The conversation explored emerging trends at the service delivery, financing, and policy levels.   MEC’s leveraged approach to carbon financing to induce scale was notable at the Conference.

More posts moving over from http://microenergycredits.blogspot.com/

Contact MicroEnergy Credits at info @ microenergycredit DOT com.

In Uganda where many schools are private, a school owner is a microenterprise, and a microfinance loan can help them make investments in infrastructure which increase their profitability while improving the quality of education for local children

In this video, a teacher describes how the system enabled the students, or “learners,” to improve their performance, increase their motivation, and how word of mouth about the system led to increased enrollments.

XacBank is a well established microfinance institution with over 100,000 clients. The temperature now in Ulan Bator is -44° F. XacBank’s clean energy project manager shared with me stories of clients that are burning plastic audio cassette cases for heat. Simple clean technologies such as efficient cookstoves and insulating blankets for yurts can significantly reduce the consumption of heating fuels, saving the clients money and improving the environment. MEC is looking forward to our partnership with XacBank, where the carbon revenues we provide will help XacBank link their clients to these clean tech products.

Although telecom economics make it unlikely that there will be mass-adoption of location based services like Miloki or Citysense in the markets that MEC serves, the fact remains that GPS enabled cellphones have now been commercialized and are available in most countries. Some enterprises (like ours) will leverage them, creating a potential for broad ripple effects throughout BOP populations. For example, with our system, one loan officer may use a GPS device to provide location data for a thousand small clean energy investments.

In addition to our application, newly available cell phone technologies are creating surprising social and economic opportunities for the BOP. A good example is MPESA in Kenya which now has 4 million account holders compared to a total of 5 million deposit accounts in the whole banking sector of the country. Other applications are helping people earn income with their cellphone, like CellBazaar, which is “Craig’s list” on your cell phone in Bangladesh, and Txt Eagle, which lets individuals do jobs such as translation over their cell phone.

The cell phone age (there are now over 3.2 billion cell phone subscriptions—nearly half the population of the planet) creates an opportunity to intelligently harvest the data that can make the BOP investment grade.

My interview from Web 2.0 is posted here.

My ethics professor at Notre Dame business undergraduate studies (Hock) in the 1980s often commented that “creating the customer for the longterm” was an eroding value in modern American business, with long term catastrophic tendencies for capitalism. Thus, stable earnings occur when business leaders take the long view. Creating the customer means to me seeing the potential of each individual regardless of the accident of where they were born and finding ways to make them part of your financial future.

MEC recognizes that measuring the benefits of clean energy for people, planet, and society is vital for ensuring that mission remains linked to that long term “create the customer” ethic.

I got a lot out of the SoCap conference, and look forward to keeping in touch with this hopeful group of people.

“April Allderdice, an adviser to Grameen Shakti and president of MicroEnergy Credits in Seattle, said the influx of renewable energy in a country where 70 percent of the population has no access to grid electricity has been stunning. For the first time in some people’s lives, she said, they are able to work in the evening by decent light and children can continue to study once the sun goes down.

“It’s completely transformative,” Allderdice said. She argued that CDM projects, because they are market-driven, create more lasting changes to energy consumption in poor countries than simple grants or charity work. CDMs, she said, “enable a sustainable market-based approach to rolling out clean energy as opposed to dirty.”

See the full article here

Each decision to invest in a software development effort starts with the question, can we find something off the shelf? and what is the level of effort that makes sense given the expected benefit within the next 9-12 months? By bounding the effort in terms of effort and cost, we ensure that requirements for that particular technology system stays within reason. This inevitably creates a conversation with the rest of the management about the trade-offs and thus leads to a process for setting priorities. This is not unique, really, I credit the folks of 37signals in their publication “Getting Real” with a good articulation of how to ensure strong alignment of information technology systems with the current phase of development. Its really a variation of “doing what matters”.

And, we try to learn by our mistakes. In the early stages of the project we went a little “over the top” with the requirement for scalability. We decided to engineer our solution to be highly scalable by using the emerging technology of cloud computing (Amazon’s EC2), which also allowed us to be charged on a “pay as you go” model. This made a lot of sense at the time, but we failed to realize the complexity involved in doing this, which led to some unanticipated costs. So, after paying for this for several months, we realized this was overkill for our current level of development and while keeping the configuration on ice, we effectively killed that account. I’m confident this wasn’t wasted effort, as it illustrated how to make better near term decisions, and gives us a foot in the cloud computing door, should we need that.

Doing more with less is actually a terrific discipline, at least in retrospect.