Generating blueEnergy

The gathering drew over 200 people, including Ashoka-Lemelson Fellows, business executives, and thought leaders, to exchange ideas and shared strategies in areas such as clean water, rural electrification and agriculture. Innovations highlighted included: telemedicine, alternative energy innovations, and the integration of these technologies with mobile technologies. Other hot topics included recent progress in science learning, payment systems, building new partnerships, and inspiring others to enter this field of work. [1]

Hyderabad is a very interesting place.  About 400 years old, founded by a feudal dynasty. About 10 million people and growing at an amazing rate of 200,000 – 300,000 per year, primarily from rural to urban migration. We Ashoka-Lemelson Fellows were housed on the Infosys campus, a very high tech software development firm and the conference took place at the India School of Business (ISB) campus, recently ranked 12th in the world by the Financial Times.  We were not roughing it by any stretch of the imagination.  We could have been in Silicon Valley as far as the facilities went, except for our lack of access to wireless due to security concerns. 

On day 3 my friend Ali Ashgar from the GSBI ’08 picked me up for lunch.  Ali works with micro-finance cooperatives of poor Muslim women in the slums of Hyderabad.  He and his wife and son drove me around Hyderabad so I could see more than just the conference center.  His 2+ year old son was a very good tour guide pointing out everything along the way, only that I couldn’t understand his Hindi.  They took me to "old town" where it is nearly 75% Muslim.  Apparently it was mostly the "untouchables" from the Hindu religion that were drawn to Islam’s promise of equality. 

Some of the conference highlights included:

• Sharing a panel with Sergio Orceansky of Yansa and Harish Hande of SELCO India

• Extensive discussions with micro-consignment model pioneer Greg Van Kirk

• Interchange possibilities with Souleymane Sarr and his organization AJA-MALI that educated children in Mali to become entrepreneurs

After the conclusion of the conference, I flew to Bangalore to spend the day with Neelam Chhiber, a friend from the GSBI ’08 who founded Industree, a sustainable, organic retailer in India.  I got the added bonus of meeting her husband, Jacob, who co-founded IDIOM, one of the largest design firms in India.  Jacob was a great tour guide so I got to see parts of Bangalore and his firms’ office.

At the end of the day I flew to New Delhi to catch my international flight home.  Upon landing in the domestic terminal I followed the signs to the shuttle bus to the international terminal.  Silly me.  After almost an hour of looking around and talking to people, I was told with authority that “there is no shuttle bus”.  When I was promptly referred to a friendly cabbie who tried to fleece me out of $50 to take me there!  Needless to say I finally found the “official” cab stand where the fair came out to $5.

Short trip, but an amazing experience I will remember.  Thanks to all who shared the time with me.

Some more pictures are available here.

[1] Paragraph laregly taken from Rosa Wang’s article here

The audit is a requirement by our longest-standing funder, Hivos.  Gearing up for first audit for the period of 2008 was a massive undertaking by blueEnergy that I wrote about extensively last year.

Since the first audit, Alex Pederson, CFO of blueEnergy and his accounting and finance team have continued to execute a massive internal capacity program to continue strengthening blueEnergy’s internal controls and to migrate blueEnergy to a state-of-the-art, online accounting system called NetSuite.

blueEnergy receive a license donation from NetSuite in 2008.  NetSuite is a powerful, feature-rich system.  The flip side is that it requires a considerable amount of configuration which is very challenging from a technical standpoint, and especially if your internal processes are not very mature.  In addition, as with all accounting systems, it has some bugs that can hamper implementation, especially when the implementation is of the “non-standard” variety.

For a small organization, blueEnergy has a considerable amount of technical capacity.  This capacity allowed us to implement the basic functionality of the system, although it took over a year.  Several consultants working with the NetSuite platform commented that they were amazed we were able to implement even the basics.  This was an important lesson learned – if you are a small organization with limited technical capacity and limited IT/admin budget, be very careful about implementing high-tech accounting/finance systems.  They can be a huge drain.  Transparency and high-tech are all the rage... but people generally don’t like to pay for it and it is expensive in terms of money and effort.  If you do go high-tech, keep it simple!

blueEnergy was in a much stronger position for the audit this year.  The process has gone well thanks to Alex and his amazing team: Shona, Sandra, Eric, Ramin and Brett.  We hope to have it all wrapped up by the end of the month – all part of our strong start of 2010!

The meeting was held in Bluefields, which afforded the Board the opportunity to meet our local staff, visit our facilities and to visit some of our beneficiary communities.  Joining us from abroad were Board members Brad Mattson and Matt Flannery, and from Managua we were joined by Lâl Marandin and Maricela Kauffman.  We were also fortunate to be joined by senior advisors Vicky Mattson and Alexandra Quinn.

The gathering was very fruitful and gave members the opportunity to increase the depth of their understanding of the conditions faced by blueEnergy in Nicaragua.  Having this hands-on perspective of context is critical for framing constructive discussions on strategy and growth.

Thanks everyone for making the effort to realize this amazing gathering!

The induction program covered such topics as the history of blueEnergy, how to work within blueEnergy, blueEnergy’s partners, blueEnergy’s technology, the history of Nicaragua and the Caribbean, how blueEnergy works with remote communities, the ethics of field work and development, blueEnergy’s Theory of Change and more!

We finally reached the point where we had the capacity to channel incoming volunteers to a specific arrival date.  This allowed us to justify investing the resources needed to develop the 8 day training program, which will pay huge dividends.  Invariably, when you don’t give people extensive training, you end up answering the same questions over and over and dealing with bad situations that arise from the lack of perspective and background.  Getting everyone gathered together allowed us to do a concentrated transmission of information that will make everything smoother going forward.  On top of that, having the new volunteers go through the program together helps build camaraderie among the group.

Nationalities represented in the new class: US, France, UK, Portugal and Israel.  Other nationalities represented in our veteran volunteers: Australia, Argentina, and Canada.

Here is a fresh picture of blueEnergy’s nearly entire staff in Nicaragua:

So, as planned, 2009 was a year of core capacity building for blueEnergy.  We strengthened our financial systems, expanded our staff, refined our model, and beefed up our project management capacity.

But 2009 was also a year that saw the international climate grow more uncertain and perilous.   After more than 6 months of preparations, the first funder lined up for our UNDP project – Iceland - went bankrupt; The World Bank, executing a project on behalf of the UK DfiD (United Kingdom’s Department for International Development), a situation created by the UK’s withdrawal from Nicaragua in 2008, stalled over massive internal confusion over the special project procedures; and finally an IADB $40M loan to Nicaragua for grid extension consumed all of the IADB and Nicaraguan Ministry of Energy’s administrative capacity, leading to a stall of the SECCI program.

blueEnergy is in a stronger position now than it has ever been.  Our staff is more experienced, more capable, our organization more defined and robust.  We have invested heavily and ramped up to meet the challenge of a large project that has not arrived.  There are encouraging signs that the “Big 3” projects continue to move forward and that in fact all is well on the “natural” timeline of these types of major, multilateral projects.  It appears that the frustration comes from unrealistic expectations on our part, of not understanding the “natural timeline” for this type of work; as well as not having deep enough pockets to fund a protracted project development/preparation phase, in some cases stretching longer than 14 months.

Our strategy, as it has always been, is to adapt.  We are planning a more dynamic approach for 2010, one where we pursue smaller opportunities and leverage our increased capacity to administer multiple smaller projects.  All the while, we will continue to move the big projects forward.

It’s not ideal.  We would like to have the financing and capacity to develop a 5-year strategic plan, get the plan funded, and then focus on execution. All of my exposure to the social entrepreneurship world through Ashoka, the Global Social Benefit Incubator, the Skoll World Forum and more, has taught me that this is the ideal way forward.  The line goes that project funding is too fickle, too time consuming, and too disjointed to lead to great impact and that it is much preferable to develop a strategy and get it funded as a whole.

But blueEnergy finds itself at the edge of a canyon – knowing that the best way forward is to develop a strategic plan and get it funded, but facing funders that either don’t consider blueEnergy “proven” enough or only want to engage after the development of a 5-year strategic plan.

So blueEnergy will be adaptive.  We will pick up projects that are inline with our mission and execute them to deliver impact.  In each of them, we will make sure there is a component that continues to strengthen our organizational capacity, moving us closer to being able to develop a strategic plan and get it funded.

Everything has a natural rate of change.  The rate can generally be compressed or expanded to a certain extent by throwing more resources at it, but at the risk of burnout and backlash.  The rate is not infinitely malleable however; there are natural limitations that cannot be ignored.  If you put your expectations out of alignment with these natural limitations, you pay the price.  It’s like “not believing in gravity”.  You can make this choice, but gravity still exists and you will be subject to its laws.  Creating fundamental changes to human culture and systems is a slow process, especially in highly marginalized communities, and expecting to see clear evidence of it with a causal relationship to a small project in a one-year or even a couple-year time horizon, is out of alignment with natural limits.

In addition to “system change”, “sustainability” is also all the rage these days.  Funders, among others, demand it and want to see evidence of it in short project time horizons, typically a year.  But sustainability is by definition a process over time – it cannot be demonstrated in a short-time window.  What can be observed in the short-term are trends of change pointing to a more desirable future.  In this context, sustainability can be interpreted as being on a path where new value is created each year, without undermining the capital stock, be it environmental, social, financial, or whatever.  It is a process, not a destination you stand at and proclaim to have achieved.

blueEnergy, as well as most social organizations, must walk this fine line between the desires of its funders and stakeholders and the natural limits to change it pushes up against.  We work hard to make sure we deliver the impact funders demand in their time horizon without losing sight of the long-term vision and what it takes to get there.  This is achieved by ensuring that each short-term deliverable includes a piece that carries on the long-term capacity building required for system change and for traveling along the path of sustainability.  This is necessary to bridge short-term impact and long-term impact and should not be viewed as an undesirable inefficiency.

http://www.firstgiving.com/blueenergy2millionhoursoflight

Light in Kahkabila.

. Light in Monkey Point.

blueEnergy has been working to bring renewable, sustainable energy to these marginalized communities since 2004, operating under the fundamental principle that energy is a strong catalyst for economic growth and development. As such, we work in collaboration with the communities to construct and install wind-solar hybrid electrification systems.

To close out the year, blueEnergy launched a "Two Million Hours of Light" campaign to raise $20,000 by December 31.  As of this writing, we are almost 75% of the way there with 2 days to go.  If you want to help blueEnergy bring light to the people of the Caribbean Coast of Nicaragua and can spare $10, please visit our campaign page here.

Light in Kahkabila.

You can think of dividing up the world into three spaces, representing different levels of business eco-system maturity:

1) Business eco-system: Profit-driven organizations thrive.  Many types of service providers available, allowing specialization.

2) Periphery of business eco-system: Population density and access to cities allow project expense payback.  Service providers are available.

3) No business eco-system (subsistence living): No jobs, no service providers and no functioning economy.  Projects intended to develop economic opportunity.

How you work in these different spaces is fundamentally different.  Classic for-profit business resides in the inner-space, while the burgeoning field of social business and social entrepreneurship primarily focuses on the second ring.  The second ring is poor and marginalized, but exists on the periphery of the business eco-system and is often characterized by road access, phone access, micro-finance access as well as access to other important services.

What you learn at Harvard and Stanford Business School, will prepare you well for the center space.  Specialization and business focus is the name of the game in this space. Increasingly, there is a proliferation of "social business" curriculum, teaching about the ways to make money while serving the bottom of the pyramid (BoP). This movement of using business principles to alleviate poverty has grabbed the public's attention and drawn bi-partisan support.

But it is a mistake to directly apply the lessons of the center space to the second ring and equally a mistake to directly apply the lessons of the second ring to the third ring. 

In the third ring, attempting to create any one part of the eco-system alone is frustrated by the lack of support services normally available in the ecosystem in more connected, developed communities.

For this reason, interventions addressing only one dimension of need are unable to have a significant impact.  Because impoverished governments, the majority of nongovernmental organizations, and the marginalized communities themselves are unable to develop holistic, multi-dimensional actions on their own and lack a high degree of coordination between them, the communities remain marginalized and isolated.

In these cases, a holistic approach is required that blends delivering fundamental direct services with capacity building and linking these fundamental services to productive uses.  Furthermore, the approach must include a component of linking communities to external markets and resources.  As much as possible, these pieces of development puzzle should be taken on by a partnership of organizations with one member acting as the catalyzer and coordinator.  In many cases though, suitable partners do not exist at the onset of the engagement, so the role of the catalyzing organization includes a component of drawing in suitable partners.

All of these pieces of the human development puzzle feed into the Human Development Index (or HDI), a metric developed by the United Nations to measure the overall wellbeing of human populations.  More than just a measure of accumulation of physical assets, the Human Development Index takes into account life expectancy, education, and standard of living (through per capita income). This is important, as human development is about the ability to pursue individual choices resulting in productive, creative lives through increased longevity and health, enriched by knowledge and higher standards of living, and the freedom to participate in communities’ and nation’s affairs.

There is strong empirical evidence linking human development to access to modern energy services. At a macro level, when countries develop, they do so in tandem with improvements in energy services.  In fact, according to the United National Milleneum Development Program, no country in modern times has substantially reduced poverty without a massive increase in the use of energy and/or a shift to energy efficient economies.

Because energy is a fundamental input to education, health and business services, all themselves key components of human development, we can see the important role energy plays in improving overall quality of life.  In short, energy changes lives.

This graphic illustrates the relationship between per capita electricity consumption and the Human Development Index. The shape of the curve highlights the tremendous marginal impact the first kWhs have in improving quality of life, which can in many cases justify the higher marginal cost of delivering these kWhs in less developed countries.  In terms of HDI, Nicaragua ranks 124th out of 182 countries [UNDP, 2007].  In pure economic terms, Nicaragua is the second poorest country in the western hemisphere after Haiti. On the Caribbean Coast of Nicaragua, the poorest region of the country, nearly 80% of the population does not have access to modern energy services.  The implications of this should be clear.

References: "Energy for All" report by the ADB, available here, and the UNDP report entitled "Energy for Sustainable Development: Linkages, Impacts and Indicators", available here.

But today, I have the same feeling.  You can read the article here and Matt's much more intelligent response here.

Are people really so naive as to think you can lend DIRECTLY to people in some of the poorest, least developed areas in the world?  And by directly, I mean with no intermediaries facilitating the money flow and providing the due diligence to ensure the money goes to where it should and that the people soliciting it are who they say they are.  It is unbeleivable to me that the people that demand the most transparency and integrity are also the ones shocked that you have to have institutions in place as intermediaries to ensure all of this.  Side note: they are often, ironically, also the ones who don't like these overhead costs and think of them as "inefficiences" when in fact they are absolutely critical.

In the spirit of fair disclosure, I know Matt Flannery personally.  Our organization, blueEnergy, has worked with Kiva to get our microfinance partner listed on their site (

Set Net project posted and fully funded in one day! | Monkey Point begun paying back!). That's how I know he and the entire team at Kiva work tirelessly to create an experience linking lenders to borrowers that is as clear and direct as humanly possible, given the very real constraints of the real world.

 "...But Mr. Roodman’s blog post said that lenders like Mr. Kristof were not making direct loans. Borrowers like Ms. Cruz already have loans from microfinance institutions by the time their pictures are posted on Kiva’s Web site."

So for efficiency's sake, the loan is made from the microfinance institution to the borrower before the money is raised on the Kiva site?  That is a plus, not a negative.  That is called streamlining your model to increase your impact.  The microfinance insitution fronts, and Kiva lenders fill in.  It is inaccurate and misleading to generally say "borrowers like so and so already have loans from microfinance institutions"... yes, they may have the physical loan, but in many cases the loan was generated because of the Kiva relationship.  I know in our case, it was Kiva's backing that convinced our microfinance partners to issue loans in the marginalized, indigenous communities we work in.  No Kiva, no loans.

The last straw was this silly comment:

Yes Kiva relies in part on its own data and uses volunteers extensively - I'm sorry, how exactly do you build a wildly successful, scaleable model, with a high degree of transparency, while meeting everyone's demand to keep overhead low, without using some of your own data and volunteers?  Again, the hypocracy and naivete of wanting no intermediaries, transparency and not wanting to invest in overhead.  You can't have it all.

I knew Kiva was an amazing concept when I first heard about it and continue to believe that today.  Those looking for silver bullets that will solve all of poverty's problems in one shot should open up their eyes to a dose of reality.  Get out there and see the real world.  Then you will know that an entire eco-system is needed, and that Kiva plays a vital role in that eco-system.

Last week, on October 15th, Lâl rejoined blueEnergy Nicaragua for a 2-year post to help blueEnergy strengthen its presence in the Capital of Managua.  Lâl will be working in many areas including strengthening the movement to support renewable energy in Nicaragua and growing key relationships with the national government, foreign embassies, international development agencies, and other nonprofit and for profit organizations.  He has an uncanny ability in this area - see here.

Lâl is joined by his wife Anne-Sophie and their lovely new baby boy, Niels, who after just a few short days has already established his fan club in Managua

One example of an often unnoticed impact blueEnergy has had has been in the realm of micro-finance.  Micro-finance is an integral part of the development eco-system but is outside of blueEnergy’s expertise and areas of focus.  blueEnergy’s solution was to help the local micro-finance institution, ADEPHCA, get registered with Kiva as a field partner in 2007.  You can read more about ADEPHCA here and here.

The intention was to immediately use this channel as a funding mechanism for blueEnergy community energy projects, but getting all the ducks lined up took longer than expected.  However, in the meantime, ADEPHCA pushed forward with Kiva, and as a result of this partnership (as of 08/24/09):

$92,625 has been loaned (13.7% delinquency / 0% default) to 206 entrepreneurs in the Bluefields area, where blueEnergy has its base of operations.  This is a significant amount of impact in this impoverished area.  To put it into perspective, if you make a very conservative estimate that each entrepreneur is supporting a family of 5, you get 206 x 5 ~ 1,000 people impacted.   This represents ~2.5% of the Bluefields population.  I am not an economist or a micro-finance expert, but to me, this is a big impact and I’m proud of the role blueEnergy played in jumpstarting it.

In recent months, blueEnergy's first projects have started to appear on Kiva's website:

Set Net project posted and fully funded in one day!

Monkey Point begun paying back!

It took a lot of blueEnergy legwork to jumpstart the ADEPHCA-Kiva relationship and then to get ADEPHCA to come with us out into the communities we work in (where they had never gone).  Almost 2 years door-to-door, but now I think we will see a lot of movement with less effort.  To be sure, Kiva and ADEPHCA deserve the lion’s share of credit for managing the inner workings of their relationship, but this is a good example of the kind of "seeding" and facilitating blueEnergy is doing to jumpstart different parts of the development ecosystem, all of which should factor into our impact analysis as well.  This is especially true when it comes to getting Kiva-backed ADEPHCA to stretch their micro-finance services to new, even more marginalized communities than Bluefields.

The GSBI leadership team added this subject to the curriculum to help graduates bridge the intense experience of the GSBI to the reality of the environment they return to.  The GSBI only accepts one person from each organization and there is a big task to carry the learnings to the greater leadership team.  There is also the task of translating big vision into operational plans, budgets and the processes that serve as the bedrock of day-to-day activities.  As one GSBI founder put it, paraphrasing, “the GSBI gives you the vision of where you want to go, but you still have to learn how to drive.”

A process is a series of steps you perform to produce a certain product, service, or result. Processes can be as simple as a list or as complicated as a binder full of flow charts. You need processes to ensure uniformity of results across your organization and to free your creative energies for creative tasks.  In other words, make the mundane mundane so you can free your energy for visioning, planning and growth.  This becomes critical as your organization grows – when you are small, you can “fake it” and get by making each activity up as you go along, but as you grow and delegate more responsibility outwards, you need processes to keep everyone on the same page.  It is the glue that, along with leadership, keeps the organization from flying apart.

If your goal is to scale your positive impact, you have to first create institutional sustainability.  Sustainability has a financial component to it, but also a human capacity and process component.  At some point the small core team can’t shoulder the burden any more and a management team is created.  Responsibility is delegated outwards.  This is a wonderful thing if there is an understanding of how all the parts inter-operate, in other words, if there are processes in place.  At the GSBI, the group came up with this, “Scaling indicator – how your organization will do without you”.  If you think you are ready to scale, take a 3-month vacation and see what happens.

Finally, you don’t want to replicate your mistakes.  Drafting processes allows you an opportunity to examine what you do that is working and what you do that is not.  It allows you to correct mistakes on paper before applying it on a large scale, and that is priceless.

To be clear, the GSBI didn’t provide all the answers.  It’s only a 2-week program after all.  But what it did do was bring together an amazing group of entrepreneurs from around the world and pair them with intensive instruction and mentoring.  Through this, strong relationships were formed and for those that were in a place to receive the “download”, it started a process of transformation.

I had the great fortune of being invited back this year to participate in the alumni panel.  When asked for some advice for this year’s class on how they could maximize their experience at the GSBI, here’s what I suggested (paraphrasing):

Be present.  Ask your team back home to give you the space to be fully present here.  This is a unique opportunity to talk to entrepreneurs like, as well as seasoned industry experts, and to reflect on it all.  Try to do your urgent regular tasks at night after everyone else has gone to sleep.

Work hard but play.  Find the social captain.  Drink beer or soda or whatever, but hang out with each other and get to know how similar you are despite the seemingly huge differences in subject matter of your organizations.  Play ping pong and sing karaoke.

Focus on the how.  Very often you know what you need to do.  The hard part is figuring out how to do it.  People here know, so ask them and take the time to listen.  Have them show you.

Understand that you can’t learn everything in 2 weeks.  Listen and learn with a mind towards how you will carry this forward.  Think about building mentoring relationships that will carry forward.

The GSBI seeks to continually improve and is looking for ways to strengthen its post-GSBI process in recognition that the 2-week program is more of a springboard for transformation than a space for the transformation itself.  Institutional transformation takes time and is a negotiation process with key staff and stakeholders and the GSBI can amplify its impact greatly by giving people the tools they need to lead the change within their organizations once they get back home.

I will be returning to the GSBI this Friday to work with this year’s class on how they can carry all their hard work and enthusiasm forward and make 2010 a year of positive change for themselves, their organizations and the beneficiaries they serve.

From all I've read and heard, the SOCAP conferences are an amazing, inspirational gathering of leaders in the social sector.  Many of my peers and heroes will be there.  I understand that conferences cost money to put on and that reasonable registration fees must be charged, but $1,200 for a social sector conference!?  How can anyone afford that?

If you have an "in" for me, I'd love to hear about it.  Otherwise, I'll be loitering around the backdoor, hoping to catch people for happy hour.

Being held to international standards but limited to local resources, at the edge of the world, is hypocritical.

International funders have expectations about financial transparency, project management, technological implementation, etc.  These expectations typically come from their realities, from where they sit in nice sophisticated offices in big global cities in the developed world.  The better ones have officers with development experience, but even in these cases there is a tendency to extrapolate from their experiences into unrelated realities.  Critiques about why we can’t do what someone did in India are counter-productive.  India is not like the Caribbean Coast of Nicaragua, and the challenges faced in the two locations are different.  Available capacities are different.  The environment is different.  The politics are different.  The cost structures are different.  The logistics are different.  Sometimes, some experience seems to be more dangerous than no experience because of this tendency of people to inappropriately extrapolate.  But I digress... my point is that these expectations are often way out of line with the local capacities that are within reach of an organization like blueEnergy.

To meet the lofty expectations, you have to start somewhere.  With no budget and dire need and technical challenges, it is logical to look for volunteer support.  Local hired expertise is sometimes available, but it demands a premium because it is rare.  Most of the time it has to be built, and that takes time, and again money.  Conversely, pursuing international professional volunteers that are willing to dedicate a year to blueEnergy with little to no cost to blueEnergy, and sometimes even a net revenue to the organization, is a smart strategy.  This strategy can bring in much needed skills quickly and efficiently.  It is important to distinguish the recruitment of highly skilled professional volunteers from short-term, young, inexperienced ones; I’m only talking about the former here.

blueEnergy’s Guiding Principles clearly state that we strive to build local capacity.  The ultimate success would be for blueEnergy Nicaragua to be run nearly entirely by Nicaraguans with periodic support from international experts.  But that is a process.  It takes time.  The romantics think it ought to happen over night and with very little funding.

A perfect example is the $1,500 audit that cost $100,000.  We were required by a funder in 2008 to undergo an audit in Nicaragua.  They insisted it should cost no more than $1,500.  After careful solicitation of quotes, we selected the best offer that could meet the requirements of this international institution.  To make an incredibly long, difficult story somewhat short, in the end, the audit and audit preparations cost us about $10,000 in cash and probably around $100,000 if you include in-kind labor and other expenses.  International professional volunteers played a huge role in helping blueEnergy prepare for and complete the audit and without their support, there would have been no chance of passing the audit.  The “romantic” view, still held by the funder, that this should absolutely have not cost more than $1,500 is absurd...  romanticism meets the pavement.

In response to the funder’s critique, blueEnergy sent one of its strongest, most accomplished staff members to the capital city to present blueEnergy’s project report at a major conference hosted by the same funder.  This staff members happens to be a) a woman, b) local, and c) highly skilled.  In order to address the concerns that blueEnergy could be more culturally sensitive, the staff member prepared the presentation in Spanish, the national language of Nicaragua.  Only days before the conference blueEnergy received a reply that they were excited our staff member was coming, but could we please send our international country director (American/French) and do the presentation in English.  The irony was strong.  The skill set to write a professional powerpoint presentation in English to give to an international audience does not exist in our local staff, despite the fact that we have invested heavily in their capacity.  Its a rare skill set anywhere on the Caribbean Coast of Nicaragua.  Yet here, the funder who critiques over-use of international professionals to build local capacity, wants in the end, international professional capacity.  Romanticism meets the pavement again.

blueEnergy politely declined and had its local staff member give the presentation in Spanish.  Our international country director was on hand for Q&A in English afterwards.

Show me a better way to create more jobs by hiring local staff, which entails a payroll burden on the organization, while maintaining the quality demanded by international institutions and demanded by ourselves, while living in a reality that most funders don’t want to pay “regular operating costs” like local salaries, and I’ll jump on board.

Creating local capacity is a major theme for blueEnergy.  We will continue to do this in the most cost effective and realistic manner possible.  For sure, it’s a process.

After the mobile communication conference, Zippy picked me up and took me to Lewa, a wildlife preserve.  We weren’t just there to see animals – we were there with her running team to go up against one of the world’s 10 hardest marathons (them not me).  We arrived at the fall of darkness, just making the deadline when they close the outside gate.  After a short night camping, we awoke to the sound of helicopters swirling overhead to chase away the elephants that have been known to interfere with the race in the past.

While I spectated and took on the role of team cameraman along with our driver Mishak, Zippy ran the half-marathon with several of her teammates while others did the full marathon.  The terrain was rugged and the heat intense.  The reward however was the amazing scenery and the wildlife: giraffes, zebras, monkeys, etc.  Zippy finished in good time.

After the race we returned to Nairobi, where Zippy’s sister-in-law cooked us an amazing traditional Kenyan meal.  I played soccer with her sons and a friend and got a good night’s rest.  On my last day, Zippy took me and family outside Nairobi to an outside, hilltop, rugged restaurant on the border of Masai territory.  There we feasted on fresh roasted lamb and other local favorites and feasted as well on the view of the valley below, stretching all the way to Tanzania.

I have always felt well connected in Latin America through my mother’s network.  There is almost nowhere I could go in Latin America where I would not be received by someone who has worked with my mother and given a home cooked meal.  But Africa is different.  I had never been to Africa and my mother’s network does not run deep there.

Being hosted by Zippy made me ever more aware of the value of the network I have been able to build through opportunities like the Tech Awards, the Global Social Benefit Incubator (GSBI) program and the Ashoka-Lemelson Fellowship.  These opportunities have allowed me to connect to social entrepreneurs around the world, building a peer network of people that I can relate to on a deep level.  It is refreshing and inspiring to know these people and be amongst them.

Thank you Zippy!

It was my first time in Kenya and my first time in Africa.  I must thank Ashoka and the Lemelson Foundation for inviting me and giving me this amazing opportunity.

The conference was held at a retreat center outside Nairobi and in attendance were Ashoka-Lemelson Fellows from Uganda, Kenya, India and US/Nicaragua (me).  The objective was to discuss the eco-system of mobile communication technology as it relates to development and to look for potential partnerships between the fellows.

Key topics of discussion included: service provision through SMS such as sharing commodity pricing information amongst local farmers, hardware improvements to make mobile phones more accessible and feature rich, and contract and policy approaches to extend mobile service and share revenue streams.

Most of blueEnergy’s communities on the Caribbean Coast of Nicaragua do not have cell phone network coverage.  As the conference went on though, I could see many ways that network coverage could help blueEnergy’s projects:  battery charging fees could be paid through SMS, technical trouble-shooting could be done through SMS, and phone ownership could strengthen communities’ adoption of blueEnergy’s charging stations.

One particular case that we discussed was that of M-PESA, a payment service that works on mobile phones.  In Kenya, Paypal does not exist and most people cannot access computers to use the service even if it did exist.  M-PESA fills the gap, allowing people to make payments to other people using SMS texting on their mobile phones.  With the explosion of mobile phone usage in Kenya, the M-PESA service has taken off, although not without major challenges during its launch.

In the two days following the conference, I traveled around inside and outside Nairobi and was amazed to see M-PESA payment centers everywhere, literally everywhere.  I talked to some people and they raved about the service.  They said it has changed “the flow” in communities and made daily transactions much easier.  M-PESA exists wherever the cell phone network exists, whereas banks don’t stray far from major cities.

Kenya was selected for the location of the conference because Kenya is an example of advanced usage of mobile communication technology and the impacts this has on society.  Staying with a friend, I used my first ever wireless USB modems to connect to the internet.  I had seen these advertised in the US, but my first usage came in Kenya.  Go figure.  Kenya understands mobile communication.