Distribution vs. Innovation: Poverty Interventions
7 Questions with Nicholas Fusso, CEO of D-Prize
When we talk about problem solving, it’s often within the context of innovation. What new ideas do we have? How can we improve upon the solutions of the past? It’s easy to get sucked into this mindset that we must always be building new products, new workflows, and new ways to do things in order to make our lives better.
Instead of spending all our energy on new end solutions, what if we explored ways to empower existing, proven ones? Ones that have been forgotten or shelved. Things that we know work, but have been buried under the ambition of steadfast innovators and entrepreneurs?
This is where D-Prize comes in — well, at least within the world of proven poverty interventions. D-Prize is a nonprofit organization that funds new entrepreneurs who increase access to proven poverty interventions. Take the example of a mosquito net. The net itself is a fantastic, proven solution for malaria prevention. The problem isn’t in that we need to fix the effectiveness of the product, but moreso asking the question of how we distribute what already works. (Hence the “D” in “D-prize”.)
We sat down with Nicholas Fusso, co-founder and program director of D-Prize to learn more about how the organization has grown, where he sees himself in the world of doing good and doing well, and a few other fun topics. Check out our conversation below or be sure to check out our full-length podcast episode with him.
1. What does doing good mean to you?
That’s such a big question. For me, doing good means really having a measurable impact on a lot of people. Reach is important. At D-Prize, we have a mission and a plan to help millions of people get out of poverty, and that a lot of people. Even then, when we talk about what extreme poverty looks like, there are 3 billion people on the planet that are suffering from extreme poverty or living in a certain level of poverty. So even if we’re able to do a 100 million people, it’s a drop in the bucket of what the whole world needs. But I think we need to think in big numbers like that. How do we get a lot of people out of poverty situations?
It’s also important to understand what that impact looks like. For me, it’s more about not so much “do I feel good about the work that I do?”. The reason I can feel good is because of the numbers and the data that show we are getting things out to people in need.
2. How do you think about balancing doing good with doing well?
I think about doing well in the business school context — making a lot of money and living a comfortable life. And basically having the freedom to do the things you’d want to do. Doing well is important, alongside doing good. For me, they don’t really have a friction. In my life they’re been one in the same. So as D-Prize grows and becomes more successful, I’m also growing and becoming personally successful.
3. Give us a lay of the land. What is your mission at D-Prize?
At D-Prize, we’re focused on how to get proven poverty interventions out to the people in need. My role at D-Prize, as co-founder and program director, is basically running the entire ship and making sure everything works. And what D-Prize does is we try to solve a really specific problem. We see there are a lot of poverty interventions that exist in the world — everything from vaccines to solar lamps to education product. They’re all really great, but they’re not getting out to a lot of people.
So there are still millions of children who don’t get vaccinations. It’s not because we don’t have the vaccines, but it’s because no one has figured out how to get them to those rural health clinics when those children are there, which is a huge tragedy. Same with energy — there are 600 million people in sub-saharan Africa right now who light their homes at night with kerosene lanterns. That’s what Abraham Lincoln used back when he was studying. So that’s 1850s technology. There are better interventions out there. We know solar lamps are great. They only cost $25-$30, but again no one has figured out how to get it out to people. To us, distribution equals development.
4. Do you have a hard time selling the value of distribution within poverty interventions?
It really depends on who I’m speaking to. I think one of the confusing parts is that when we’re here in a place like San Francisco, distribution isn’t really a problem. When we go to a grocery store, there are groceries on the shelves. And when we order something from Amazon, it shows up two days later. But if you’re in a place like Kampala or Nairobi or rural Botswana areas, there is no Amazon and you might go to grocery stores or health clinics and there might not be things on the shelves. So even just this fact that distribution is a problem you have to think about, in a lot of ways it’s been eliminated from our lives in San Francisco. That’s confusing for a lot of people.
5. Do you feel like we’re at a point where there are enough inventions?
Absolutely. Without innovation, without people actually doing the work of creating these amazing interventions, we’d be all the way back to square one. We wouldn’t know what to do. But there has been a lot of smart people working on these innovations for a long time.
Today, we’re at a spot now where so many brilliant people have been working on these interventions, and not enough people have been working on this problem of access and distribution.
So the scales are a little out of whack. If we’re putting a ton of resources on the innovation and invention side of things, it’s helpful, but it’s not the number one problem right now. To me, the number one problem is distribution.
6. Have you ever been in a conversation where someone disagrees distribution is the most important piece?
Oh yea, story of my life. It’s hard because I speak to a lot of entrepreneurs and when you think about the quintessential entrepreneur, it’s someone who has invented something. You imagine someone who has been on an infomercial, holding up a product. Or Steve Jobs, where you’re up on a stage and you have a big product to showcase to everybody. When people think about what’s it’s like to be an entrepreneur, they’re thinking about those moments. And so that’s what gets in the head of a lot of entrepreneurs.
It could be their ego, but it could also be their optimism. Entrepreneurs are super optimistic. They look at these problems, and they think — not only is this solvable, but I can be the one who solves it.
7. What do you look for in entrepreneurs applying through D-Prize?
We look for a couple different qualities. For us, we are looking for people who are really thoughtful in their opinions, but also root those opinions in some sort of evidence. What we say is we like to look for “strong opinions held weakly.” When you’re an entrepreneur, you’re in this very weird spot where you’re doing something that most people have said this is too hard or too difficult. So you have to have these strong opinions that what you are doing is right.
But at the same time, entrepreneurs are testing a lot of different things. They’re usually doing something that other people haven’t done before, so they’re trying out different models, activities, operations. There are a lot of unknowns and statistically, a lot of them are going to fail. So they have to be able to say, even when my opinion is super strong, when I’m facing failure, they’re held weakly enough to where I can make changes.
