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• My Week's Discoveries: Malaysia

  Jocelyn Ling 9:17 am on August 31, 2012 | 0 comments Permalink | Reply
  Tags: change (28), collaboration (21), creativity (7), design (13), designthinking (2), education (12), empowerment (13), impact (23), innovation (13), inspiration (21), movement creation (4), social enterprise

  So, I’ve been in South East Asia for the past three weeks, namely Malaysia and Sin­ga­pore. The trip has been long time com­ing as I haven’t been back to my home coun­try in over five years, and boy — am I ever glad I did. I have never been so inspired, hum­bled and proud of my fel­low coun­try­men for the incred­i­ble work that they are doing in South East Asia. If you have the priv­i­lege to be involved with their orga­ni­za­tions or have a cof­fee with these remark­able indi­vid­u­als, I assure you that it will be time well spent. Also, given that today is Inde­pen­dence day in Malaysia, thought it would be timely to share a few of my dis­cov­er­ies with you.

  1) Malaysia Social Enter­prise Alliance

  This is a Malaysian orga­ni­za­tion for social enter­prises and entre­pre­neurs with solu­tions to some of the most urgent social prob­lems in Malaysia and glob­ally. One of their more notable endeav­ors is Change­Week­end, a 9–10 month pro­gram as a facil­i­ta­tive plat­form that would equip orga­ni­za­tions with design think­ing and devel­op­men­tal skills. Even more incred­i­ble is the dri­ving force behind all of this is a won­der­ful lady, Ellynita Lamin, who has a heart of gold and is trail­blaz­ing her way in this part of the world. Don’t just take my word for it, check out what one of the local news­pa­pers has to say about her work too!

  2) Teach for Malaysia 

  Teach for Malaysia (TFM) enlists Malaysia’s most promis­ing lead­ers to improve edu­ca­tion in Malaysia. It mod­els after Teach for Amer­ica, where it is a two-year, fel­low­ship pro­gram where fel­lows are placed in local schools. Besides the fel­low­ship, the team has not only enlisted an incred­i­ble amount of sup­port from pri­vate and the Min­istry of Edu­ca­tion, but clear strat­egy and vision in how fel­lows can trans­form Malaysia’s edu­ca­tion sys­tem from inside out. Change is on the hori­zon. This ini­tia­tive is par­tic­u­larly close to home for me as I went through the pub­lic edu­ca­tion sys­tem in Malaysia (yes, just like the adorable kids in the video!) and to get a glimpse of what TFM is up to, check out the video below.

  3) Week­end: The Week­end Movement 

  This is a com­mu­nity of peo­ple that is cre­at­ing a week­end move­ment where they come together to build projects, cre­ate solu­tions and bring great ideas to life. So far, their week­ends con­sist of Hack Week­end, Make Week­end and Change Week­end, and I’m sure it doesn’t stop there. The week­ends are designed to kick­start inno­va­tion and new projects. If you ever are in Malaysia for a week­end that coin­cides with one of their work­shops, def­i­nitely don’t hes­i­tate to check it out!

  4) Malaysia Design Archive 

  This is a beau­ti­ful project com­bin­ing design, his­tory and preser­va­tion of cul­ture. The project traces, maps and doc­u­ments the devel­op­ment of graphic design in Malaysia to pro­tect our visual his­tory. Malaysia’s his­tor­i­cal design influ­ences are par­tic­u­larly fas­ci­nat­ing as this is a meet­ing point and cul­tural cross­ing of the East and West — from ornate Islamic texts, to Chi­nese cal­lig­ra­phy and Euro­pean engrav­ings. As you browse the site, the graph­ics tell a won­der­ful story of Malaysia’s cul­tural trans­for­ma­tion. I highly rec­om­mend you start here.

  5) Other notable mentions:

  • SOLS 24/7: edu­ca­tion pro­gram in Cam­bo­dia, Laos, East Timor, Malaysia and Thai­land that has edu­cated over 80,000 youth.
  • Gawad Kalinga: Build­ing com­mu­ni­ties through tourism, social enter­prise, dis­as­ter relief, recon­struc­tion and devel­op­ment to end poverty.

  Thanks to Ellyne, Shie Haur, Nicole, Tas­nim and John for inspir­ing this post.

   

• My Week's Discoveries

  Jocelyn Ling 3:37 pm on March 9, 2012 | 0 comments Permalink | Reply
  Tags: debate (6), finance (5), impact (23), social enterprise, social finance (9), women (6), world (17)

  1) Amer­i­can Booty — The story of Sara Blakely, the youngest self-made bil­lion­aire as founder of Spanx

  A hugely inspi­ra­tional story on the qual­ity of per­se­ver­ance. Sara only had $5,000 to cre­ate Spanx, and she cre­ated a com­pany, self-wrote her patent and devel­oped a pro­to­typed. She under­stood what women wanted. This is a quick 13min video on her story. Love the fact that she believed in her prod­uct so much that she never took no for an answer.

  2) Why ‘Shared Value’ Can’t Fix Cap­i­tal­ism - Forbes

  Thought-provoking com­men­tary to counter Michael Porter’s and Mark Kramer’s idea of ‘Shared Value’. Worth a read to get you think­ing about what aspects of cap­i­tal­ism needs ‘fix­ing’ and what doesn’t.

  3) Launch of Women INvest­ing in Women INi­tia­tive (WIN-WIN) — Calvert Foun­da­tion 

  A highly encour­ag­ing piece of news that I cel­e­brated for Inter­na­tional Women’s Day. Calvert Foun­da­tion launched WIN-WIN with $20mm to be invested in high impact orga­ni­za­tions and global projects to cre­ate financ­ing oppor­tu­ni­ties for women.

  4) Where did social enter­prise come from, any­way? - GOOD Magazine

  Use­ful sum­mary of the sec­tor, includ­ing the legal aspects of social enter­prises. Not sure if the found­ing of Ashoka started carv­ing out the space — my per­sonal take is that Dray­ton was one of the first that pop­u­lar­ized the concept/language. Then again, does under­stand­ing of the space come with under­stand­ing of lan­guage. hm…

  5) Tools and Resources for Assess­ing Social Impact - Foun­da­tion Centre

  Toolk­its and reports galore. From BACO by Acu­men Fund to FSG’s Guide to engag­ing stake­hold­ers. Seri­ously great database.

   

• Identifying the Next Steps for Impact Investing

  Jocelyn Ling 1:01 pm on January 28, 2012 | 2 comments Permalink | Reply
  Tags: impact (23), impact investing (12), social enterprise

  A report by Credit Suisse and the Schwab Foun­da­tion for Social Entre­pre­neur­ship was released this week on the topic of impact invest­ing at the World Eco­nomic Forum’s annual meet­ing (Davos). A great overview of the cur­rent land­scape, it is worth a read, par­tic­u­larly Mark Kramer’s and Sir Richard Bran­son’s inter­views and com­ments on the sector.

  Investing_for_impact Credit Suisse — Schwab Report

  The report lead me down an inter­est­ing thought path on the “next steps” of the sector…

  Evi­dence:  The report high­lights sev­eral suc­cess­ful social enter­prise mod­els that are part of Schwab’s net­work. My per­sonal favourite was Bam Aquino of Hapinoy in the Philip­pines — invest­ment funds that cre­ates sus­tain­able dis­tri­b­u­tion chan­nels and busi­ness devel­op­ment strate­gies to empower for­merly iso­lated and infor­mal sec­tors of the Fil­ipino econ­omy. The report above, com­ple­ments the Data Dri­ven JP Morgan-GIIN report, that drills drown into the num­bers and break­down of social enter­prise in dif­fer­ent sectors.

  As a next step, I would love to see a report that focusses more on the acces­si­bil­ity and avail­abil­ity of invest­ments in the space — from an investors per­spec­tive. Com­ing from an asset-management back­ground, I have devel­oped a strong belief that under­stand­ing the invest­ment is just as impor­tant as know­ing your invest­ment options. Cur­rently, main-stream investor’s expo­sure of ‘social’ in invest­ments are SRI offer­ings — they need to be edu­cated on dif­fer­ent entry points and impact invest­ing prod­uct offer­ings rang­ing from an insti­tu­tional and pri­vate client per­spec­tive. A great start­ing point to this step is Impact Asset’s 50: A list­ing of Impact Fund Man­agers.

  Fail­ure: With the indus­try in a growth stage, as great as it is to know the suc­cesses and the land­scape, it is just as impor­tant to know the fail­ures. Where did we go wrong? What worked? How did you man­age to pivot? How do you pri­or­i­tize your mis­sion and your finances? When did you know the time to scale? There is such a stigma with fail­ure in the non-profit/charity world. This stigma should NOT be car­ried for­ward into the impact investing/social enter­prise sec­tor. Fail­ure is a gift — and the abil­ity to speak freely to learn from them, should be embraced by this sec­tor. A won­der­ful exam­ple of embrac­ing fail­ure is the EWB Canada’s Fail­ure Reports. I would love to see a sim­i­lar ini­tia­tive in the impact invest­ing sec­tor. Even inter­nally within orga­ni­za­tions — as a start.

  Road-Map: There is a wealth of infor­ma­tion on impact invest­ing that has been churned up within the last few years or so. The issue is know­ing where to look: from fund­ing social enter­prises to exit­ing an invest­ment. A nat­ural next step to this would be for var­i­ous stake­hold­ers to share their “how-tos” and points of con­sid­er­a­tion in the impact sec­tor. Some orga­ni­za­tions have already begun to pave the way for this, but what we need is for more road-maps to appear so at the very least, when you’re at the start­ing line — you have a gen­eral sense of direc­tion on where to go.

   

   

• Invest2Innovate: Addressing the Disconnect in the Social Enterprise Space

  Jocelyn Ling 1:06 pm on November 26, 2011 | 0 comments Permalink | Reply
  Tags: BottomOfPyramid (5), empowerment (13), impact (23), social enterprise, social finance (9)

  *The post below was orig­i­nally pub­lished on http://www.socialearth.org on Nov 25, 2011

  
  In the social enter­prise world, one key issue that con­stantly resur­faces, as it would in any grow­ing sec­tor, is one of fund­ing and iden­ti­fy­ing a proper invest­ment pipeline. The acces­si­bil­ity and  avail­abil­ity of start-up fund­ing is cru­cial to star­tups, and in the case of social enter­prises, a largely untapped mar­ket. Here’s whereInvest2Innovate (i2i) comes into the pic­ture. They are a social enter­prise inter­me­di­ary that sup­ports the growth of social entre­pre­neur­ship in new mar­kets, help­ing fun­ders and early stage entre­pre­neurs see eye to eye.

  I had the oppor­tu­nity to con­nect with Kalsoom Lakhani the founder and CEO of i2i to inter­view her about her recently launched social enter­prise. A trail­blazer and native to Pak­istan, Lakhani launched i2i’s pilot in Pak­istan in Sep­tem­ber 2011 with plans to expand oper­a­tions to other coun­tries post 2012. Here’s what she has to say about her startup and the space:

  1) What is most inter­est­ing to you right now in the social enter­prise space? 
  There are many inter­est­ing inno­va­tions tak­ing place right now – from ground­break­ing SMS crowd-mapping tools to agriculture-based inno­va­tions for small farm­ers. Inno­v­a­tive tools & approaches of engag­ing and empow­er­ing low-income com­mu­ni­ties are com­ing up con­stantly. But I’m also extremely inter­ested in the growth of the impact invest­ment space, and where we are right now in terms of the com­mu­nity as an emerg­ing asset class, whether or not this type of invest­ment breeds bet­ter social impact met­rics, and whether the cap­i­tal is flow­ing to the right places. There are still a lot of spaces we need to fill when it comes to con­nect­ing cap­i­tal to social enter­prises, par­tic­u­larly at the early-stage, and it’s inter­est­ing to see how crowd-funding and other inno­v­a­tive ways of rais­ing cap­i­tal are becom­ing poten­tial solu­tions to help fill that gap.

  2) Why start up i2i? Why is this the time to enter into the mar­ket? 
  i2i was launched in order to help address some of the dis­con­nects in the social entre­pre­neur­ship space. Prior to launch­ing the com­pany, I worked in ven­ture phil­an­thropy for over three years, pro­vid­ing seed fund­ing and sup­port to early-stage social enter­prises mainly in Pak­istan. I was first exposed to the “space” then, and quickly immersed myself in all things social entre­pre­neur­ship & inno­va­tion. It has been fas­ci­nat­ing and moti­vat­ing to see grow­ing ecosys­tems in mar­kets like India, Latin Amer­ica (Mex­ico, Brazil, Chile are good exam­ples), and East Africa. Beyond higher access to cap­i­tal (a lot of impact investors oper­ate in these coun­tries), we’ve seen the growth of other play­ers that fur­ther sup­port social enter­prise – incu­ba­tors, accel­er­a­tors, gov­ern­ment poli­cies (in some cases), inter­me­di­aries, etc.

  

  i2i was founded to take a sim­i­lar ecosys­tem approach in the “untapped” mar­kets – that’s a lot of jar­gon I know, but essen­tially we pro­vide tai­lored ser­vices to early-stage social enter­prises to grow their busi­nesses and con­nect them to cap­i­tal. Pak­istan, our pilot mar­ket, is a great exam­ple of a coun­try where there is a sig­nif­i­cant need for more inno­v­a­tive and market-based approaches to devel­op­ment – 66% of the pop­u­la­tion live on under $2 a day – but where the envi­ron­ment for social entre­pre­neur­ship is rel­a­tively new. Entre­pre­neurs often lack the tools & ser­vices to max­i­mize the poten­tial of their mod­els and attract cap­i­tal, espe­cially in mar­kets like Pak­istan, where the volatile polit­i­cal and secu­rity sit­u­a­tion hurt the investor envi­ron­ment. There is a lot oppor­tu­nity for i2i, as an inter­me­di­ary, along with other part­ner orga­ni­za­tions, to be the archi­tects of the ecosys­tem, fos­ter­ing the social entre­pre­neur­ship space both from the top-down and the bottom-up.

  3) What is the biggest mis­con­cep­tion you see in the world of social enter­prise and where do you stand on the issue? 
  I think the biggest mis­con­cep­tion in social enter­prise is that it’s ok to stop at the “warm & fuzzy” and throw the term around irre­spon­si­bly. It dri­ves me crazy. Social enter­prise ulti­mately com­bines the best of the busi­ness and the char­ity world – it begs the ques­tion, “Could we mag­nify social impact if we take a busi­ness approach to devel­op­ment?” Social entre­pre­neur­ship is not the solu­tion to every­thing, but in some cases, it can be really effec­tive. For instance, if rural low-income com­mu­ni­ties that are off the elec­tric­ity grid use kerosene as their light and heat source, not only is it a costly prod­uct, but it poses ter­ri­ble health and envi­ron­men­tal ram­i­fi­ca­tions. Dis­plac­ing this demand for kerosene with clean energy solu­tions pro­vides these low-income com­mu­ni­ties with bet­ter alter­na­tives at com­pa­ra­ble prices, ulti­mately con­tribut­ing to poverty alle­vi­a­tion. Social enter­prises need to demon­strate social and/or envi­ron­men­tal impact – that is what tends to qual­ify the “social” in the equa­tion, but at the end of the day, they are busi­nesses that need to have strong mod­els and be sus­tain­able in the long-term. Some­times that gets lost in the “warm & fuzzy” sto­ries we hear in the space, which are great in com­mu­ni­cat­ing an organization’s vision and build­ing a com­mu­nity of sup­port­ers, but there needs to be sub­stance behind that story.

  4) What is one action would like peo­ple to take once they know if i2i? 
  If you are a social enter­prise, espe­cially in Pak­istan (since that is our pilot), get in touch with us to get an assess­ment of your busi­ness and how i2i can pro­vide ser­vices (from busi­ness devel­op­ment to communications/marketing) to help your orga­ni­za­tion grow. If you are a poten­tial investor (both for i2i and/or inter­ested in early-stage enter­prises in new mar­kets), we’d love to talk to you! And finally, if you are just a sup­porter, we are always excited to hear your feed­back and make our model better.

  ***

  Kalsoom is a the founder of invest2innovate based in Wash­ing­ton, D.C. She is a co-ambassador for Sand­box, a global net­work of inno­va­tors under 30, and is also a mem­ber of the World Eco­nomic Forum’s Global Shapers.  She has writ­ten for the Wash­ing­ton Post, the Huff­in­g­ton Post, Foreign Pol­icy, and Pakistan’s Dawn Newspaper. Get in touch: klakhani@invest2innovate.com.