Benin

Interview with Mary Balmaceda, Director of Marketing and Communications, Unitus

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Mary Balmaceda was in the Peace Corps from 1996 to 1998 in Benin, where she trained cotton producers to form credit unions to provide micro loans to farmers. The Peace Corps was a life-changing experience that started when she was 13. She was in Sierra Leone visiting her father stationed there with the UN Development Program when she met an exciting Peace Corps volunteer on a motorcycle. She thought to herself, “I want to do that!”

She began her career as a marketer through an internship with the National Geographic Channel during her MBA studies at Georgetown University. She was hired as a full-time consultant after she graduated. While at National Geographic, and later at the Discovery Channel, she felt drawn back to social action. Through a Net Impact contact she was offered a job as Marketing Manager at the Calvert Foundation – the non-profit arm of Calvert Mutual Funds. It was a great opportunity to combine her interest in socially responsible investing, her marketing experience and her love for social action.

She is now Director of Marketing and Communication for Unitus, trying to reduce global poverty through microfinance. Unitus works with local microfinance institutions, helping them to get access to business tools and capital to scale up so they can serve more people.   Unitus’s portfolio of partners now reach close to three million people.

Her job is to manage Unitus' print and media communications, branding, reports, website, and e-marketing campaigns - essentially everything to attract attention to Unitus, the social entrepreneurs they fund, and the mission of fighting global poverty.

She does not consider herself a social entrepreneur, but an accelerator of social entrepreneurs. Her advice: “Be persistent! Success comes when you persist against the odds, keep your eye on your ultimate vision and your mind on the people you are helping.” 

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Interview with Sam Goldman, CEO of d.light.

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Sam Goldman decided to go to Benin while he was riding his bike across Canada in a bet with the Canadian government that he could do more to reduce greenhouse gasses riding his bike that it could do with policy. He discovered that his riding partner had worked in Benin and had loved it.  He is not sure if he won the bet, but he never collected.

Sam’s parents were USAID workers who lived in Pakistan, India, Mauritania and Rwanda while he was growing up. Watching the needs in these countries motivated him to join the Peace Corps and later to start a company to make life better in the developing world.

While in Benin he helped design and build cement water catchments and latrines, and trained villagers to build them themselves. He also met David, a local man with whom he eventually co-founded GARPE, an NGO that processed the leaves of the extremely nutritious local Maringa tree into a valuable food powder. GARPE trained local women and later farmers to continue to build an industry around the Maringa tree, thus increasing the income of farmers and improving the nutrition of the villagers.

Sam decided to go to Stanford because of a class taught in the School of Design, Entrepreneurial design for Extreme Affordability, which he took to design lights and power sources for villages, trying to solve a problem he had noticed wherever he lived. He asked the design school to "incubate" his start-up firm, and the school gave him a little money, office space and equipment to launch the company (Note: Many US colleges and universities have business incubators on campus to bring faculty and student research to market very rapidly). That was the start of d.light design which now has a team of five students: two MBAs including Sam, two mechanical engineering and one electrical engineering student.

d.light is focused on eliminating kerosene – a toxic and dangerous fuel used widely in the developing world as a light and power source, a decision he made when the son of one of his neighbors in Benin was badly burned by a kerosene lamp (one of many thousands of such accidents around the world).  Sam's goal is to provide a source of light and power that is safer, cheaper and brighter than kerosene. The Foreverlight can use solar power, car or truck batteries, or a local generator to charge very long-lasting batteries that run a super bright LED lamp.  Foreverbright costs $10 or less, is five times brighter than a kerosene lantern, lasts for up to a month, and runs for 10 cents – 25 cents a month – far less than kerosene.

Sam is now looking for a social entreprise investment firm to put up a second round investment to enable d.light  to start manufacturing and set up distribution – possibly by creating small village businesses that rent or sell Foreverlights locally.

Sam’s advice to social entrepreneurs? Don’t be afraid of change. Before arriving in Benin, he was not too fond of the capitalist system, but he quickly changed his mind when he saw that businesses were having a faster positive impact than traditional development organizations. He realized that he needed to learn business and enrolled at Stanford. 

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