Africa Social Venture Crowd Sourcing

Posted on October 10, 2012 by Grant Montgomery

In microfinance, crowd-sourced ventures have aimed at connecting first world capital with developing world opportunity – and with some success.

Mads Kjaer and Tim Vang co-founded MYC4 which works to connect online investors with entrepreneurs in Africa. MYC4 was founded using a Dutch auction method for retailing loans to small and mid-sized businesses in developing countries – a crowd-sourced for-profit micro finance company with an initial presence in Africa.

Since they started five years back, over $20M has been invested in over 10,000 loans. These funds have come from over 19,000 investors/lenders. The biggest challenge facing MYC4 at the moment is lack of adequate liquidity to fund all the loan requests. This year alone, over $1M worth of loan requests has not funded. At the moment, MYC4 requires an increase of investors/lenders with a short term year end funding gap of $1M in new liquidity to fund growth.

Says Mads, “Africa is no longer a basket case but a business case. For decades, highly subsidized credit and grants have not helped African businesses grow but has often created a dependency syndrome.

“What we are learning now is that small businesses that are looking for capital to grow can pay market rates of interest. Their major concern is reliable and continuous access to rightly priced capital. Through the Dutch Action on MYC4, businesses have an upside of receiving cheaper funds than they were initially willing and able to pay. We have seen to type of investors/lenders; social and for profit and the Dutch auction accommodates both.

“The on-going transformation in microfinance means grants and subsidies are a thing of the past and commercial sources of funding will continue to be the major source of funding.”

Read more

Modifying websites to accomodate the Mobile Revolution

Posted on October 9, 2012 by Grant Montgomery

The Chronicle of Philanthropy reported on a new study from com.Score that shows that more than 13% of webpage visits this past August were made on a tablet or mobile phone. That means that one in eight page views now comes through mobile platforms.

Doesn’t seem like that much? Well, just consider that mobile viewing has more than doubled from just a year ago. That certainly squares with recent data from Pew Research that half of U.S. adults now connect to the Internet with a smartphone or a tablet and more than 60% of them access news on their smart devices at least weekly.

Nonprofits certainly need to respond to this trend by making their websites more mobile friendly. Some tips from that article include:

• simplifying your website so that it is easier to read on mobile devices and to take actions, such as donating.
• investing in a separate website just for mobile or in technology that automatically reformats your site depending on the device being used to access it.
• prioritizing mobile access of your main website before creating specialized apps.

Jakob Nielsen explores some of the options too, suggesting that mobile sites can’t be cut to the bone or users will be disappointed, but can’t include so much that usability is poor on the smaller phones and tablets.

About.com’s Guide to Web Design suggests “Don’t put your navigation first, even if that’s where it is on your main page. If you make the navigation too small it won’t be usable, and if it’s too large that will be all some mobile users see when they first download the page.”

–Excerpt of article by Joanne Fritz

New York rock concert a record fundraiser

Posted on October 8, 2012 by Grant Montgomery

The last time Central Park’s Great Lawn hosted a Saturday night concert, the year was 1981, and the total raised was $100,000.

A recent Saturday marked the first show since, and the results were 60,000 souls watch a lineup including the Foo Fighters, Neil Young, The Black Keys, Band of Horses and K’naan–and became the largest syndicated charity concert in online and broadcast television history, generating over $500 million in pledges to combat poverty around the world.

In fairness to Simon and Garfunkel, the Global Festival’s pledge total relies on individual philanthropists, governments and NGOs to keep their word and contribute aid. But it’s a staggering sum nonetheless, one that’s nearly enough, says Evans, to eradicate polio once and for all (that would be music to the ears of Neil Young, who suffered from the disease as a child).

“It’s so close,” says Evans. “It literally could be the legacy of this generation to see that polio is wiped off the face of this planet, and that’s what we’re committed to.”

The Global Festival, deliberately scheduled to coincide with the United Nations’ General Assembly, should boost efforts that halved the global poverty rate from 1981-2005, from 52% to 25%–and give a jolt to the international body’s Millennium Development Goals, one of which is to eliminate extreme poverty and hunger by 2015.

Going green in Ghana with sewage power

Posted on October 4, 2012 by Grant Montgomery

How might the world’s poorest continent go green? Kwabena Otu-Danquah’s job is to crack that riddle. The renewable energy czar for Ghana ranks among the handful of bureaucrats across Africa tasked with picking which forms of green energy might prove affordable on a continent where most people don’t pay for the electricity they sometimes receive.

Last year the Ghanaian parliament signed a pledge to derive 10 percent of the country’s electricity from alternative sources come 2020.

Sun? Forget it. Solar costs 40 cents to 50 cents a kilowatt hour, while Ghanaians pay just 5 cents to 10 cents for electricity from conventional sources. Wind? Too slow. Breeze ambles through this tropical doldrum at a leisurely average of five kilometers an hour (3.2 miles per hour).

That’s forced Ghana to consider a more imaginative set of choices. Among them, sewage. Flush with a $1.5 million grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, local Waste Enterprisers Ltd. is building Ghana’s first “fecal sludge-fed biodiesel plant.” That’s longhand for cooking human excrement into generator fuel, Chief Operating Officer Tim Wade explains. The transformation would serve a dual purpose. Open sewers sweep 1,000 tons of slurry each day into the ocean off Accra. Outside the upland city of Kumasi, roughly 100 trucks dump tens of thousands of liters of septic tank sewage daily into what used to be a small pond.If all goes according to plan, next month one truck a day from Kumasi will dump its payload into a warm and massive vat that will skim lipids – fat – off the top. “That’s your biodeisel,” he explains.

At $7 a gallon, he can sell the muck to local mining companies, who are keen to buy because they too have been required by parliament to power 10 percent of their private electric plants from green sources. Normal diesel does sells a few bucks cheaper, he admits, “But we’re still optimizing the process.” If he can get costs down, Mr. Wade intends to build four plants in Accra and lecture sub-divisions back home in Colorado on the folly of treating their waste.

The convergence between money and meaning

Posted on October 3, 2012 by Grant Montgomery

For the next generation of philanthropists, I don’t think they’re going to ask themselves whether or not they should work in the private, public, or non-profit sector. They’re simply going to wake up each day and ask themselves what impact am I going to make today.

The traditional model of a successful career and life was divided into three phases: we learn, earn, and then return. We went to school, got a job (and kept it for decades), and then at the end of our life we gave back from the fruits of labor.

Now, we can pursue both purpose and profit. There is a convergence between money and meaning throughout one’s life. For philanthropy this means that donors no longer are passive supporters, but are more engaged in creating the means of change they seek in the world. Donor circles, social entrepreneurship, impact investing, corporate social responsibility, crowd-sourcing are examples of this convergence.

The continued convergence of sectors will allow the next generation of philanthropists to focus even more on impact and not artificial distinctions between money and meaning.

–Blog excerpt by Omar Brownson, executive director of the LA River Revitalization Corporation

The nonprofit charity: water

Posted on September 30, 2012 by Grant Montgomery

Nonprofit charity: water recently launched its innovative, annual September Campaign, seeking to raise $1.7 million in order to bring clean, safe water to nearly 26,000 people in Rwanda.

Under the leadership of founder Scott Harrison, the organization is reinventing the nonprofit model by marketing itself like a tech company, guaranteeing 100 percent of donations to funding its water projects and taking full advantage of social media. For those and other reasons, it has become one of the hottest and most innovative nonprofits around.

Click below to learn more:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?list=PLTP7oKl8qFml6oqxcW801K8rcEWQ0-mxK&v=msm106Gnjug&feature=player_embedded#

Intimate moments from 2012 Clinton Global Initiative

Posted on September 28, 2012 by Grant Montgomery

Bill Clinton’s annual Clinton Global Initiative attracted a cast of political, celebrity, and nonprofit all-stars, bringing a flood of new commitments to push for real, fast change. Call-outs to some of the lesser celebrities:

John Calipari  (Kentucky basketball coach) – John Calipari likes to see action on and off the court. “I don’t like getting involved where there’s no scoreboard,” he said. At the “Turning Inspiration Into Action” breakout meeting, he talked about seeing the first photos emerging from the Haiti earthquake in 2010 and leaping into action with his team, raising $1 million in one day soon after. It wasn’t something to mull over, he stressed. “People were dying. What we had to do was act now. I went to Haiti, and, I’ll be honest with you, we kept people alive.”

Loretta Claiborne (six-time gold medalist at the Special Olympics) –  “I had a mother, and she was told to institutionalize me. To put me in an institution, and that would be the end of it,” Loretta Claiborne, a six-time gold medalist at the Special Olympics, told the audience at CGI’s opening plenary. “Still today, around the globe, people with intellectual disabilities such as I are still being housed in warehouses and institutions.” Claiborne, who was born partially blind and experienced delays in walking and speech development, made a touching speech leading to the announcement of a $12 million donation by philanthropist Tom Golisano to expand the Special Olympics’ health services.

The Awards Ceremony – Sometimes politicians, CEOs, and otherwise stiff-lipped professionals need to let loose too. At the Global awards ceremony, musical artists set the crowd on fire, especially Benin singer Angelique Kidjo. Belting out rhythmic African songs, Kidjo climbed down from the stage to get the audience singing. Sister Rosemary, a Ugandan nun at President Clinton’s table, waved her hands over her head, as Clinton sang along. At one point Kidjo passed the microphone to Mexican billionaire businessman Carlos Slim, who gave the ceremony a taste of his vocal cords. Not bad.

Treasury and IRS rule changes reduce barriers to global grant making

Posted on September 26, 2012 by Grant Montgomery

The U.S. Department of the Treasury and the IRS have recommended a significant change in the process for determining whether a foreign nongovernmental organization (NGO) meets U.S. standards for charitable giving.

In “Reliance Standards for Making Good Faith Determinations,” a document just published in the Federal Register, Treasury and the IRS have proposed regulations that lessen the administrative and financial burdens for U.S. grantmakers to engage in international philanthropy. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced the guidance in an address at the Clinton Global Initiative, during which she unveiled the Global Philanthropy Working Group.

The process of evaluating whether a non-U.S. NGO is equivalent to a U.S. public charity has been subject to rules that have not changed for 20 years. Secretary Clinton noted in her remarks this morning that the change clears the way for the establishment of organizations that can serve as repositories for equivalency determinations, though the proposed regulations do not specifically address this matter.

“Secretary Clinton’s announcement and the IRS guidance support a shared cross-sector vision of ways to reduce redundancy and lower costs and are a welcome signal from the government to grantmakers and their grantees,” said Rebecca Masisak, co-CEO of TechSoup Global.

Kelly Shipp Simone, deputy general counsel of the Council on Foundations, said, “While this guidance is key to reducing the burdens of private foundations in making international grants, we expect it will also serve as a guide to public charities seeking to make similar grants. The net result will be to reduce the burden on potential grantees as well.”

Bill Clinton gathers global leaders to address world problems

Posted on September 25, 2012 by Grant Montgomery

At the newly-opened Clinton Global Initiative, among other things former President Bill Clinton challenged Wal-Mart to open a store in Libya and help create jobs in the world’s most troubled areas.

The annual forum brings together leaders in politics, business and philanthropy for three days of brainstorming about the most pressing global problems. Newly elected Libyan President Mohamed Magariafis is listed among about 1,000 forum participants, as is Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi, along with 50 other current or former heads of state.

The theme of the 2012 meeting is “Designing for Impact.” Its stated purpose is to consider how the Clinton Global Initiative community “can utilize our abundance of global capacity to invent better tools, build more effective interventions, and work creatively and collaboratively to design a future worth pursuing.”

The U.N. secretary-general said the “top priority” is sustainable development – especially for basic needs such as energy, food and water in poor parts of the world. “I’m going to sound an alarm to all the leaders,” he said. “We are living in an era of insecurity, injustice, inequality and intolerance, and what should we do?”

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