Faith Muigai shares what she learned building the highest quality affordable maternity hospital in East Africa.

Faith Muigai is a Regional Director at the PharmAccess Foundation and the former Chief Medical Officer of Jacaranda Health, a social enterprise that designs and scales innovative and patient-centered care models for women and newborns in Kenya.

In this interview, she spoke about what she learned building the highest quality affordable maternity hospital in East Africa and the power of agile and low-cost solutions.

Could you start by sharing your journey in the health sector from Jacaranda Health to the PharmAccess Foundation?

My history in the health sector has included training as a nurse, managing research programs and hospitals, and now executive management.

I moved to the United States for college and lived there for 17 years. Then in 2012, I transitioned back to Kenya, where I joined Jacaranda Health, a social enterprise focused on innovation in scaling up maternal and child health and healthcare service delivery.

At Jacaranda, we opened two maternity hospitals in seven years and learned a lot of lessons. When we were getting started, we didn’t understand the market — particularly me, coming from the healthcare system in the United States. Over time, we came to understand the needs of the population in Kenya and how to run a sustainable business.

As a director and later Chief Medical Officer, I focused on the quality of care. I wanted to make sure the quality of care that I provided was similar to what I saw and experienced in the United States, having had children there myself.

I wanted an independent party to assess what I was doing and tell me if I aligned with international standards. We know that in lower-middle income countries, most hospitals don’t meet quality standards and they don’t know how to improve.

In 2017, I enrolled in a program called SafeCare that assesses facilities and shares a roadmap to reach international standards of quality and safety. I was able to attain the highest level of certification that the program provides.

After Jacaranda, I became Regional Director for the SafeCare program at the PharmAccess Foundation. So you can see a natural progression from managing a hospital and implementing these quality standards to now running the program that certifies hospitals for quality health service delivery in Africa.

Let’s talk about Jacaranda Health. As you said, it is widely recognized as the highest quality affordable maternity hospital in Kenya. Could you explain what you were doing differently compared to other hospitals?

As an organization, we focused on making sure we had systems and processes that worked. We instituted quality standards that were applicable to our local context. And we always evaluated ourselves from a clinical standpoint, as well as a business standpoint.

Many people in this environment don’t look at healthcare as a business. And that’s where they fail. They don’t ask themselves, “What do I have to put in place to achieve my desired outcomes?”

One important variable is staffing — this is huge. When obstetrics goes bad, it goes very bad, very quickly. If I don’t have skilled professionals who are equipped to handle these emergencies, the outcome will be poor. Women will talk about their poor experience in their communities, and then you don’t get more patients through referrals. It has a trickle down effect to your bottom line.

You need more women delivering in your facility and more women talking about your facility. For me, the golden standard to achieve those outcomes was quality of care.

Now, when you look at the consumer industry, you have different organizations validating the quality and effectiveness: Is this a good drug? Does it achieve the desired outcome? Is the generic drug as effective as the brand name?

The same rules apply to healthcare service delivery. Are you providing efficient services? Are you providing value for money? Are you providing care that is patient centric, because patient satisfaction is important to you and because it brings more business to your facility so that you can generate revenue?

How were you able to keep these services affordable to women, while still making sure the hospitals were financially sustainable and high quality?

We were very concerned about our pricing in the beginning. We were trying to do good. As we grew, we realized that it wasn’t about “doing good.” It was about value for money.

There is the concept of “willingness to pay” vs. “ability to pay”: Are customers willing to pay for the goods or services you are providing?

I found that, even in informal markets, “willingness to pay” was the most important factor.

If people understood the value of the services that were being provided, they would figure out a way to pay for them.

We realized that going cheap was not the best route. Instead, we focused on pricing so that we could make ends meet.

We were still conservative — we were one-tenth of the cost of some higher level facilities — but we spent a lot of time developing our business model to ensure our prices made sense.

We did exercises: If a woman is admitted from point A to B, what does it cost for us to provide these services? We knew the costs of all our services — the supplies, the human resources, the administrative fees, the direct and indirect costs.

Then we built a margin that was reasonable and not excessive or exorbitant. That way, we were still an affordable choice, but our services could align with higher level facilities and we could invest in our people and infrastructure.

My job was to ensure that women accessed antenatal care, which is vital for a healthy pregnancy and delivery. But to make money, that antenatal care needed to translate into skilled delivery in our facility. We also built an operating theater for cesarean sections and emergencies, but the space was expensive. So we opened it up to other types of surgeries, such as elective gynecological cases that could bring in money to help sustain the business.

In that way, we expanded our scope of services from what we had originally intended, but it made sense from both a business and clinical standpoint.

You mentioned that understanding your costs and pricing your services were important elements of Jacaranda’s success. Some people might be surprised to think about a hospital this way, especially one that serves lower income patients.

A lot of practitioners come in with a social mission to do good. But they have not strategically mapped out how they can become a thriving business. That was something Jacaranda did very consciously. No one likes to say “profit” in healthcare, but you need profits to invest back in your business.

I believe that is what made Jacaranda successful. We were always looking at metrics, and not only clinical metrics, but also business indicators. That includes human resources indicators like employee retention, as well as patient wait times, because dissatisfaction can result in lost customers.

Did any parts of Jacaranda’s business model change?

Everything evolved. We shut the first hospital down. The surrounding population was elderly, so they were not having babies. It was also difficult to safely access our facility in the middle of the night when emergencies happened.

We learned from those mistakes when we built the second hospital. It was on a busy road, so access and security were not a problem. The income levels varied from lower to middle income, so we had a variety of clients with and without insurance. Patients had access to mobile money. There were also more women and men of reproductive age.

In the first hospital, we had averaged about 20 to 30 deliveries a month. Within two years of moving to this new facility, we reached 100 deliveries a month and patient numbers were soaring.

Could you explain what you mean by “patient centric” care? What are some examples from your work at Jacaranda Health?

Our leadership understood that you have to learn fast and fail fast. You also have to learn about the population you’re serving and design your services to meet their needs, not your own.

I’ll share an example. In the beginning, we thought we could run a maternal facility that focused on deliveries and then refer mothers to a pediatrician for the baby’s care. That’s what happens in the United States, right? After I had my baby, I was scheduled an appointment to see a pediatrician in one week. But in a community health setting, there is no time to see a pediatrician. Everything has to happen at the maternity facility.

So we had to change the design of our program from a Western approach to an African approach, where the practitioner attends to the mother and the newborn in the same appointment. Mothers are only referred to a pediatrician for emergencies. As a result, we needed to upgrade the midwives’ skill set so they would be confident in newborn care.

We also learned that, although many mothers could not afford another child, they wouldn’t show up for an appointment to discuss family planning. But they would attend an appointment for the baby. So we redesigned our follow-up family planning appointment, as well.

We were customer centric and redesigned our programs to fit our patients’ needs, but we stayed true to our intentions for founding the hospital.

Are there any other companies that are doing a great job to improve the quality and access of healthcare in Kenya?

There are so many enterprises and solutions that are happening. The thing is, we haven’t mapped them out.

That’s the problem with our system in Kenya; there are so many innovative solutions, but people are working in silos, and we don’t have a repository of who is doing what and where. If we all came together, do you know how many people we could reach? But we don’t because we see each other as competitors.

What advice would you share with students who want to enter a career in health?

My first piece of advice is to learn fast, fail fast. That phrase has always resonated with me because we often dwell on the problems, but we don’t catalyze solutions quickly enough.

Second, public health professionals need to listen to the local market, understand the local need, and embrace local solutions. Don’t assume that because you come from Stanford or Harvard, you know everything.

Let me ask you a question — have you been to a hospital lately? How did you call your nurse? You press a button like you’re on an airplane, right?

That doesn’t work in Kenya. So when you’re looking at solutions, focus on realistic and low-cost solutions. You know what I did at Jacaranda? I bought bells and kept them on the patients’ side tables.

These low-cost solutions also apply to business decisions. Let’s say you don’t have sophisticated computers or software, but you need a dashboard. You need to see information related to your business — where you’re in the red, where you’re in the green. Guess what? Excel spreadsheets will do that for you.

I went to a conference that was all about artificial intelligence and blockchain. I told them, don’t talk to me about artificial intelligence and blockchain when I’m still trying to figure out how a patient can reach the nurse at the nurse’s station! So, how can you innovate, but also be agile?

Third, help change mindsets and cultures. Don’t come in with a solution — come in trying to brainstorm the solution. Design solutions that work within this environment.

Finally, understand the language and the business of health, and how to translate it in a way that is digestible to the local environment. And then partner with organizations that will help you can showcase what works, because you can then take it up on a policy level.

Measuring Patient and Business Outcomes at a Maternity Hospital in Kenya was originally published in Acumen Academy Voices on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Dr. Naveen Rao, Senior Vice President for Health at The Rockefeller Foundation, shares advice for students looking to make a difference in global health.

Dr. Naveen Rao is the Senior Vice President for Health at The Rockefeller Foundation. He is leading a team that is dedicated to bringing new digital tools to community health workers around the world to reduce child and maternal deaths and contain global pandemics.

In this interview, he spoke about his path to medicine, the power of “precision public health,” and what happens when social enterprise goes wrong.

Could you start by sharing your experience working in the health sector?

I’m an internist by training. I practiced medicine here in New York City. Then I joined Merck, the pharmaceutical company, about 25 years ago. Now, I’m close to finishing my first year at The Rockefeller Foundation.

What brought me to this role was the rich legacy, history, and impact The Rockefeller Foundation has had over the last 120 years in the health sector. In fact, they’re credited as having established the field of public health.

It’s a storied organization — the yellow fever vaccine came out of The Rockefeller Foundation, and there are some major advances the Foundation has done in global health. That’s what attracted me to come to the Foundation and take it to the next level.

What inspired you to enter the field of global health?

Ever since I can remember, growing up as a child, I wanted to be a doctor. I don’t remember where it came from or why — I don’t even remember wanting to be anything else.

Once I decided to be a doctor, it was the straight course of trying to get into medical school, then get out of medical school and begin residency.

In practice, I realized I could have a bigger impact on global public health — as opposed to one patient at a time, one stethoscope, one prescription pad. I felt I could paint on a larger canvas and have more impact.

I made the choice to go from clinical practice to public health because I realized I could play that role. Having grown up in India, seen the West, and knowing the needs of the underprivileged, that was my role.

What challenges in the health sector need to be most urgently addressed right now, in your opinion?

The most urgent challenge for me is to bring the power of data and data science to public health. Traditionally, the way medicine is practiced today in communities and primary healthcare centers is no different from how it was practiced for the last 50 to 100 years.

As we look around, there are so many industries that have been disrupted because of data. In my lifetime, I’ve seen how music has changed from physical objects to data streaming. Growing up, going to the bank was a ritual, and now we don’t need to do that. Or distance learning and education — all that has been disrupted by data. I feel that health is next.

In this context, if we’re not careful, all of the advances and advantages of data — data science, artificial intelligence, predictive analytics, and tools to overcome infrastructure barriers — will not reach the poor and underprivileged.

I believe the class divide of the future, the haves and the have-nots, is not going to be money. It’s going to be data. Those who have access to data will have good health and those who do not will have poor health.

So the urgency is, how do we bring data to public health? And how can we make sure there is equity in this data sharing?

How can we bridge that divide, bringing data to public health while making sure it is equitable and serves the vulnerable? How do we make sure everyone benefits from this?

Last year, you published a blog post about precision public health. You wrote, “Precision public health has the potential to help overcome some of the biggest barriers to achieving universal health coverage by ensuring that the right care gets to the right people at the right time.”

For example, in Yemen, a computer model can predict the location of cholera outbreaks to help funnel resources to the areas most at risk. Could you share more examples of precision public health?

There are many examples of how precision in public health will allow us to do more with less — integrating multiple data sources and coming up with insights that can help the front line healthcare worker do his or her job.

For example, there’s one predictive model that uses simple photographs and videos of a pregnant woman’s belly. Based on algorithms, it can calculate the size of the baby’s head and the size of the mother’s pelvis, and predict whether this is going to be an obstructive birth — all from an external video that was taken of the pregnant mother’s belly.

This technology is here — it’s not science fiction! When you have these kinds of data and predictive analytics tools to identify who is at risk, there is a huge amount of power there.

Who should social enterprises and entrepreneurs partner with to ensure they can create meaningful change in public health?

If you are a social entrepreneur who is trying to establish yourself and look for partners, there is a concept called the “Golden Triangle.”

At the top of the triangle is the local government. Unless you have the government involved, there is no scalability and no sustainability in the country, especially if you’re thinking about the developing world.

The second end of the triangle is civil society, which includes all the faith-based organizations, NGOs, and foundations. The third is the private sector. You need all three to come together.

We put the community healthcare worker in the middle of that triangle. Community healthcare workers are on the front line and directly interacting with mothers and children who are at risk.

One sector cannot do it alone. You need the private sector, civil society, and government to come together to save these mothers and children. You can’t do it without partnerships, especially if you’re looking for scale and sustainability, which every project should think about from the start.

Your team at The Rockefeller Foundation is bringing new tools to community health workers in regions that don’t have access to physicians. Could you tell me more about the lives and responsibilities of community health workers?

A community healthcare worker is often a high school graduate and they have been trained to identify risk factors for disease and understand which households are most at risk. They’re usually in charge of 100 to 200 houses and make the rounds. They are at the frontlines, responding to the health needs of their communities.

The best example of this would be India, where there is a huge army of community healthcare workers who go around house to house and are trusted in communities. They know how to look for risk factors and who to bring into the formal health system.

Many are collecting data across numerous devices and inputting what they see on an individual household level. Yet, this data is not being used to help them identify risk and triage care.

We aim to fill the gap by bringing the latest tools in AI and predictive analytics to analyze household data and layer in other data (environmental, geopolitical, weather) to provide actionable insights to help community health workers effectively triage care.

What are some of the common mistakes made by social entrepreneurs in public health?

The classic mistake is social entrepreneurs who come into the field with a big heart, good idea, but try to develop it in isolation. Or worse — they spend just one week in the field or believe they already know the solution, and then wonder why their enterprise doesn’t work out. I have seen so many examples where nobody thought of sustainability down the road.

Let me give you an example. I was in an African country and in front of the hospital was parked an ambulance. The hood of the ambulance was open, and where the engine should have been, it was being used as a flower pot holder.

I asked, what is this story? They showed me a newspaper article of a donor who came and thought the best way to take care of the health situation in this village was to donate six ambulances. There was a lot of media and hype, but two years later, the village needed a spark plug. Okay, so now, who is going to pay for the spark plug? Where are they going to get it? Who knew how to install the spark plug into this ambulance? So very soon, the ambulances stopped working, parts of the engine started disappearing, and now it is being used as a flower pot.

It was a great idea — they needed ambulances, for sure. But no one thought, five years from today, who is going to maintain this? Coming in with a brilliant idea but without the local social context is probably the biggest mistake.

If you were talking to students who wanted to build a social enterprise to address public health challenges, what advice would you have for them?

If you want to do good, take a humble approach. Learn before you come in with a solution. Learn the problem, learn the local solutions, see which piece of it you can help, and how can it be sustained.

Who is the beneficiary? Who are your partners? How will you get a coalition going? How will you make sure that what you’ve brought is actually going to help, not hurt?

For example, we’ve seen people donating medical equipment from the United States, but no one has thought through how the recipients are going to dispose of all the plastic and waste that these instruments come in. Now the waste is accumulating next to the hospital, there is a big plastic dump that the animals are getting into, and it is causing problems.

When you have these big ideas, you really need to think downstream about what the local implications will be. The only way to do that is to visit the field, talk to the beneficiary, understand the situation, and then start something. It takes a lot of discipline and humility.

Roy Steiner, Senior Vice President for Food at The Rockefeller Foundation, shares advice with aspiring entrepreneurs in the food and agriculture sector.

Roy Steiner is the Managing Director for the Food Initiative at The Rockefeller Foundation. He is leading a team that is dedicated to creating access to nourishing food for millions of people in the United States and around the world.

In this interview, he spoke about three challenges facing the food system and invited social entrepreneurs to imagine a future that is sustainable, rather than dystopian.

Could you start by introducing yourself and your past experiences in the food and agriculture sector?

I’m the Senior Vice President of The Rockefeller Foundation’s Food Initiative. Before that, I spent several years at the Omidyar Network, which is a social impact investment fund, and nine years at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s agricultural development program.

What brought me to the food and agriculture sector is a fundamental belief that it’s the foundation of human civilization. Food systems enhance and enable a flourishing and peaceful society. When you don’t get it right, it contributes to a real breakdown.

For example, you can see that all over the world, the food system is a major contributor to global warming and greenhouse gases. Where the food system doesn’t function well, conflict flourishes. We also see a lot of health problems, both from the wrong kinds of foods and undernutrition. So, food and agriculture is fundamental to a peaceful and flourishing society.

What are some of the challenges in the food and agriculture sector that need to be most urgently addressed right now?

I think there are three fundamental things.

First, we have to improve the efficiency of our production. We need to get more from our inputs, but there is currently quite a bit of inefficiency in the way we produce. For example, 70% of the fertilizer we use is wasted.

Second, we have to reduce food loss and food waste. We know that 30 to 40% of all food that is produced is actually thrown away or discarded somewhere along the supply chain. That is a lot of waste and we can get a lot better at that.

Third, and one of the most important challenges, is that we need to shift diets toward more healthy food. Producing enough and efficiently is not going to solve the problem that our dietary patterns are resulting in some of the greatest epidemics of poor health that humanity has seen. Currently, in many countries, you’re seeing obesity rates of 30 to 40%. That’s not just in more developed countries but across the globe. These diet-related problems are resulting in diabetes and contributing to about 60 to 70% of non-communicable diseases.

So the question is, how do we shift people to what we call “protective foods” or healthy foods? Basically, that means a diet that is high in fruits, vegetables, legumes, and whole grains, and much lower on the ultra processed foods that are providing us with too much sugar, starch, and salt. Unless we make that shift, we’re going to see massive healthcare problems.

Those are the three fundamental challenges that the food system is currently facing. Underlying all of this, we have to solve these problems in a way that is sustainable and does not contribute to environmental degradation or greenhouse gases.

What are some opportunities for innovation where aspiring social entrepreneurs can contribute new solutions to these food and agriculture challenges?

All along the supply chain, there is opportunity. One theme we are seeing consistently is that food and agriculture is one of the least digitized sectors of the economy. There is not enough application of good data and analytics to improve decisions — for example, to identify where to plant more effectively and what kinds of inputs to use.

Another opportunity is to track the supply chain more effectively to increase traceability and safety by using blockchain. Then there is the ability to deliver in new ways — for example, delivering really healthy food to areas that do not have it. So, there is an incredible opportunity to use data analytics to make better decisions, and to build effective and efficient distribution and delivery tech systems.

There is also an opportunity to create new products that are healthier for people and better for the planet. For example, Beyond Meat just IPOed. Five years ago, people thought it was a crazy idea to create a plant-based burger that could compete in Burger King. Well, that’s actually starting to happen with Impossible Foods.

Those are examples of the real desire to eat healthier, but new products alone are not going to do it. We also have to figure out ways to create food environments that are conducive to healthy eating. I think there are lots of interesting ways to change institutions, schools, and hospitals to help them enable their students or patients to eat healthy. This is where behavioral economics could come in to nudge people toward a better outcome. For example, there is evidence that by changing the way food is described on a menu, we can make people more likely to choose healthy food.

In your previous roles, you contributed to the creation of Ethiopia’s Agricultural Transformation Agency and the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa. Based on your experience, what food and agriculture challenges are particularly urgent in developing and emerging markets?

Just getting good information to farmers is a challenge. There is increasing use of cell phone technologies to enable farmers to make better decisions. But we need to get better at that — we still don’t have really killer applications. There are huge inefficiencies in supply chains.

There is an opportunity to introduce alternative energy, as well. Now that solar energy is so much less expensive, it’s starting to enable innovations we had never imagined — everything from solar irrigation pumps to solar drying and solar energy processing is just starting to become economically viable. So how could we adopt solar energy throughout the supply chain? That would mean redesigning from a process and an engineering perspective.

Then, once we develop these new protective and healthier foods, we have to develop demand. Consumers everywhere in the world, including in Africa, want things that are convenient, tasty, and low cost. Too often, we have the ultra processed foods that are cheap and unhealthy filling that void. So we need healthy products that are convenient and tasty.

What are some examples of successful social enterprises and innovations in this sector that aspiring entrepreneurs should know about?

One Acre Fund is a nonprofit social enterprise that provides loans for purchasing inputs, training on agricultural techniques, and crop storage solutions. Wefarm is a platform for farmers to help each other make better decisions. Twiga Foods is a distributed distribution company that accepts food from farmers and delivers it to thousands of vendors around Nairobi. They are able to reduce prices dramatically because they are much more efficient and don’t waste as much food.

At a high-tech level, there’s Atlas AI, which is using satellite imagery to help measure yields on the ground in Africa in real time. It can create more accurate estimates than the governments themselves, providing information for policymakers as well as the private sector.

What projects are you excited about at The Rockefeller Foundation right now?

There is a number of really good storage and waste reducing technologies. For example, InspiraFarms has developed a cold storage solution that is solar powered and really quite innovative.

There are also simple solutions, like hermetically sealed bags that prevent the destruction of maize and many other crops. That alone could reduce food loss by 50%, if we can figure out how to get them to farmers. We have also had a lot of success with fruit fly traps that are cheap and reduce the spoilage of mangoes.

Another area that is pretty exciting is using insects as feed for chickens. For example, you create a farm that raises insects on food waste. Then you feed those insects to poultry. It’s a huge environmental benefit and the poultry are even healthier. It’s a wonderful way to deal with the waste issue and create a sustainable food source.

We want social entrepreneurs to understand they are part of an ecosystem; they should not be solving these problems in isolation. Where should aspiring social entrepreneurs build relationships to start creating meaningful change in agriculture and food systems?

It all starts with the people who are engaged in the supply chain: the farmers, the traders, and the retailers. It is critical to engage with them.

In terms of organizations, there are funding organizations like the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa and innovation funds like Acumen. There are also bilateral and multilateral institutions that are active in this space. Every African government has its Ministry of Agriculture.

Finally, colleges and research universities in Africa often have a deeper understanding of the realities on the ground. I recommend partnering with other students in agricultural colleges who can give a reality check. Even just a Skype collaboration is helpful — there are students and universities who would love to help.

Have you seen any common mistakes from social enterprises in the food and agriculture sector that you would like social entrepreneurs to be aware of?

Yes — assuming that no one has ever done what you’re thinking of. Another big mistake is that people don’t understand the realities on the ground and the basic economics that have to make sense for an innovation to become sustainable. Additionally, understanding what is culturally appropriate and building upon existing infrastructure is critical.

You also have to understand that farmers and the food community are generally fairly conservative and risk averse because the consequences of making a wrong decision are dramatic. So it will be challenging to drive adoption of even the best technologies.

Is there any advice that you would share with someone who might want to build a career in this sector?

It starts by getting your hands dirty and understanding what is happening on the ground. Theory is important, but grounding in reality is just as important.

My other advice is that we’re generally pretty bad at listening and developing feedback systems. Any time you are beginning a new initiative, make sure you have feedback systems in place to help you learn quickly.

It is part of the lean startup mentality, but it doesn’t always translate to the agriculture sector. People say, “Oh, that’s fine for Silicon Valley. But we know what the answer is here.” But that’s not true.

So, how do we leverage our knowledge to create more dialogue and more connection points?

Finally, I understand that you have been involved in projects related to “future sensing” and “foresight.” Could you tell me more about that and how it relates to food systems?

When I was at Omidyar Network, we were developing what we called “future sensing capabilities,” which is listening to signals and creating future scenarios and foresight. In one of our analyses, we looked at how our popular culture envisions the future.

We found that 99% of the books and movies in our list were dystopian and dark — like Hunger Games, Mad Max, The Handmaid’s Tale. We are extraordinarily good at describing a world that we don’t want and are afraid of. We are quite bad at describing the world we actually want.

The challenge is that if you can’t imagine a future, you can’t create it. And we don’t have a lot of imagination of what a really good future would look like.

We have global warming, automation, artificial intelligence, population growth — all of those things are real. But let’s say we made the right decisions: What would the food system actually look like? What would it take to support that vision?

We’ve optimized our food system for two things: profit and production of calories. We have not optimized it for nutrition, environmental sustainability, culture, and community. Our food system needs to optimize along all six of those factors. So what would that actually look like in your region? What would it mean for land use? What would it mean for the kinds of crops that are being grown? What would it mean for the distribution system and employment, given that artificial intelligence and automation are going to change everything?

At the end of the day, the whole reason to create visions of the future is to direct the kind of innovation processes we want.

Recommended resources:

• Food in the Anthropocene: the EAT–Lancet Commission on healthy diets from sustainable food systems, Walter Willett et al.
• Good Food is Good Business: Opportunities driving the future of affordable nutrition, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
• Feed Compass: Acting on animal feed, Feed for the Future
• Shaping the Future of Food, World Economic Forum
• Productive Diversification in African Agriculture and its Effects on Resilience and Nutrition, World Bank

Three Challenges Facing the Food and Agriculture System and Opportunities for Social Entrepreneurs was originally published in Acumen Academy Voices on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Leading investors, entrepreneurs and sector experts share their insights on building successful business models that provide electricity to the poor

Nearly 1 billion people lack access to electricity. 2 billion people have unreliable electricity access. 3 billion people lack access to clean, safe cooking solutions. While grid-electricity serves nearly 140 million more households today than it did in 2010, outages are common and lengthy, and expansion of these services has been uneven. It is invariably the poor who remain underserved.

Yes, these numbers are big, and represent a lot of lives. But you know what that means? The potential for impact is big, as well.

Over the past decade, 45% of people who gained access to energy for the first time did so because of new social enterprises. More than 86 off-grid startups incorporated in the past 3 years, and for the first time, the number of unelectrified people fell under 1 billion.

Interested in contributing to this catalytic community, bringing new ideas and solutions to the challenges of energy access? Check out this advice from 7 leading experts in the sector. We talked to Amar Inamdar, Managing Director at KawiSafi Ventures, Christine Eibs Singer, Co-Founder at E+Co and Senior Advisor to SEforALL, Alejandro Estrada, Co-Founder and Fund Manager of E 10 Energy Services, Leslie Labruto, Global Energy Lead at Acumen, Ling Koopthavonrerk, Associate at The Rockefeller Foundation’s Power initiative, Nthabi Mosia, Co-Founder & CMO at Easy Solar, and Russell Sturm, Head of Energy Access/Advisory Services, International Finance Corporation.

1. Start with the problem, not the solution.

It’s easy to assume that a great idea will be enough to make your business successful, but experts say this is the most common mistake new entrepreneurs make. It’s important that you build a business around the problem you’re solving, not the solution you’re offering. Alejandro Estrada, a fund manager at an energy investment firm, E 10 Energy Services, offers this advice, “You have to understand your customer. I have seen companies fail and go bankrupt because they believe they know better than the customer. They define their solutions sitting from an office space, not from getting perspective from the field. Meaningful change is possible when you have a customer-centric approach. Partner with your customers, listen to your customers, and have a strong relationships with your customers.” For example, if you’re developing clean cooking technology but you don’t consider how that technology will alter the taste of food, you’ll fail to achieve long-lasting adoption rates of your cook stove, even if it significantly reduces toxic emissions. Christine Eibs Singer, who has invested in and coached hundreds of energy entrepreneurs, advises, “Don’t pretend that you have all of the answers. Acknowledge what you know and don’t know, and be a really good listener.”

2. Push yourself to bring energy to harder markets.

The challenge of energy access is deeply connected to geography. 95% of the off-grid population lives in Sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, and East Asia, and 87% of the world’s unelectrified population lives in rural areas. That’s why Leslie Labruto, Global Head of Energy at Acumen, says that we need entrepreneurs to push themselves to go to harder markets. These may be countries like Chad, Malawi, and Niger, where respectively 91%, 89%, and 84% of the population is without access to electricity. Or it might mean developing innovative distribution channels, payment models, and customer service mechanisms to reach people in remote villages with limited infrastructure. Evaluating and entering new markets can be challenging, so Leslie suggests using these five “conditions for success” created by McKinsey to determine if markets are ready for new energy entrants. These involve examining off grid regulations in the country you which to serve, the overall business environment, and the ease of logistics and channels, among other factors.

3. Plan for more cash than you think you need.

Companies that provide energy access can be capital intensive, especially for companies offering things like solar home systems or mini grids. It’s important for any business to manage its costs and revenues, but it’s especially critical for capital-intensive business models. Amar Inamdar, Managing Director at KawiSafi Ventures, offers this advice, “Cash flow is what drives business success and business failure. The business that don’t work out may have had a fantastic product and brought it to market for a few years, but they ultimately ran out of money. The inability to convert sales into cash and get that cash back into the company is what ultimately undoes a business.” Managing cash flow might sound easy in theory, but it’s challenging in practice. Amar recommends stripping the business model down to its simplest form: how is money made and where is it spent?. Then, ask yourself, will your business become cash flow positive based on the size of the market you can reach? How quickly? You can work with the government or other donors to receive grants and subsidies, but eventually, you need to prove that your business can be self-sustaining.

4. Identify partnerships to help simplify your business model.

Some energy businesses are completely vertically integrated, meaning they own every part of their operations from manufacturing to sales and distribution to customer service. Owning every part of your supply chain has benefits. You have control over every activity needed to deliver value to customers, and you hear feedback directly from customers on what is working and what is not. However, owning the entire value chain can become incredibly complex and costly. You have to develop an expertise in each stage of the supply chain that you own. That’s why Russell Sturm, Head of Energy Access and Advisory Services at the IFC, says you need to be smart about where you partner. “You need to decide what you develop an expertise in versus what others can do for you,” he says, “Being a manufacturer, a retailer, a distributor, and a financer is hard to do. If you’re the first company in the market, sometimes you have to run every part of your supply chain. But if you’re coming into a market with some traction, think twice about where your comparative advantage is along the supply chain. Partner with companies that already have expertise, rather than trying to spread your company out over eight different business activities.”

5. Focus on providing top-notch customer service.

Acumen has conducted countless Lean Data studies to understand the pain points of energy access customers, and one thing is clear: customer service is the number one pain point for mini-grid companies. Ling Koopthavonrerk, an Associate at The Rockefeller Foundation’s Power initiative, encourages entrepreneurs to think about customer service this way, “In a rural context, energy operates differently than your traditional utility. There’s more than one choice for how you get energy. That means the nature of the energy market is a retail market. Retail is detail. You need have have excellent customer support and service.” You may provide customer service directly or you may partner with a company to deliver customer service. Regardless of who is delivering the customer service, you should have clear customer satisfaction metrics and survey customers frequently to see how well your company is serving customers needs.

6. Connect energy access to broader issues of development

“You can’t really talk about wide scale development unless we fix the power issue,” says Nthabi Mosia, co-founder and CMO of Easy Solar. That’s because energy is foundational to progress in sectors like agriculture, education, and healthcare. Energy-efficient refrigerators would extend the life of vaccines, and electricity in health clinics would mean that no mother has to give birth in the dark. In the education sector, students rate limited lighting as the number one challenge to learning and doing homework. In India, it’s estimated that $13 billion of post-harvest losses happen every year due to lack of refrigeration solutions. Christine Eibs Singer sees this as an opportunity for entrepreneurs to develop cross-sector innovations. She says, “The role of energy can enable better health services and education services. Right now, it’s an afterthought, but I think there’s an opportunity for businesses to better connect these sectors. In some countries, as little as 9% of healthcare facilities have access to electricity. We need to inform and influence decision makers on the role of energy in enabling better health and education services, and businesses can help move forward these opportunities.”

7. Contribute to the development of energy efficient technology.

While the energy efficiency of off-grid products has improved significantly over the past few years, there is still need for technological innovation, especially for cross-sector solutions. Amar Inamdar describes the need and opportunity this way: “The consumptive use space — TVs, lights, radios — are seeing phenomenal increases in efficiency. But I think we’ve got so much further to go in the energy efficiency journey. I’m really excited when entrepreneurs start to work on the energy efficiency of productive use technologies, like irrigation, refrigeration, and agriculture milling. These are the spaces where efficiency will transform the ability of a family to make income and improve livelihoods. These are the innovations that will fundamentally transform the way business is done and the way people get access to incomes, independence, and livelihoods.” If your company is selling products in the productive use space, how are you pushing the conversation about energy efficiency forward?

8. Pilot and pivot.

Truly understanding the needs of your customers takes time, and customer needs evolve. That means that identifying a customer problem is not a 30 minute exercise. It’s an iterative process that requires piloting and pivoting solutions to see if they truly address your customers’ needs. Here’s how Nthabi Mosia thinks about it, “You need to be willing, at every stage, to accept that you might be wrong about what you’re doing. There’s a balance between having confidence in the fact that you’ve got a good idea, and being willing to adjust or amend it. The customer, at the end of the day, is the one who knows what they need.”

8 Lessons for Aspiring Entrepreneurs in the Energy Sector was originally published in Acumen Academy Voices on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Perspectives from our friends at IDEO.org. This post originally appeared on the IDEO.org blog.

At IDEO.org, we’ve been working on financial innovation for the poor. More than 2B people globally have no access to financial services, and in the US, 138MM people are struggling financially. We think this matters: financial health gives you the money you need for the day and the ability to plan for the future. It protects your family from shocks and empowers you to take advantage of opportunities.

We think this is a complex design problem, and we’re out to fix it alongside lots of other innovators in financial health. Here are five reasons why design is so critical for financial services:

1. Financial products weren’t designed for poor people.

Historically, financial services have been designed for people with steady incomes, a variety of investments, and fixed assets like homes. And less than 8% of assets — 401(k)s, pensions, etc. — are owned by the bottom 50% of Americans. When we take a closer look, this group is still earning and moving money with a high level of proficiency — they are just using a different system. Why use a credit card when cash is easier? Why travel to a far away bank when a payday loan is right next door? There is an open playing field for creating new products, services, and business models that are specifically targeted towards the bottom 50% of Americans.

Many families save using informal means, such as this savings box in Mexico.

2. People know what they should do, and then they do the opposite.

According to a report from the Center for Financial Services Innovation (CFSI), 50% of American households — regardless of income level — have less than $1,000 in savings. We also know that short-term thinking often drives decision-making, which can have significant implications for the savings of a person with low income. This presents a massive opportunity for digital tools to intervene. IDEO.org worked with Moneythink to address this gap in knowledge and short-term action with low-income high schools students in Chicago. After observing both social and financial behaviors of the students, IDEO.org partnered with Causelabs to design a new mobile app which leverages behaviors like peer applause and recognition when students save, spend mindfully, and use financial products safely. It socializes the experience, lending students accountability and shifting those short-term behaviors.

3. Income cycles are mismatched with expenses.

If you’re being paid hourly or taking odd jobs, you don’t always know when your next paycheck will arrive, or even its size. Expenses, however, are often quite regular: the rent, electricity bill, and the phone bill come around the same time every month. The day a bill is due, plenty of consumers who might otherwise be able to pay might not have the cash on-hand.

We see a tremendous opportunity for cash-flow smoothing. Tools that help bridge the gap from the bills to the paycheck can relieve a huge pain point and protect people from added fees or predatory lenders.

Partnering with Econet, Mercy Corps, and Consultative Group to Assist the Poor(CGAP) in Zimbabwe, IDEO.org designed a micro-savings and micro-credit product that allowed families to set aside money for school fees as they earned it. In cases where they didn’t have enough money when school fees were due, a small line of credit would advance the difference and could be paid back interest-free over the next 30 days.

4. Design for smartphones. Everybody’s got one.

Smartphones drastically decrease the cost of reaching people, empower customers to know more about their accounts, offer a safe space for a conversation on a private matter, and open new and exciting channels of communication. There’s a reason so much fintech innovation has happened on smartphones: smartphones are easy to build on and, if you’ve got a successful product, quick to scale. And yet, traditional banks still have a high in-person costs of service, and a mere 7% of their products are digital end-to-end. Fintech innovators are seizing this golden opportunity to create disruptive products and upend traditional business models.

Two-thirds of adults in the US use a smartphone, and in low-income households, many are dependent on their smartphone for Internet access.

5. Many people are one emergency away from serious debt.

Though you don’t know when, unexpected emergencies always happen. Non-salaried workers suffer the most from this: if your child stays home sick or your car breaks down, you can’t get paid and savings are quickly depleted. Suddenly, opportunities for access to capital are shut down. You’ve got a poor or no credit score, your savings are dry, and you’ve tapped out all your resources. And this isn’t an experience only for low-income Americans: according to a recent Shed report, almost half of Americans would be unable to pay a $400 unexpected expense.

At IDEO.org, we find that the biggest pain points for people are often the strongest opportunities for design to play a role. In 2015, we partnered with Neighborhood Trust to develop a “When Life Happens Fund,” a product specifically designed for emergencies. The idea was to create a fund which is paid into directly from paychecks (like a 401(k)) and where possible, matched by employers). When an emergency happens, you have access to the amount you would save for the full year. Early prototyping provided compelling results.

Calling all designers!

These may sound like massive problems, but there’s good news — there is so much more to design! And now, there are initiatives in the financial health space with eyes solely focused on these issues and capital to help the most innovative solutions come to life. For example, Neighborhood Trust — a more traditional, small nonprofit — is beginning to stretch its financial innovation muscles thanks to the support and capital provided by the Financial Solutions Lab through its 2015 challenge, which sought innovative solutions to the issue of income volatility.

This is only the beginning of what we hope becomes a wave of innovative fintech solutions. At IDEO.org, we will continue to design at the edges around the world, and we can’t wait to see the innovators who join the next class of the Financial Solutions Lab to continue to push the envelope of what design can do for financial health.

Calling all designers!

These may sound like massive problems, but there’s good news — there is so much more to design! And now, there are initiatives in the financial health space with eyes solely focused on these issues and capital to help the most innovative solutions come to life. For example, Neighborhood Trust — a more traditional, small nonprofit — is beginning to stretch its financial innovation muscles thanks to the support and capital provided by the Financial Solutions Lab through its 2015 challenge, which sought innovative solutions to the issue of income volatility.

This is only the beginning of what we hope becomes a wave of innovative fintech solutions. At IDEO.org, we will continue to design at the edges around the world, and we can’t wait to see the innovators who continue to push the envelope of what design can do for financial health.

—

This piece was written by Jessie Wild Sneller of IDEO.org and originally appeared on the IDEO.org blog. It is reprinted with permission from our generous friends at IDEO.org. You can check out all of their great resources for learning human-centered design at DesignKit.org.

Five Reasons Why Financial Services Needs Design was originally published in Acumen Academy Voices on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

A Q&A with Nthabi Mosia, Co-Founder & CMO of Easy Solar

Nthabiseng (Nthabi) Mosia, Alexandre (Alex) Tourre, and Eric Silverman founded Easy Solar with a vision to transform the face of energy in a country that’s been in the dark for too long. Today, only 11 percent of Sierra Leone’s 7 million people have access to electricity. Easy Solar’s mission is to bring new hope and opportunity to the country by making high-quality solar energy available and affordable for all. They do this by distributing a suite of high-quality solar products on affordable payment plans to communities underserved by the grid.

We sat down with Nthabi Mosia, who founded Easy Solar while in school at Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs, to ask her for advice about starting a business as a student and to learn about the lessons she’s learned from building Easy Solar.

What inspired you to work in the energy sector?

I grew up in South Africa, and around when I was in high school, we had power outages consistently. Because most houses in South Africa don’t have a generator and most people can’t afford a backup system, we lived by candlelight on some nights. I remember I studied for some of my final exams by candlelight. I think when you don’t have something you realize how central and core it is to what you’re doing.

But I think South Africa is still really privileged in contrast to the rest of Africa. When I was working as a management consultant, I was doing projects across the continent and realized that you can’t really talk about wide-scale development unless we fix the power issue. I was fortunate enough to only have to study by candlelight a few times in a night or a week or a month depending on the load shedding schedule, but some people have to read in toxic kerosene fumes. When I first was in a house in Sierra Leone that was using kerosene and I had to breathe in those toxic fumes, I couldn’t even stand it for five minutes. I felt the impact right away, and people have been living like that for quite a while. I think what inspired me to work in this sector was a personal dissatisfaction or inconvenience that morphed into being frustrated with the lack of development. It was thinking about the 600 million people without power and what that means for Africa.

Tell us about the creation of Easy Solar. How did the idea come about? How did you research, test, and develop your idea?

Easy Solar came up as an idea when we were still in grad school. It’s been through many, many, many iterations. It started off as a communal charging solar kiosk, and it eventually morphed into its current mode where we distribute solar products with affordable payment plans through a network of community-based agents and shops.

When we were deciding where to build a company, we asked ourselves, “where is the strongest need?” There were lots of other companies doing things in different parts of the continent, but Sierra Leone seemed like a huge, untapped market. Eric knew the landscape really well from living and working there for a few years during Peace Corps. He speaks the local language, which is so important when you’re running these types of businesses, especially when you’re doing distribution. Market need, limited competition and local context; those factors made us focus on Sierra Leone.

While Alex, Eric, and I were in grad school, we developed an initial idea, entered it into the D-Prize and won, and received seed funding. We entered a few other competitions and hackathons throughout school and won some of them. We tapped into the networks at our school to help refine and polish the idea into what it is now.

How did you meet your co-founders? What advice do you have for students forming new teams?

The co-founders story is always interesting because we are a very different mix of people. Eric I had met through a class we were doing on energy access in the developing world. Alex, who is an engineer and computer scientist by training, was also studying at Columbia’s School of International Public Affairs, where we all met.

All three of us founders were really committed and passionate about energy access for different reasons. There are a lot of competing factors when you’re starting a business in school. People may be really excited at the outset, but for one reason or another — a grad school loan or a family commitment — they might fall out. I think it’s really important to have conversations upfront about whether starting a business is something you really want to do and how long can you commit to it.

Another thing that I think has really allowed us to flourish throughout a bumpy but enjoyable road… in 4 wheel drive… very Sierra Leonean-esque… has been our complementing skills and personalities. You kind of want it to be like a marriage. You balance each other out, but you also drive each other crazy and push each other to be better. I like that about the three of us. We’re never complacent with each other. I think because we’re so different.

At the end of the day, we always say, “Our mission is the company’s mission.” So, no matter what personal dynamics get in the way, that brings us back. Which is why passion, focus, and commitment should be the driving forces behind how you build your team.

Tell us about a time when you adapted your business model based on feedback from customers.

Initially we thought we could come in with full solar home systems and Pay-As-You-Go (PAYGO) financing. But when we did a survey of the Sierra Leonean landscape to figure out whether people would be able to afford a solar system or solar lantern, we realized that average income in Sierra Leone was slightly lower than we had expected and that it’s more of a cash based economy compared to Kenya or Tanzania.

The survey helped us realize two things. First, we can’t rely on mobile money, and second, if we came in with a Solar Home System, we’d either not get enough penetration or we’d have super high default rates, which was happening a lot in the industry. We developed a tiered sales approach in response to those findings.

We come in with an entry level lantern that can charge your phone and that retails $15–30, depending on the lantern, and people can finance anywhere between 4 months on the smallest lantern to 7–9 months on the larger ones. This makes it a price point that almost anyone can afford. We use the payment data to evaluate whether people can qualify for higher purchases, like a solar home system. We’re still a solar home system company, in essence, but we do more of a credit appraisal process. The benefit of that is that we know our customers before they buy a $200 home system.

A recent Lean Data study found that delivering quality customer service is one of the biggest challenges energy access companies face. Easy Solar has exceptional customer reviews, so can you tell us about Easy Solar’s strategy for ensuring quality customer service?

Being a distribution company, we see ourselves having two key assets. The first is our agent network that forms our distribution network. The second is the payment information and data.

With our distribution network, we want our agents to be able to sell a continuous pipeline of products to customers. We really want to minimize churn. So, in addition to thinking about a lifetime customer relationship, we think about a lifetime agent relationship. Our first agent is still with us. He’s like “Mr. Easy Solar” in his village. We train agents, and we make sure they’re really well branded. We make sure we instill the company’s mission, vision, and values in a way agents can understand through frequent training. We also make sure we have someone on our management team visit agents on a weekly basis. With all of the agents, we try to invest in them as people. That really frames the relationship that this company is a family where people can improve and better themselves and their community. When our agents are interacting with customers, that comes through. We think that happy employees — happy agents — are the first ingredients for happy customer service relationship.

As a company, we really put the customer at the center of what we do. We haven’t perfected it. I’m not going to sit here and say we have happy customers all around. We try and focus on why customers are unhappy — they can’t get a hold of an agent or there’s an issue with their product, and there’s no replacement stock. Those are things we try to focus on and improve the time-to-service delivery.

Based on your experience of starting a social enterprise in school, what advice would you have for other students looking to launch a social enterprise?

You need to know when and how to ask for help. There are three ways we asked for help.

First, make sure that you’re using the school’s resources as effectively as possible, both in a class context and with professors. For example, in our second year of school, we adapted all our classes to make sure either we were focusing on something that was relevant to the business or to Sierra Leone. There’s always trade-offs you have to weigh around how much time you focus on school versus your business. As much as possible, try to find an overlap between school and business.

Second, if your school has an entrepreneurship program, tap into that. Seek out mentorship programs, hackathons, incubators, workshops, grants and tap into all of it.

Third, ask for help from people already in your industry. We were fortunate enough to be in contact with people who were at a later stage in the entrepreneurship journey and were actually willing to chat with us. You’d be surprised how many people are willing to take 30 minutes out of their day for someone who is in a position that they were a few years ago. Those conversations were the most valuable. People can give you a reality check on what will work and what won’t, and they can help you think about your challenges differently. And don’t take no for an answer! Sometimes we had to hound people for time, but those 10 minutes of time we got were still so helpful for us.

What are the biggest pitfalls or mistakes you’ve seen social entrepreneurs in this sector encounter?

The first one that comes to mind is having a solution-first approach, not a problem-first approach. You need to be willing, at every stage, to accept that you might be wrong about what you’re doing. There’s a balance between having confidence in the fact that you’ve got a good idea, and being willing to adjust or amend it. The customer, at the end of the day, is the one who knows what they need.

The second one — and I think it’s linked to the first — is not necessarily respecting the local context enough when you’re building your team or thinking about people and culture. A lot of people I’ve seen who are very passionate about social entrepreneurship don’t fully understand the context of the problem or maybe haven’t experienced the problem themselves. We were three expats coming into Sierra Leone, trying to build a business that lasts. One of the first decisions we made about building our team was to bring in Sierra Leonean talent to build their own company. It was 2 years before we recruited a foreign national. We’ve had times when we’ve gotten survey results that we don’t understand or that frustrate us, and one of our Sierra Leonean managers will say, “Of course that makes sense”.

Lastly, I think a lot of people think a good idea and a good team is enough, but just from a personal perspective, you have to be willing to put in the work and you have to have the right expectations. Sierra Leone has some of the best beaches in the world — and that’s not a shameless plug, it’s really true — and I didn’t see a beach for the first 6 months I was there. That’s because, especially as a co-founder, if you don’t do the work, no one is going to do it for you. And it’s not always going to be fun. Be very open to having nights — or weeks — where you don’t sleep. We lived and worked in the same building and drove each other crazy. I think you need to have the expectations that the day to day sometimes just is not great. You need to know why you’re there and return to your mission. It’s going to be a ride, and it’s going to be amazing once it pays off.

But it might not pay off. We always profile the successes, but sometimes you will fail. Failure is not failure until you leave it there. If it doesn’t pay off and the business is not successful, be willing to go back and ask if you’ll try it again from scratch, or if you’ll start a new project. Humility means being willing to fail and knowing that you’re still learning something along the way.

Want to learn more about Easy Solar? Get a firsthand look at Easy Solar’s impact and experience the power of solar through Acumen’s docuseries, ENVISION. ENLIGHTEN. EMPOWER.

Lessons from the University to the Field was originally published in Acumen Academy Voices on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

A Q&A with Leslie Labruto, Associate Director and Head of Global Energy at Acumen

Since 2007, Acumen has invested $23.3 million in 23 companies in the lighting, power and cookstove sectors. Working across every rung of the energy ladder, these social enterprises have provided nearly 100 million people with access to energy. Many companies, from d.light to M-Kopa, have pioneered the off-grid sector and opened the doors for new energy companies to find faster, more efficient solutions to improve the lives of low-income people everywhere.

In 2017, Acumen launched its Pioneer Energy Investment Initiative (PEII), a $20 million initiative to expand its work in the energy sector. PEII funds invest early-stage, high-risk equity in off-grid energy access enterprises in East and West Africa and South Asia with the goal of impacting 60 million lives by 2026. We sat down with Leslie Labruto who leads Acumen’s Pioneer Investment Initiative to ask about the lessons Acumen has learned related to building successful business models that provide electricity to the poor.

Let’s start with the big picture. What challenges in the energy sector do you think need to be most urgently addressed right now?

In my opinion, there are two things that the energy sector needs to focus on, but doesn’t: alleviating poverty and first-time energy access.

There needs to be a poverty focus in energy access work. If energy is deployed properly — if you’re connected to a mini grid, if you have the right appliances — energy can help you generate income. At the core of Acumen’s energy strategy is poverty alleviation.

We also need to accelerate the rate at which people receive first-time access to energy. There’s still 950 million people without energy access. That’s about a seventh of the world’s population. First-time energy access is a pressing issue that needs to be addressed.

What opportunities for innovation do you see in the energy sector?

We need companies and startups to go to markets where there’s currently no energy access. Certainly, some of these markets are difficult to enter, but we need more companies focused on increasing energy access in countries where there isn’t an off-grid market yet.

We also need more companies improving productive use technology and thinking about how their business models can generate revenue for customers. At Acumen, we consider “productive use technology” to be products and services that create an opportunity for customers to generate income — for example solar irrigation pumps, sewing machines, welding tools, refrigerators, or hair clippers. At the same time, financing needs to be available to ensure these appliances are within reach for low-income customers.

There’s myriad of opportunities to develop more inclusive business models. For example, companies can provide longer term loans to low-income customers or ask for lower deposits from customers. These are changes that can make energy efficient appliances and productive use technologies within reach for the poor.

I think cooking is arguably the greatest challenge in energy access, though. Three billion people cook with dirty fuels. If we could help customers transition to electric or cleaner fuel sources, we can see substantial health gains.

What has prevented cookstove business models from gaining traction?

There are lots of reasons that cookstove business models have struggled to take off. One factor is that cooking is so steeped in behavior and habits. Introducing a new cooking technology with a new fuel source could change the way you cook and provide for your family. If the new stove isn’t sufficient to meet your old standard of taste, you end up stacking fuel sources when you cook (aka using your old cookstove in addition to an improved cookstove).

The technology for cookstoves is still emerging too, so even with the most advanced cookstove technology, customers are stacking fuels because their favorite foods don’t taste the same.

At large, clean cooking has turned into more of a ‘push’ product. Customers aren’t saying “I need this.” A lot of times, customers would just rather use the cooking technology they’re used to.

(As an entrepreneur), you have a better chance at success if you can demonstrate two things to customers: (1) that your product will save them money and (2) the quality of food cooked on a new stove will remain the same. But still, the cookstove sector is still widely misunderstood and poorly studied. The sector needs more capital and a bit more time to create a business model that’s really successful.

What advice do you have for entrepreneurs hoping to enter a new geography, potentially as a first-mover?

Acumen analyzes five different conditions that McKinsey identified to evaluate if markets are ready for energy access companies.

The first condition is off-grid regulations. What are the off-grid regulations? Do regulations exist? Ideally there are supportive regulations, but sometimes no regulations are better than bad regulations.

Second is the business environment. What is the business environment in the country like? How easy or challenging is it to set up an entity in the market? Are there opportunities to receive capital in market [from local investors, governments, or donors]?

The third condition is logistics and channels. If you’re trying to get products to low income customers, how will you physically get products to them if they’re located in disparate, low-volume communities? If customers are in a remote part of a country, what infrastructure exists to reach them?

The fourth condition is willingness and affordability. Do customers actually have the money to pay? If the population lives on less than $1 a day, and your most affordable solar system is meant for customers living on $3.10 a day, there’s just simply not the cash flow available for your business to succeed.

The final condition is ease of payment. Mobile money has been hugely instrumental in enabling energy access. Mini-grid customers pay with mobile money. Solar home system customers pay deposits and make loan payments with mobile money. If there’s no mobile money penetration, it’s really tough for companies to recoup their costs to really track cash payments. So, what technology exists to make payment really easy?

How are social enterprises uniquely suited to play a role in addressing challenges or pioneering innovations in the energy sector?

Of the 800 million people that have gained energy access in the past decade, 45% have been from path-breaking startups.

We’re seeing that, increasingly, social enterprises can get to customers at a lower cost than the competition. Extending the grid can cost up to $2,000 per connection, compared to a solar home system, which can cost $200 or even cheaper. There’s a role for home system companies and solar distribution companies to serve customers in a cheaper, more efficient way than some grid solutions. And again, we need social enterprises to explore new, untapped markets.

Acumen has been investing in the energy sector for over a decade. What do you look for when you evaluate investments?

There’s five factors we look at when we’re evaluating investment potential.

First is the product or service. What is the product, service, or technology a company is offering? Have customers shown they want what is being offered? What are the margins for the product or service?

Second is the market size. How big is the company hoping get? Is that hope realistic? How well do you know your market? How well do you know your customer?

Third factor is the team. Probably the most important is who you are as a team. Are your entrepreneurial and have you done this before? Are you a good leader? What is the intention you hold? Are you willing to really commit to solving this problem by being in the market for long time?

The fourth factor is the deal. Obviously, every time an investor looks at a deal they are evaluating the historical and project financials, evidence of revenue generation, and the valuation and terms associated with the transaction. .

Lastly — probably as important as the team — is the customers. Who are your customers? We reach out to customers in our due diligence to ask: “How did this product change your life?” We want to understand what meaningful change customers saw: quality of life improvements, longer hours of study time, etc. For Acumen, poverty focus is critical.

What are the biggest pitfalls or mistakes you’ve seen social entrepreneurs in this sector encounter?

Oftentimes, we see valuations that are too high. It’s just a bad sign in terms of humility and expectation setting.

We’ve also seen entrepreneurs underestimate the cost of distribution. It’s much more difficult to sell a product or service when it’s in a rural region. You may spend half a day getting to a customer, and then that customer might not want what you’re selling. There are a lot of costs that go into distribution and it can be quite discouraging.

Finally, you always need more money than you think you’re going to need. Prepare for the fact that energy access business models are capital intensive and line up early investors who can support your vision over a long time. Tap into all types of capital available in your market, not just public grant capital, but also debt, equity, and grants. Different types of capital can enable different activities. Be responsible and thoughtful about how you take on capital and how you plan to repay loans.

If you were talking to a group of students looking to create an enterprise in this field, what advice would you have for them?

The first piece of advice I have is that you need to be in the market you want to serve. If you’re not in the market you want to serve while you’re in school, ideally you can relocate there after school. You can’t develop a solution when you’re not talking to the customers who are ultimately going to be using your product or service.

The second piece of advice is to talk to your customers all the time. See what their feedback is, understand what’s working for them and what’s not. Customer feedback is going to be a critical driver of early success.

Third, look for partners. There’s so many people out there eager to support you: NGOs, for-profit companies, investors, networks of peers, research partners. The list is endless. The key is to make sure you’re committed to partnering with people who have been pioneering this work and reinventing the wheel so that you can work together to develop a solution. That’s how can you stand on the shoulders of giants.

The last bit of advice is to be realistic. Nothing is worse than a company saying the addressable market is all unelectrified people. Be humble in recognizing that this is a really challenging task.

Want more energy insights from Acumen? Check out our Energy Impact Series, a collection of new research on the social impact of off-grid solar energy access.

How to Accelerate Energy Access through Off-Grid Innovation was originally published in Acumen Academy Voices on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

You might assume that branding requires engaging an expensive design agency to get started. However, you can get started on the branding process without necessarily hiring a designer or branding expert right away.

All great brands start much deeper than what you eventually see translated into logos or graphics.

At the core of remarkable brands, there is a deep understanding of the purpose and strategic direction of the organization. This inner awareness is critical. If you skip it you could end up with a brand that falls flat, doesn’t feel authentic, or entirely misses the mark with your audience.

Bobby Martin, co-founder of Original Champions of Design and a guest in the +Acumen Master Class on Branding for Social Change, describes what truly lies at the heart of branding:

“A brand is a feeling, an emotional connection. It’s something that is much bigger than just a logo. A logo is the visual articulation of a brand. A brand to us is a promise. A consistent promise that a company or an organization delivers over time. It’s something that you want to believe in and participate in. It’s something that has to be crafted and well-delivered by that company to the consumer or the audience.”

While you will eventually need a designer to help execute your brand’s visual elements, having clarity of purpose, values, and differentiation will considerably influence your overall brand identity.

There are three foundational branding areas you can start to investigate on your own:

• What is your organization’s purpose? Why do you exist?
• What are your core values? How will your organization behave?
• What will you do differently? How will you stand apart?

#1 — Know Your Purpose

“It is critical to understand the essence of your brand before bringing it to life.” — Debbie Millman

As Debbie Millman shares in her five-step process for branding, the first step you should undertake is understanding your brand’s strategic reason for being. In other words, knowing why your organization is needed to make a difference in the world right now.

The most common tools used to express purpose are organizational mission and vision statements. For social impact ventures, memorable brands are often strongly connected to these statements.

Vision statements articulate what an ideal world looks like in your context, and mission statements clearly state why and how your company plans to make a difference. (Read this article from The Brandling for more perspective on how mission, vision, and values work together.)

The Conscious Brand Index, created by Mezzanine, defines a conscious brand as, “one that actively and intentionally nurtures positive values, relationships and experiences with all stakeholders. It values people and purpose over profit.”

They determined six pillars that make up a conscious brand, all of which relate to the self-awareness of an organization and its strategic goals.

Two of the six Conscious Brand index pillars have to do with a dedication to purpose:

• Higher purpose — “Harnessing a shared purpose connects, unifies and mobilizes others around a common goal, which is the foundation for creating real change.”
• Purpose-driven strategy — “A purpose-driven strategy can be described as ‘one that refers to its purpose to drive, integrate and evaluate everything the organization does in order to ensure it creates its desired future.’”

Julie Channing, Chief Marketing Officer of the shoe brand Allbirds explains how dedication to purpose has informed their branding:

“Purpose has informed everything we’ve done since day one. We really believe we’re here to make better things in a better way. That’s one of the ways we simplify the idea behind the brand, but it’s also really important that people understand we have a strong belief that comfort, great design, and sustainability can live harmoniously in a pair of shoes.”

Honing in on your organizational purpose is something that only your team can truly articulate. Even when working with brand strategists and designers, they will rely on you for these insights.

The more thought you give to your purpose early on, the more prepared you’ll be to co-create a remarkable brand when the time comes to hire a branding professional.

#2 — Know What You Value

“The notion of a brand has now extended to how we live, what we choose to surround ourselves by, and the way in which we want the world to be.” — Debbie Millman

The foundations of building a brand start with knowing who you are and what you value. When you are clear on this, you can communicate with your audience and customers with authenticity and consistency.

Your social venture’s values influence behavior, culture, and decision-making. Recruiting Social’s Core Values Guide summarizes, “in a business context, core values are the highest values that guide a firm’s actions, unite its employees, and define its brand.”

Together with vision and mission statements, core values serve as an internal pulse check when faced with uncertainty or difficult decisions. Externally, when customers see an organization acting in alignment with values similar to their own, they are more likely to feel trust, connection, and eventually become a supporter or customer.

Here are three examples you can use as inspiration for developing organizational core values:

Once you have narrowed down the list to five to ten core values, take it one step further and define what each of those values means to you in real life.

For example, does valuing ‘community’ mean you value a few deep relationships, or you value connection amongst thousands? To solidify the meaning even further, you can write down an example to demonstrate each value in action.

Core values give people a way to feel connected to the brand. Howard Schultz, CEO of Starbucks, said, “If people believe they share values with a company, they will stay loyal to the brand.”

The core values that drive your work are what makes your brand ‘uniquely you.’ When your organization is living your values, you’ll be delivering a more memorable experience and building trust.

#3 — Know What You Do Differently

“This is a very complicated world; it’s a very noisy world. And we’re not going to get the chance to get people to remember much about us. No company is. So we have to be really clear on what we want them to know about us.” -Steve Jobs

Understanding how you stand apart in the marketplace requires looking at what your organization does exceptionally well and, often, better than alternative options available. Don’t be afraid to infuse your personality and story as you communicate how and why you do things differently.

Discovering how you stand apart is answering the question:

What do I want to be known for?

Your product or service has multiple features and benefits for your users, but what is the single most interesting, helpful, unique, surprising, etc., thing for which you want to be known and remembered?

The answer should bring you to the one sentence that you want people to say about you around the coffee table to a friend or in line at the grocery store to a stranger. When you emphasize what you do differently from the rest you ensure that your brand remains noticeable and relevant.

In the +Acumen Master Class on Branding for Social Change, Brian Collins describes branding as, “a promise that’s kept consistently over time.”

He breaks the idea down into three main ‘P’s’ and together they demonstrate how your brand uniquely delivers value to stand out from the rest.

• A promise = a promise is the story that you invite people to believe. It is the perceived value of what you offer.
• Kept = keep indicates performance. It is the action you take to back up and prove out the story you promised. It is the real value created for your customers.
• Over time = over time indicates your ability to push through time, or think into the future and anticipate where the world is going so you can stay salient and relevant.

While standing out evokes the idea of creativity and innovation, it doesn’t mean compromising on consistency. Brands that achieve cohesive messaging and design can stand out precisely for their consistency and reliability. In turn, this predictability builds brand trust and loyalty.

When it is Time to Bring in the Experts

Even if you are going the do-it-yourself route, at a certain point you will need to recruit experts to help you execute the brand vision professionally.

A designer can help you express your brand vision by crafting brand elements, like a professional logo, visual graphics, typography, color scheme. A brand strategist can also help to implement these design elements throughout your messaging channels cohesively and consistently.

If funds are tight, first invest time and effort into articulating your brand purpose, values, and point(s) of differentiation. Then, when the funds are available, you’ll be that much better prepared to invest in expertise to help you bring your brand to life through professional design and strategy.

As Anne Miltenburg of The Brandling points out, branding and marketing are not overhead; they leverage an organization’s other investments by attracting more customers, supporters, and talent, all of which grow impact and revenues.

Conclusion

Whether you are conscious of it or not, through your actions and messaging, your venture will develop a brand image organically. Therefore, it’s worth taking some time early on to craft your brand intentionally.

To get started, read our branding guide — How to Think Like a Brand Strategist to Connect with Your Audience and Maximize Your Social Impact.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Danielle Sutton is the Content Animator at Acumen where she surfaces stories to inspire and activate social entrepreneurs. In an age of information overload, she believes in learning ‘the right thing at the right time’ to intentionally design impactful social enterprises. You can usually find Danielle digging into the Acumen course library, playing in the mountains, or exploring marketing on The Sedge blog.

Branding on a Budget for Social Good Companies was originally published in Acumen Academy Voices on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

When brands are successful, they give those who share the same values and vision for the future a way to be part of something bigger than themselves.

When remarkable brands tell stories and act in alignment with their values, it inspires people to take action, support movements, and create change together.

In the +Acumen Master Class, Debbie Millman on Branding for Social Change, she outlines the five steps required to build a remarkable brand for social change. Use this summary of her process as a starting point to develop a brand for your own social change venture or initiative.

#1 — Understand the Need for Your Brand

Before you start building a new brand, Millman recommends answering the question:

Why are you the best brand to fulfill a need in the marketplace or community?

When you answer this question explicitly in one sentence, you clarify your organization’s purpose and benefits to the people you serve.

If you cannot articulate your strategic reason for being, your brand likely isn’t needed.

Thinking strategically about how your brand is set apart from the rest allows you to own and defend your value proposition to your specific audience. If there are existing brands that serve the same audience, you need to understand precisely how your approach or solution is different.

Girl Scouts Case Study

In the Branding for Social Change Master Class, Millman interviews Bobby Martin and Jennifer Kinon, co-founders of Original Champions of Design (OCD), about their project to rebrand the Girl Scouts.

When the Girl Scouts first came to them, the organization was seeking a redesign of the logo created in 1978 by iconic designer, Saul Bass.

After thirty years, they felt it was time for an overhaul. With an established presence across North America and a mission to uplift women, the Girl Scouts had a clear strategic reason for being. However, they needed a refreshed brand presence..

OCD realized there was a considerable amount of brand equity and emotional connection already built into the organization. Pulling from visual history dating back to 1910, Bobby and Jennifer saw a long narrative of visual elements and recognized that the Girl Scouts did not need a new logo.

Instead what they required was a more extensive system of brand elements that could be used by the individual chapters in their own way, while still achieving a consistent brand identity.

As Jennifer summarizes, “A brand almost always requires a system…we look at the whole visual universe of that product, of that person, of that nonprofit, to understand what the elements are that they have been using over time (and) their visual history. Then we try to figure out: where do they project their business to go in the future; who will that audience be?”

#2 — Research: Get Input from Your Potential Audience

After establishing your strategic reason for being, you need to speak with your potential audience and gain their input on how they perceive your brand. Engaging your customers or constituents early allows you to understand what makes your audience feel connected to the work you are doing and how they feel about what you are creating.

Depending on your needs, there are several research methods you can use:

• Small focus groups and one-on-one interviews help you gain a qualitative understanding of what makes them feel connected and included.
• Observing potential or current customers interacting with your brand illuminates how your brand fits into their life.
• Diagnostic research looks at the current mindset of customers, (i.e., what does this visual mean to you?)
• Projective research looks at possibilities for the future and gathers input to develop your brand (i.e., how would you feel about this direction?)

Collecting themes from your potential audience will give you clues about the the type of branding and communications that will resonate most with them.

This understanding will help you translate your values into language and visuals that resonate with your audience.

Debbie reminds us that we need to, “understand what you don’t know that you might not realize you don’t know.”

If you have an existing audience and are considering rebranding, engaging them is critical to ensure the direction you’re heading is aligned with their values. The decision by email provider, Convert Kit, to rebrand under a new name was so poorly received by their community that they renounced the name change.

Girl Scouts Case Study

OCD began the research phase of the Girl Scouts brand update with a deep dive into the archives, looking at visual artifacts from 1910.

Next, they brought current scouts into the conversation through collage-making sessions. They asked questions like, “What reminds you of Girl Scouts?” and “What are the things that you love?” This process helped OCD visualize what was meaningful to them, what type of organization they wanted to be involved with, how they felt about Girls Scouts right now, and where they wanted to see it headed.

OCD also interviewed stakeholders including troop leaders and the most involved community members, called ‘green bloods.’ One of the most informative research activities Jennifer and Bobby undertook was joining a Girl Scout convention where they were directly immersed in the organizational culture.

#3 — Positioning: Position Your Brand in the Marketplace

“Creating a platform for the brand to occupy is positioning” — Debbie Millman

With an understanding of your brand’s strategic reason for being (step 1), and input from your target audience (step 2), you have the information you need to position your brand within the marketplace.

Framing your brand requires analyzing the context your brand lives in and crafting messaging that sets you apart from alternatives.

Brian Collins, founder of Collins, describes positioning as the combination of three elements:

• How does your offering compare to theirs in terms of story?
• Is that promise materializing in performance?
• Are you innovating in that space, and will your impact last?

Once you have clarity on the positioning of your brand compared to alternatives, the next step is to communicate it to prospective clients and other players in the marketplace.

The two primary tools for this communication are a positioning statement, which is an internal and descriptive ‘North Star’ to guide your work, and a tagline or slogan, which is generally a single line that will be memorable to customers and inspire them to believe in what you believe.

Girl Scouts Case Study

The focus of the Girl Scouts rebrand was less about messaging and direction, and more about designing a visual system that would align with their needs and vision.

At the time, the organization was going through internal shifts to reduce the numbers of councils, and external changes to update programming and curriculum. OCD wanted to give them a new brand system that would support their plans for the future while remaining flexible and straightforward.

The solution was to give individual councils more brand assets that they had freedom and flexibility to use in their own mix-and-match style while reducing overall brand inconsistencies.

#4 — Design: Bring Your Brand to Life

At this stage, you have determined your brand’s purpose, relevance, and positioning. The next step is to translate those ideas into visual brand elements to express the same.

The visual expression of a brand that often comes to mind first is a logo. A logo is a symbol that serves as a visual shortcut to help people identify your work. Other visual elements include the color palette, typography, imagery, and graphics.

Typically, a brand design is expressed first through a creative brief which outlines the challenge, the componentry, the characteristics and the criteria for success.

Debbie explains the value of a creative brief, “I find that one day of working on a creative brief can prevent two weeks of mistakes, maybe more, maybe two months of mistakes. A lot of people are very anxious to get the design process started when creating new identities and often circumvent a creative brief feeling like somehow that will curtail what is possible, but I think the opposite is true. I think a creative brief gives you the ability to focus and then go deep and wide within that focus to be able to deliver the best possible outcome.”

In this design phase, it’s essential for the visual elements to be aligned with the brand values and messaging determined in earlier stages.

Girl Scouts Case Study

After OCD completed the research phase, they had a plethora of insights to inform the visual brand identity. Their primary task in the design phase was to translate the abstract concepts they had collected into visuals that served to demonstrate the same ideas concretely.

Research also informed what elements needed to be in the system. For example, OCD determined that a custom and versatile typeface, illustration-style graphics, and a full brand architecture would be required for the new brand system to be successful.

The design charted how all the brand elements visually come together. OCD came up with several iterations of the design before first presenting to Girl Scouts, including options that were both evolutionary and revolutionary to show shortcomings and potential of each direction.

#5 — Implementation: Bring the Brand to Market

Now that you understand your brand’s purpose, your audience’s desires, and your visual elements, the final stage is sharing your brand with the world.

Here you take the visual elements designed in step 4 and start to push them out through channels like your website, storefront, advertising, public relations, social media, and other marketing and communications collateral.

In this phase it is crucial that brand elements are consistent across channels so that, together, your brand translates your core values and messages to your audience.

Girl Scouts Case Study

The implementation phase for unveiling the new Girl Scout’s brand architecture included gathering input from the girls to confirm they liked it. Internally, they launched the new identity with case studies to demonstrate the new brand system in action.

OCD also created a 96-page brand user guide, or identity guidelines document, which served as a reference manual to show how the new brand elements and architecture work together. The guide outlined ‘brand rules’ to help councils feel empowered to engage with the updated brand on a day-to-day basis.

A brand user guide helps users determine if the implementation is ‘on brand’ versus ‘off track’. On brand means the implementation follows guidelines in an appropriate way. If it’s veering off track, the brand guide helps users make adjustments to realign.

Conclusion

One thing to keep in mind as you go through this five-step branding process that Millman outlines is that your brand will likely be an evolution from the beginning.

As you progress over the life of your organization, you will gain more clarity about your brand identity,voice, values and messaging.

For more insights and exercises to help you take your branding to the next level, enroll in the Debbie Millman on Branding for Social Change +Acumen Master Class.

Originally published at https://www.plusacumen.org on August 10, 2018.

You may have heard of the phrase “human-centered design,” an idea swarming Silicon Valley, and often the origin of some of our favorite tech and social products. But what is it, exactly, and what does it mean to the success of your nonprofit? Simply put, human-centered design is an approach to problem solving that starts with the people you’re designing for, and ends with new solutions that are tailored to suit their needs. Seems simple enough, right?

While conducting research for Social Startup Success, I saw a consistent theme in my interviews with breakthrough social entrepreneurs: many had used this innovation practice to develop their models for products or services, and put them to the test before going out to raise capital and seek press coverage. With testing underway, the social startups were able to develop more effective programs and products, and, at the same time, craft a persuasive story about how they had arrived at these models.

If you’re thinking about incorporating human-centered design into your testing process, you might give these methods a try.

Get out from behind your desk.

To stay innovative, it’s essential to stay inspired. Get out and build strong connections with the end-users in order to build a better understanding of their needs. Host focus groups or surveys, ask the right questions (how can you help your beneficiaries, not how they can help you), and observe the nature of life by conducting in-person interviews to understand the problems they face.

Think of design as a team sport.

Once you’ve conducted interviews, discuss key findings with your team, and perhaps with a range of stakeholders and outside advisors. Hold a session where you invite others to discuss the problem. All ideas are welcomed and encouraged, and none should be shot down during the brainstorming session. Take a note from Silicon Valley and consider scribbling thoughts on brightly colored post-it notes, then sticking them on a whiteboard, poster, or wall.

Create a rough prototype.

You’ve researched, brainstormed, now it’s time to put your ideas to the test. This step should be a very simple and inexpensive representation of the product, or how the service will work, such as a sketch describing a product, or a storyboard showing how a service would operate. Gain valuable feedback, refine, and get ready to launch a pilot program to really test results.

Guest Written By:

Kathleen Kelly Janus

Kathleen Kelly Janus is a social entrepreneur, author and lecturer at the Stanford Program on Social Entrepreneurship. Her new book, Social Startup Success: How the Best Nonprofits Launch, Scale Up and Make a Difference, is an essential playbook for how to make a difference.

How To Incorporate Human-Centered Design into Your Organization was originally published in Acumen Academy Voices on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.