Organization: Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT)
Location: Cali, CO
Opportunity for internships and jobs for recent graduates to gain international experience
The Decision and Policy Analysis Program (DAPA) of the International Centre for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT) is seeking English speaking recent graduates for 6-12 month internships. CIAT is an international research center, one of the fifteen global centers of the Consultative Group on International Agriculture Research. Located in Cali, Colombia and working on international projects in Africa, Asia and Central and Latin America, the DAPA program evaluates the effects of climate change, evaluates technology and knowledge gaps, critically analyses environmental and agricultural policy in Latin America, and considers barriers to market access for small, rural producers in developing countries.
The interns will gain experience in international research for development, and will be actively encouraged to use the internship as a stepping stone to further education at the masters or PhD level.
Expectations:
The interns are expected to work on a range of tasks from project and report writing, to analysis of data and publication of peer-reviewed journal articles. We seek young, enthusiastic and energetic people with solid English skills, to spend a 6-12 month period of time in our head office in Cali, Colombia. We provide the cost of tickets to and from Colombia, plus a monthly stipend of US$750 (sufficient for basic living in Colombia).
Requirements:
- Excellent English skills, including strong capabilities in writing. Knowledge of Spanish is a bonus, but not essential
- Recently graduated at undergraduate or masters level in any of the following disciplines: Economy, Geography, Agricultural Science, Environmental science, Development Studies, Biology, Sociology, Social Communication, Business or other related subject matters
- Interest in applied research for developing countries
- Open to experiencing new cultures and perspectives
This is an open call with no deadline. Applicants should send an email to Andy Jarvis (a.jarvis@cgiar.org) with a CV and application letter outlining your motivation, research interests and medium term career plans. Also be explicit about your potential areas of interest with respect to the Decision and Policy Analysis program’s work. For further information on the Decision and Policy Analysis Program, see http://gisweb.ciat.cgiar.org/dapablogs/
For further information about CIAT, see http://www.ciat.cgiar.org.
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Authored by: Francisco Noguera
The last few weeks have been unusually busy at NextBillion. You've seen several new names, topics discussed, and the diversity of perspectives represented in our pages continues to expand. Moreover, the site's managing partners (Acumen Fund, WDI and WRI) recently met for a planning session where we discussed several ideas that get to the heart of our site's goal: bringing value to our readers and being the web's primary resource for analysis, news and opportunities related to market-based approaches to poverty alleviation.
Lots of exciting ideas and lots of work, to be sure, but all of this has been accompanied by several conversations with a growing base of contributors. Today I'd like to introduce you to four new members whose name you'll see more and more often in NextBillion: Maria Zheng, from the University of Michigan, Adeena Schlussel from Acumen Fund, Andrew Eder from NextBillion's partner Technoserve, and Bryan Farris from Bain & Co.
While Maria will join as Editor, Andrew, Adeena and Bryan join as Staff Writers. For more information about their backgrounds and interests I encourage you to visit their profiles. Please join me in welcoming all of them!
Organization: Ashoka
Location: Sao Paolo, BR
Ashoka is the largest association of social entrepreneurs in the world - men and women with system-changing solutions for the world's most urgent social problems. One of its next challenges is to help create pioneering business models that harness the joint power of businesses and social organizations to provide sustainable access to essential products and services - such as low-income housing solutions, health insurance or agricultural technologies - to low-income populations, at an unprecedented scale.
We seek a highly entrepreneurial individual with strong strategic thinking, solid business experience and deep commitment to social change to lead our low-income housing program in Brazil.
THE OPPORTUNITY:
Building this new program will be a true entrepreneurial endeavor, the detailed path of which the person will need to chart. It will certainly include
- Engaging decision-makers from the business and social sectors to refine and scale-up 'A Casa é Sua', a business-social venture that offers integral housing solutions to low-income populations
- Mobilizing significant investment for low-income housing from for-profit and non-profit investors
- Leveraging Ashoka's global community of social innovators to bring sustainable housing solutions to Brazil
- Liaising with the global staff and support the launch of like-minded low-income housing ventures outside Brazil
- Managing a small team
THE PERSON:
- Demonstrated intra/entrepreneurial track record
- Significant experience within social AND business sectors, commitment to building a hybrid platform for social impact
- Minimum of 10 years of experience in the private sector (including professional careers in management consulting or investment banking)
- A strong track-record of innovation and systems-building regardless of the institutions worked in
- Capacity to effectively communicate with - and engage - various stakeholders ranging from CEOs to social leaders to slum dwellers
- Fluency in Portuguese and English required
Ashoka's Hiring Criteria:
- Entrepreneurial: Compelled to cause major pattern change (e.g., founding an organization or company, starting a movement, or re-shaping the work of an existing organization). Demonstrates relentless and realistic how-to thinking and passion for seeing ideas come to life.
- Understanding and Belief in Everyone a ChangemakerTM: Understands and believes the Everyone a ChangemakerTM vision at a gut level. Candidates posses a broad and inquisitive intellect and a thinking pattern that connects the dots between historical trends and current social context.
- Social and Emotional Intelligence: Ability to work efficiently and respectfully in teams, putting organizational/team goal first (personal glory second).
- Ethical Fiber: Exceptionally strong ethical behavior. Is self-reflective and has strong empathy skills. Trustworthy.
- Self-Definition: The person assumed that changing the world in big ways and on a continental scale is what he/she will do in life.
Application process:
Visit www.ashoka.org/apply, and list 'Brazil Director, Housing for All' in the 'Openings of Interest' field. With any questions, or recommendations, contact Pilar Martinez at pmartinez@ashoka.org.
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Authored by: Sarabjeet Singh
I read a brilliant article 'Design Thinking for Social Innovation' published in the Winter 2010 edition of the Stanford Social Innovation Review today. The article is inspired from the work of IDEO, a global innovation and design firm, and is authored by Tim Brown (CEO and President of IDEO) and Jocelyn Wyatt (IDEO's Social Innovation Lead).
The article talks about the need for human-centric design to solve complex problems and takes one through the key elements in the 'Design Thinking' process. Through examples of the water treatment centre run by the Naandi Foundation in Hyderabad, India to the Mosquito Net distribution program in Africa, it brings out the importance of design thinking in every aspect of creating and delivering a product or service.
"The design thinking process is best thought of as a system of overlapping spaces rather than a sequence of orderly steps. There are three spaces to keep in mind: inspiration, ideation, and implementation. Think of inspiration as the problem or opportunity that motivates the search for solutions; ideation as the process of generating, developing, and testing ideas; and implementation as the path that leads from the project stage into people's lives." says Brown and Wyatt.
Inspiration is the first step towards creation of a product or service. Observing how things and people work in the real world (which might require living with local communities) is very helpful for drawing inspiration. The example of the use of the positive deviance initiative, where the problem of malnutrition in Vietnam was solved by discovering the solution within the same community, is a good one of drawing inspiration.
In the Ideation space, the authors highlight the importance of letting ideas flow (while deferring judgment) till the end of brainstorming sessions. Organizations often restrict choices while ideating on projects, which is easier to do in the short-term. However, divergent thinking and more ideas are what lead to disruptive solutions and are beneficial in the long-run. It is also advisable to have multi-disciplinary teams when collaborating.
The last space is Implementation, which is the key to the creation of the final product or service. In this space, prototyping is extremely important. Testing within a small and well chosen sample set of users can help create a revolutionary product.
If you want to learn Human Centric Design (HCD) and use it for innovation, you can use the IDEO designed HCD Toolkit, which helps organizations understand people's needs in new ways, find innovative solutions to meet these needs, and deliver solutions with financial sustainability in mind. The toolkit was created in collaboration with the Gates Foundation and non-profit groups IDE, ICRW and Heifer International.
Authored by: Manuel Bueno
Early childhood development (ECD) is a term used to describe the personal growth of a child until the age of 6. During this period the brain of a child continues to develop and form neural connections – a process that started during the pregnancy. Adequate nutrition, cognitive stimulation and care strongly influences the extent to which a child’s health may develop to their fullest potential, as well as her cognitive and social and emotional abilities (Young, 2002).
Unfortunately, in many low-income countries, poverty also begins at birth. Children from low-income families are much more likely to be malnourished, live under unhygienic circumstances and receive low levels of education. A shortfall in early childhood development will have irreversible consequences on individuals’ future lifetime opportunities. This will reverberate later in life in the form of lower quality jobs, lower wages, shorter life-spans, worse health and lower cognitive abilities, thus perpetuating an intergenerational cycle of poverty.
Return on investments in early childhood will be higher than returns to investments made later in life. Firstly, because beneficiaries have a longer time to enjoy the rewards from these investments; secondly, because investing on, for instance, better health or education has a stronger impact on young children than on any other population segment, even if the amount of years was the same. Therefore, supporting ECD generates a positive impact that will have a stronger impact on the individual’s wellbeing than at any other later stage of her life (Recent Nobel laureate James Heckman, has studied this topic extensively, see for instance, Heckman, 2006).
To assist ECD, the child’s family environment is pivotal, hence ECD interventions should at least also consider the child’s mother (as I suggested in a previous post) or at least the child’s primary caretaker. The parental environment and family income of a child are, moreover, far more decisive in promoting human capital and school success during early childhood than in later years (Vegas and Santibañez, 2010).
Although ECD is a very multifaceted concept (at the end of the day everything may have an impact on the child’s development), a recently published book by the World Bank suggests prioritizing 3 goals:
- Enhancement of a child’s development early in life, including her cognitive and social and emotional development, physical growth, and well-being;
- Enhancement of a mother’s antenatal care with services and information to strengthen the probability of delivery of a healthy baby;
- The education of parents and/or caregivers in better parenting, health, and hygiene practices, as well as providing them the opportunity to participate in the labor force.
In other words, at the child’s level there are three main and interdependent needs: nutrition, education and health. At the family level, and especially for mothers, health and education about how to take care of a baby are essential. Therefore adequate ECD programs should ideally be multi-sectorial (straddling more than one industry) and target the child and her family. Along these lines, the most successful ECD programs are:
- Conditional Cash Transfer (CCT) programs: CCT programs transfer money (in cash or in kind) to families in exchange for them to comply with certain conditions. These conditions normally revolve around children's education and health, such as school attendance or regular vaccinations. In Latin America, where CCTs have been successful, it is estimated that they have benefited more than 15 million poor families and over 60 million low-income people.
- Parenting Programs: These programs try to educate parents in childrearing and child stimulation techniques and often also include child preschool programs that have been found to significantly affect long-term educational attainment.
- Nutrition and supplementation programs: This third type of programs have been mainly geared to improve the children’s physical wellbeing and growth as well as stimulating better cognitive outcomes. For instance, subsidized milk and milk fortification programs for children and lactating women have been massively popular and successful in places like Colombia, Mexico or Guatemala.
Unfortunately, the role played by the private sector in ECD is minor at best. Such a state of affairs stems partly from the belief that nutrition, education or health for infants and young children are sectors better taken care of by the public sector rather than by private enterprise. Moreover, scandals such as in Nestle’s baby-feeding formula have not encouraged BoP firms to try to tackle this set of unmet needs for fear of a public backlash.
This represents a missed opportunity for BoP businesses. I believe that businesses operating in low-income markets would have three main advantages over state–run programs as far as ECD programs are concerned. Firstly, many BoP businesses have accumulated a very high degree of trust and legitimacy at the local level. This high status enables them to more convincingly sway families into changing the way many children are brought up and improving their health and hygiene standards.
Secondly, most BoP business are hierarchically flat in order to decrease operational costs to a minimum and be financially sustainable. This means that a smaller portion of investments in ECD programs would be devoted to the maintenance of business structures and a greater portion would end up on the hands of those who need it most. This is a serious problem in many state-run programs where often a big percentage of the money devoted to development is diluted after passing through the hands of several public organizations (even when there is no corruption).
Thirdly, the integrated nature of ECD programs, and the fact that the most effective interventions include components that are usually the domain of different government sectors (such as education, health, welfare, and labor), makes it complicated to implement and sustain them at the public level. However, most of the most successful low-income businesses exploit hybrid business models. The fact that they straddle more than one sector often represents a strength rather than a weakness or a source of difficulty in their business model.
As I have argued before, it is time to extend the focus of BoP businesses beyond male adults and try to develop products and services targeted to other comparatively hidden population segments such as women and, as I have argued in this post, small children. By refocusing and growing our field of vision, private sector development will achieve increased legitimacy vis-à-vis other more traditional forms of aid and realize higher social impacts.
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