Thomson Reuters Foundation brought the spotlight firmly on the kind of robust support systems that social entrepreneurs need through a chat with Intellecap CEO – Anurag Agrawal on the sidelines of Sankalp Unconvention Summit 2014.

Mumbai: Impact investing firms, which invest to deliver social benefits alongside financial returns, have put $1.6 billion (around Rs.9,600 crore) into India since 2000, mostly in companies in sectors such as healthcare, micro-finance, and financial inclusion, according to Intellecap, a social advisory and investment banking services firm.

The number of foreign investors looking to invest in the social sector has increased, while domestic investors show a reluctance to contribute to impact investing funds, said Nisha Dutt, director, consulting and research at Intellecap, which released a report on the matter at the Sankalp Unconvention Summit 2014, Asia’s largest social enterprise platform, last week.

“There is a lot of capital that has started coming in and once the money is coming in it has to get deployed; it is the coming of age of this industry,” said Dutt.

Sankalp Unconvention Summit 2014 kicks off today in Mumbai drawing more than a thousand people from over 30 countries.

In its sixth year now, the event is an initiative of Intellecap’s Sankalp Forum. The first-ever impact investment landscape report for India will be unveiled, detailing how $1.6 billion has been pumped into more than 220 social enterprises since 2000.

Titled “Invest. catalyse. mainstream: The Indian impact investing story”, it will showcase how 60 per cent of the capital has been invested in 15 enterprises alone, with microfinance, healthcare, agri and clean energy sector initiatives receiving about $341 million.

“The funds go to entrepreneurs and pioneer investors targeting underserved geographies and communities as well as championing newer business models. From this kind of angel funding, which is hard to access in India, enterprises are nurtured to be potentially attractive to mainstream investment firms,” says Nisha Dutta, Director of Consulting Services at Intellecap.

It’s a long road to the coveted Sankalp Social Enterprise Awards trophy. India’s leading social enterprise awards run through a process that lasts close to 6 months, and sees a hard-fought battle. Only open to enterprises that are operational, have displayed a proof of concept and earn revenue, the awards recognize the best enterprises from eight high-impact sectors: agriculture, food and livelihoods, clean energy and technology, education and vocational training, financial inclusion health, water and sanitation, technology for development and women’s empowerment.

Along the journey, we encounter many inspired stories. This year’s cohort of finalists – 24 of them – showcases a mix of age, backgrounds, and of course, ideas. (Check out all of the finalists here). There are two devoted scientists who are committed to crafting tech to drive a social change. There are a couple of entrepreneurs who are consciously staying away from grants to focus on building self-sustaining businesses. And there are a whole bunch of folks who have returned to India from far off corners of the globe to make a difference.

Here are two videos that are indicative of this year’s cohort of finalists. I hope you find their passion as contagious and their businesses as powerful as we do. And yes, I hope you follow the rest of their journey leading up to Sankalp Unconvention Summit 2014 to be held from April 9-11 in Mumbai. Register for the Summit or catch all the action on Twitter with the hashtag #SUS2014. (NextBillion readers may register at a discount by using the code: NXTBSUS.)

Community social impact is not just about making someone financially independent, it’s about creating a sense of self respect in people,” says Rangan Varadan, CEO and Co-founder, MircoGram.
A PhD in finance and economics from the Lehig University and ex-Head of Banking and Capital Markets Domain and Competency Group at Infosys Technologies, Varadan is on a rural India mission with his friend Sekhar Sarukkai, another Indian, one of the tech hot heads working in Silicon Valley.

They are the people behind MicroGram, a peer-to-peer lending platform that empowers rural entrepreneurs with access to loans from socially minded investors.
THE GREAT IDEA The inspiration for MicroGram came from Kiva.org, a US-based crowd funding model. The Kiva model offers lower rates of interest, making it viable for the borrower.
WHAT IT MEANS MicroGram crowd sources funds as social investment and lends it to poor farmers who cannot afford loans at high interest rates. “We borrow from individuals and that money is given to our on field partners – some NGOs who in turn lend it to farmers at an approximate rate of 14-16%. This interest rate is split into three – 6-8% as service fees for the NGOs, 6-8% is paid to the lender and 2% is given to MicroGram.

Nairobi was the place to be on the African social enterprise scene last week. With a wide range of meetings, conferences and workshops taking place, there is palpable excitement about the potential for innovative social solutions to tackle intractable development problems on the continent in inclusive and sustainable ways.

On Tuesday, Feb. 11, the Overseas Development Institue (ODI) and its partners (KCA Business School in Nairobi, the East African Social Enterprise Network and UCT Graduate Business School, South Africa) convened a workshop to discuss obstacles and challenges facing agriculture and health-related social enterprise in Kenya.

Wednesday and Thursday saw the first Africa Sankalp Forum. Sankalp is a platform bringing together social entrepreneurs and investors, as well as governments, donors, support organizations and knowledge brokers to explore how to catalyze systemic change through market-based approaches.

Then on Friday, I attended the Aspen Network of Development Entrepreneurs’ (ANDE) Africa Conference, where we talked about Africa-India collaboration, access to talent and ANDE’s research program on incubators. Then I dashed (or, more accurately, crawled painfully through pollution and traffic) across town to Strathmore Business School to hear the final session of a day-long discussion about their forthcoming Rockefeller Foundation-funded research on policy issues for impact investing in Kenya. Government representatives spoke about how government policy – and implementation – could be improved.

In our Tuesday workshop, we discussed themes emerging from interviews with social enterprises and support organizations conducted in November (an ODI report on this is also due to be published in April). Many of the same issues arose during panels and conversations at Sankalp, ANDE and Strathmore. I can’t do justice here to all the diverse and informed discussions which took place; however, here are a couple of thoughts from what I heard.

Aparajita Arawal speaks to national daily Financial Chronicle about prevalent trends and challenges in the start-up and entrepreneurial ecosystem in India. She also discusses Sankalp Forum.

Aparajita Agrawal, Director – Sankalp Forum, presents a note in Times of India’s supplement Ascent. She discusses how social enterprises stack up as employers for women.

In an in depth interview with leading entrepreneurship focused media platform, Social Story, Director – Aparajita Agrawal speaks about the evolution of the social venture space and the role of Intellecap initiative Sankalp Forum in it. She talks about the spurt in India’s startup space, calls out to some challenges faced by small and growing businesses and shares her picks for sectors to watch out for.

It is a sweltering July afternoon in Cuddalore, Tamil Nadu (a South Indian state) where summer temperatures can soar above 45 degrees Celsius. Most ATMs cannot function in this heat, but innovative ATMs designed and manufactured by India-based Vortex Engineering can. In fact, they require 90 percent less power; can generate their own power through solar panels; and are about 50 percent cheaper to operate than most ATMs in the market. As a grocery store owner slides his card into the Vortex-manufactured ATM to in India, 50 such ATMs are also working across the ocean in Nigeria and Madagascar.

Another innovative financial product targeted at communities like those in Cuddalore also launched in India in 2013. m-pesaTM, is a mobile money service being jointly rolled out by Vodafone and ICICI Bank. Developed and scaled in Kenya, and also widely celebrated as a triumph of social innovation – m-PesaTM aims to facilitate cashless transactions for millions of Indians without access to formal banking services. Vortex and m-pesaTM’s examples aren’t just “what if” scenarios, but part of the growing reality of India-Africa innovation transfers.

India and Africa may have vastly different local cultures and contexts, but they face similar development challenges of social inequity and environmental unsustainability that need solutions under severe resource constraints and over crunched timescales. As early as 1987, Amartya Sen (Indian economist and Nobel laureate) wrote a white paper on “India and Africa: what do we have to learn from each other”. He explored themes of food security, political stability and women’s empowerment. The message he sought to give almost 40 years back seems clear: While developing countries can be “patriotic” about how well equipped they are to solve their own challenges; there is every reason to be “democratic” about the solution itself and be open to learning from each other.