind of capitalism, one that helps create a world beyond poverty and one that leverages markets but is not beholden to them, the we are going to have to become exceptionally adept at understanding two highly sophisticated, often opaque markets:

The economy of the poor (rural and urban both), who manage money and risk and make sophisticated tradeoffs every day about the simple act of survival (for which Portfolios of the Poor is in my mind the right starting point, but then we need to spend real time in these markets to really understand much of anything);
The economy of the rich, not just to understand how capital moves (though that’s important), but also to understand what “real markets”, the most sophisticated markets in the world, really look like.

More often than not, I think we fall into the trap of grossly oversimplifying both of these markets – we paint the same pictures that were drawn for us in Microeconomic textbooks and imagine stylized, efficient markets with the greater good, magically and invisibly, created for all. Yet the more I understand how the most sophisticated markets function, the less convinced I am by stories that end with “and then market actors will come in and scale and efficiency will follow.”

I don’t know what the SKS IPO means. No doubt it is an important and potentially very positive step. We want people to be competing for the business of poor borrowers (and, hopefully, eventually savers). We want competition to bring prices down and we want the best organizations to have the capital on hand to scale. But it also could be that microfinance is the next subprime mortgage crisis, an edifice built on the backs of a different set of poor people (this time in the developing world). If that is the case then one possible outcome is that some people will get very rich and others – the most vulnerable – will end up holding the bag. Most likely the answer is somewhere in between, and I believe to steer us towards the most positive outcomes we need to sharpen our pencils and bring more sophistication to how we characterize markets for the very rich and the very poor, since increasingly these two will intersect in the coming years and become increasingly interconnected.

My ultimate dream is that, armed with a clear-eyed, sophisticated understanding of how both of these markets really work, we will find a way to bring in capital with a purpose from a class of investors that sees economic return as part of a larger set of returns that they create with their capital. (This may and probably will involve lower economic return that incorporates higher social return). It’s going to need to be both/and (social/economic), not either/or.

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The poverty box

January 7, 2010January 7, 2010 ~ Sasha ~ 3 Comments

Today I registered for a conference and had to check a box about my “area of interest,” so I check off “International Development / poverty.”

And then I realized why only 23% of U.S. philanthropy goes to international causes.¹ We’re stuck in this box. The one that has you pick from: Human rights / Conflict resolution / Women’s issues / Education / Healthcare / Infrastructure / Policy reform / Judicial reform / Poverty alleviation (CHECK) / Etc….

The “how” is so much less important than the “why” in making people understand how urgent this is.

The box I want to check says: “I’m in the business of creating a different world, one in which the 7 out of 10 people globally who are struggling for survival can instead become artists and engineers and teachers and entrepreneurs and CEOs and judges and architects and software programmers and Presidents and mothers who don’t worry if their children will survive to age 5. I’m in the business of realizing the potential of all of the 6.7 billion people on this earth, and not just the 2 billion who were born in the right place at the right time.”

Yeah, that’s the box I want to check.

NOTE 1: the 23% number comes from Jane Wales, and if anyone knows this statistic it’s her. I honestly thought the number was much lower. Does anyone have a source for this number?

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