Social Entrepreneurship Cybersalon Notes

Running notes from Yesterday's Social Entrepreneurship Cybersalon

Martin Fisher founder of ApproTEC
Stuart Gannes, Director of the Digital Vision Program at Stanford
Boku Kodama founder of Urban VOICE
Beverly Greene, executive director of Berkeley's Small Press Distribution (SPD)
Yoo-mi Lee Board of Directors Charity Focus home of the Quote-a-day.

Running notes (Highlights):

Beverly: SPD is the nations largest non profit distributor of non mainstream books.
Goal is to go against the harmonizing of culture. First time authors very seldom hit it big.
Alice Walker is their poster child, that started out with SPD and got big and moved on to a larger publisher.
Poetry also a big section in their catalog.

Stuart: There is no shortage of ideas. It is the making it happen that is the hard part.

Martin brought with him one of the Super Money Maker Irrigation Pumps (see factory picture)

Appropriate technology for the situation in the third world. With these pumps you are able to improve the income by a factor of 10.

Please, where is the technology that ten-folds my income?

The additional trick is, that the pumps are not given out for free. They have a price and are sold via small distributors and are produced in two factories over there. A whole healthy industry got created around them. Families get out of poverty, children are sent to school, a middle class emerges, this middle class is then creating a better government.

ApproTEC's impacts numbers are impressive: Over 33,000 new businesses started, 800 new businesses per month, $35 million a year in new profits and wages generated by the new businesses, new incomes account for over 0.5% of Kenya's GDP and 0.2% of Tanzania's GDP.

20 to one return on investment. He said, that $200 takes a family out of poverty forever. If you company has a matching grands, like my employer SAP has, I only need $100.

There were rumors, that Martin presented two years ago already, back then with the same story and same numbers. Did nothing happen since then? If you check the web page there is an article form last month in Islam Online that support his claims.

Boku: Every business success is depending on the welfare of the community. I wanted to give back to that community.
Urban Voice is organizing micro enterprises workshops in West Oakland.
Quote form on participant: "No one ever asked me what I am about, what I want to do"

Stuart: We focus on technology, because with technology you can shakes things up. Introduce something new challenge the status quo.

Believes in the best way to learn something is by teaching it. They do that in small groups. Come and visit Tuesdays and Thursdays.

Calcars.org next generation of cars where they improve the current Hybrid cars with larger batteries, so they can run longer on the electric engine. I am not sure that this is the right approach. The electricity to charge the car has to be created too: Coal, Gas, Atom Energy. You loose a lot of efficiency on the way from creation of the energy to deliver to the house, to charging of the batteries ... I like the approach of super efficient diesel engines with catalysator the better way to go.

Martin: Lesions learned
Spend time in the country you want to improve understand the problems, analyze what models have failed

What went wrong: Technology was a time saving instead of money making devices are.

Boku things we teach: Many common sense. What are the systems that you need for a successful business.
Doing it just for money does not work, there has to be passion for what you do.

Comments

[Martin Fisher]

Mark
Thanks so much for the nice post on ApproTEC and for your generous donation - which will take a family in Africa out of poverty forever!

By the way - just to set the record straight I checked my notes and ApproTEC's impact numbers at the previous CyberSalon on Jan 26th 2002 were 19,000 new businesses in East and Southern Africa (80% in Kenya) and the total revenues generated by all the new businesses were at that time equivalent to 0.5% of Kenya's GDP. At that time we were starting about 500 new businesses per month.

Today they are over 35,000 new businesses in East and Southern Africa and the total revenues generated by the businesses in Kenya alone are equivalent to well over 0.6% of Kenyan GDP and those in Tanzania are equivalent to over 0.2% of Tanzania's GDP and there are also many more impacts in other African countries were we have sold over 3,000 of our pumps. Today we are creating 900 new businesses per month.

But this is a problem with numbers - once you get over about 10,000 its dificult to really visualize (or remember) the difference and this just gets worse the bigger the numbers get.
Thanks again
best wishes
Martin

[Mark Finnern]

If you donate, don't forget the gift matching programs of your employer. I just used SAP's at https://www.easymatch.com/SAP was a piece of cake and another family out of poverty forever :-)

This is such a powerful sentence: "Another family out of powerty - forever".

[Boku Kodama]

I appreciated the opportunity to introduce Urban VOICE to the CyberSalon. I hope that this unique forum will spark active support for the many orgs doing social justice work here and abroad. It is also a great catalyst to effectively generate support from others outside of the salon. It is hard enough for many of us to deal with the day-to-day issues and I hope that the CyberSalon will push forth for an agenda of participation and resolution. Understanding is one thing, participation towards the solution is the true key to helping resolve some of the issues that were discussed at the last CyberSalon.