Three Kids in a Garage

As I think about social enterprises in the developing world, many emerge as responses to market and government failure. M-Pesa in Kenya, for example, emerged in response to unbanked people having no way to safely transfer funds within the country. Britain’s Department for International Development funded the prototype with Vodaphone that fundamentally changed the financial services industry in Kenya. And yet no Bank saw this opportunity early on; not until more Kenyans used M-Pesa than all financial institutions combined. 

Ushahdi similarly grew out of a need to reliably and quickly communicate crisis information following elections.  What emerged was an open-source SMS cum mapping platform that has been repurposed many times globally. Vijay Govindarajan calls this reverse innovation. With access to connectivity, global expertise, and information at their fingertips, talented people from Africa, Asia, and Latin America are consistently demonstrating that they can lead global trends and create examples that are replicated in reverse.

But what does this mean for global development institutions like the World Bank particularly institutions with wide footprints in the developing world?  Unless we pay attention to what’s happening around us, much smaller and nimbler actors will prove that neither access to capital nor knowledge is a sustainable comparative advantage. Like GE, we need to figure out how to ‘disrupt’ ourselves and jettison services that no longer generate value to our clients.

Are we lending institution or a development solutions bank that can play many keys on the keyboard? What’s the next idea, product, or service that can lift 100 million people out of poverty? Should we identify it ourselves or can we work with others to ‘crowd-in’ the knowledge, talent, and expertise to realize it? How do we leverage core strengths and assets without limiting ourselves to only what we ‘do’ today?...