Investing & Incubating
Early-Stage Social
Enterprises
in South & East Asia
S. Dev Appanah
Principal, TRN Institute
dev@trnlab.org

$2.3 trillion spent
5 decades
solutions not
reaching the poor
bold unmotivated
plans

lack of feedback
•consumer needs are met through feedback
•buy if the right price or return/ complain if worthless
•theoretically politicians function in the same manner
•constituents complain about public services and politicians try to fix it
•aid given for free so nobody listens to the poor feedback/ demands

lack of accountability
•biz produce more if demand increases or goes out of biz if it hurts consumers
•politicians lose elections for not fixing problems
•blurred and mixed accountability in the aid environment creates a weak
incentive to find out what works
•no pure independent/ external evaluation mechanism
•success is measured by the amount of money spent

planners searchers
•already knows the solutions •ready to admit they don’t know the
solution but willing to experiment
•lack the knowledge at the bottom &
trust outside experts •incremental discovery process
relying on competition and feedback
•never find out if the target group got to find out what works
what they needed
•find out the reality at the bottom
•CIDA/World Bank farming project and believe in homegrown solutions
example
•find out if the customer is satisfied
•PSI - Bednets example

grant-financing
•grants are useful for non-revenue generating
activities or very early stage ventures
•long exposure to grants creates donor
dependent organizations (nonprofits); donors
have become your clients instead of your
target group;
• short-term, project-based funding prevents
nonprofits from focusing on long-term
mission and development
•nonprofits are chronically undercapitalized
(relying on donations); exist is a state of
dysfunction and rarely achieve their
objectives; also unable to broadly disseminate
or scale solutions
•nonprofits focus resources on service
delivery rather than internal capacity
building; due to donor financing relationship

PSI Malawi - Bednets

water is supplied to the
children play on
schools and surrounding
merry-go-round advertising
community
finances
maintenance
powerful pumps store
lots of water in tank
Clean Water: Playpumps Intl

blended-value
balance the generation of social/environmental and economic
returns to remain effective and sustainable over time

Social Blended Sus.
NGOs Biz
Ent Value Biz
convergence

Initiatives & Ventures
25 investing & incubating 14
ventures regionally
access to approximately 100
12
10 youth-led ventures (startup &
scale-up
5
scalable social innovation deals
2007 2008* - micro agri tech, alt energy,
Major Intiatives SE, telecentres
Social enterprises

Grassroots
Innovation
Network
(GIN)

•delivers life-skills
education to the BOP
•2 centres in Cambodia &
Timor Leste
•over 2000 students per
centre

Jaspal Shakya
Community Friendly
Movement
•1000++ artisans engaged
•USD150,000 turnover

Marielle Nadal
idea!s

Salah Uddin Ahmad
XayanIT

! Youthworks Philippines
•22 young entrepreneurs
•1300 jobs
•100% repayment rate
•micro-business training
workshops

innovative financing
Jobs guarantee
Equity-like grants
mutual funds as SVC
international buffer funds

Opportunities
• entering a new world of blended value
businesses
• reinventing development financing &
changing the field of finance
• untapped opportunities in social innovation
• exploring these new areas and are
interested in working with more partners

beware of overfishing!
S. Dev Appanah
dev@trnlab.org