YEAR END REPORT2014

Jacqueline delivering the closing address at

Acumen’s Partner Gathering 2014.

Smallholder farmers sorting coffee beans for

processing through KZ Noir, a new agriculture

investment in Rwanda.

This year, we made significant impact across all three pillars of our model. Including our new investments this year, since our beginnings we have collectively approved $88 million in investments across 82 innovative companies whose focus is on the poor. We have trained almost 100,000 leaders online who have the courage to disrupt the status quo and shared the knowledge and ideas needed to tackle poverty with more than two million people.

Our journey from an organization to an “organizational platform for collaboration and change” was a theme that continued to unfold this year. Through the growth of our leadership work—+Acumen online courses, the expansion of our Regional Fellows programs and the stories of impact that have emerged when leaders connect with other parts of the Acumen community including partners, alumni and more—we know that we are merely scratching the surface of the full potential of our ecosystem to change the way the world tackles poverty.

As an organization, our portfolio work remains at the core of what we do and where we learn our greatest lessons and extract our greatest insights. This year we announced Sachindra Rudra as our new Chief Investment Officer in New York and Ajit Mahadevan as our new India Director. In Impact, our team kicked off our Lean Data Initiative in partnership with the Grameen Foundation’s Progress Our of Poverty Index to test quicker and more cost-effective ways of assessing and evaluating our work. To date, we have piloted six Lean Data studies across our geographies and sectors ranging from agriculture to healthcare to education.

Finally, we believe that what benefits us should benefit all. As part of our promise to the world to share new ideas and lessons learned, this year we released several groundbreaking, new studies including Growing Prosperity: Developing Repeatable Models® to Scale the Adoption of Agriculture Innovations, our report written in conjunction with Bain & Company and with support from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which unveils new recommendations for how pioneer firms can accelerate the adoption of agricultural inputs and products with smallholder farmers in order to unlock their full potential and transform lives.

In the year, Sachindra Rudra became our new Chief Investment Officer, transitioning from his role as our India Director. Sachindra is an experienced investor and has substantial experience in running and scaling organizations with a focus on the consumer products, processed foods and healthcare sectors.

In May, with support from Dow, Unilever and Barclays, we hosted our second annual Technical Assistance (TA) Initiative Summit in Nairobi, Kenya. The purpose of the Summit is to accelerate the development and distribution of crucial products and services in agriculture, water, sanitation and energy across East and West Africa.

Since last year’s inaugural summit, five technical assistance grants have been provided through our corporate partners to social enterprises focused on solar lighting, sanitation and agricultural productivity for smallholder farmers including d.light, Sproxil, Sanergy, Western Seed and Virtual City.

As part of our commitment to expand our post-investment management support to our investees, giving them the much needed resources and support to grow and scale, we hired Justus Killian as Post-Investment Manager. A former Global Fellow working with Gulu Agriculture Development Company (GADC) in Gulu, Uganda, Justus has significant experience in corporate finance and is piloting new tools and systems to support the development of our investees in areas such as capacity building, financing and operations.

This year, we approved $20.6 million into 26 companies, including three new investments below:

Siembra Viva, Colombia, Agriculture ($0.4M Equity, Pioneer)

We invested in Siembra Viva, one of our first investments in Latin America, which delivers organic fruits and vegetables directly from farms to urban households through an e-commerce platform boosting farmers’ incomes by up to 161%.

Siembra Viva’s approach is innovative because it tackles the root problems affecting farmers, such as lack of access to markets and non-transparent distribution channels. Siembra Viva provides technical assistance to allow farmers to farm more value added organic products, eliminates middleman and ensures the produce is being purchased at predetermined premium prices. It also assists farmers with inventory planning by informing them when to plant and harvest crops based on demand projections. Acumen’s investment in Siembra Viva will allow the company to scale up operations, expand to Bogotá and invest in its e-commerce platform.

Siembra Viva Founder Diego Benitez with

his team in Colombia.

SEWA Grih Rin (SGR), India, Housing ($0.35M Equity, Pioneer)

SEWA Group (SGR), a well-known and highly respected women’s development organization, has been working on various women’s issues predominantly in the area of cooperative formation, access to financial services and market linkages, since its inception in 1974 in the state of Gujarat. SGR has more than 1.7 million low-income women enrolled in their network working on a number of issues such as housing, women’s health, financial inclusion and sanitation.

SGR is a housing finance company that, once operations commence, will provide small loans for improving housing to women who are employed in the urban informal sector and who are excluded from the formal housing finance sector because of their inability to produce a clear mortgage title. Acumen’s investment in SGR will allow them to open three new branches and begin making incremental housing loans in those areas

Solar Now, Kenya, Energy ($1.4M Preferred Equity, Growth)

Uganda has one of the lowest electrification rates in sub-Saharan Africa. Off-grid energy, including solar power, is frequently hailed as the “leapfrog solution” to provide efficient, reliable and clean energy, but solar penetration remains stubbornly low at just 4% due to fragmented distribution networks, the market selling low-quality panels with no installation or maintenance support and little end-user financing available to promote affordability.

SolarNow addresses these challenges by combining sourcing, assembly, sales and maintenance to offer the first comprehensive distribution network for Solar Home Systems in Uganda. The company has also developed a credit facility that allows end users to finance the systems for low monthly payments. Acumen’s investment is assisting the company to scale its franchisee network in Uganda and expand its services to Tanzania and Kenya by the end of 2015.

The Global Fellows Class of 2014 began the year in the field with Acumen’s investees. This year, Fellows integrated +Acumen courses including the Storytelling for Change, Design Kit: The Course for Human-Centered Design and Adaptive Leadership courses as capacity-building tools within the investee companies where they worked. Examples of Fellows’ projects include:

Rajanthi Manivannan, from Canada, spent her year working in Kenya and Uganda with M-KOPA, which provides financing for mini solar home systems, critical for low-income families without access to reliable, or any, grid-infrastructure. While there she helped increase the capacity of the existing finance team through training and skill development and built systems to increase the efficiency of their financial reporting. Rajanthi also helped expand M-KOPA’s business into Uganda, setting up their Uganda office and building a local team.

Suzuka Kobayakawa, from Japan, spent her fellowship working with two different teams at Pagatech which delivers universal access to financial services in low-income communities in Nigeria. Emphasizing the importance of serving the poorest, she worked primarily on expanding their Branchless Financial Services.

Umar Ashfaq, from Pakistan, worked with the management and marketing teams at Pharmagen, a company that provides safe drinking water for the urban poor in Pakistan. He assessed operational and financial inefficiencies at the company and provided recommendations for growth across their business operations, including optimizing their

A SEWA Grih customer in her home in India.

SolarNow staff loading a delivery truck for

distribution of Solar Home Systems in Uganda.

Global Fellows Class of 2015 at the Global Fellows Celebration

in September this year.

water delivery network. He also worked with Waqas Ali (Pakistan Fellow ’13) to help raise money from angel investors for Markhor (formerly Hometown).

In September, the 2014 Fellows returned to New York where their fellowship year culminated in our largest ever Global Fellows Celebration. Over 100 Acumen partners, staff, fellows and special guests attended the event, keynoted by Author & Blogger, Seth Godin, to celebrate the returning class of Fellows and welcome the 12 incoming Fellows. The celebration also honored the Woodcock Foundation for their years of continued support of the Global Fellows Program.

In June, we announced the Class of 2015 Global Fellows: twelve social sector leaders from ten countries with professional experiences ranging from finance and international development to social justice and activism. They began their fellowship with two months of training in New York including meeting guest speakers such as Ben Horowitz and Chris Anderson. By the end of 2014, all Fellows had departed for their field work, including first-time placements with Asian Health Meter and Labournet in India, Esoko in Ghana, Sanergy in Kenya and Mekelle Farms in Ethiopia.

As we enter into the third year of our Regional Fellows Program, we now have programs in three geographies – East Africa, Pakistan and India – consisting of nearly 60 active Fellows in our programs, in addition to more than 50 program graduates. In this time we have established a strong core curriculum and are already seeing connections, both domestically and globally, in new ventures being formed, mentorship relationships across geographies and bonds of trust cutting through generations of separation.

This year we strengthened our own team, by bringing in an alumnus of our Global Fellows Program, Bavidra Mohan, to launch and run the India Fellows Program as well as an experienced executive from Unilever, Rosemary Lore, to lead our East Africa Fellows Program.

East Africa Fellows Program

We welcomed our third cohort of East Africa Fellows. Selected from Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Rwanda and South Sudan, this diverse cohort includes social sector leaders such as:

Janemary Ruhundwa is the Country Director of Asylum Access in Tanzania, which empowers the unrecognized and marginalized urban refugee population in Tanzania through legal services, livelihood and entrepreneurship training and also influences public policy.

Joram Gichuki is the Chairman of Jijenge Sanitation Youth Group, an organization that alleviates poverty for recyclable waste collectors by increasing incomes by assisting them to sell directly to the recycling industries.

Ken Oloo is a photographer and founder of Filamujuani (Swahili for: Films in the Sun), an organization that provides earned income opportunities to young people in the Nairobi slums by teaching them how to use video and photography to tell their own stories. In Ken’s inspiring talk at this year’s Partner Gathering, he shares the story of Miriam, a 20 year-old urban slum dweller who, by learning to be a camera person, was able to earn enough income to pay for her university tuition, a dream that would not have been possible before Filamujuani.

Left: The 2014 East Africa Fellows. Left: East Africa Fellows, Class of 2014.

In addition to the seminars that Fellows participated in over the year, the Fellows built a truly bonded cohort with exceptionally strong relationships and a sense of shared purpose that will endure long after the fellowship.

At the end of the year we received almost 600 applications for the next class of East Africa Fellows and have selected the new cohort to be announced early next year.

India Fellows Program

To great success and with support from our community, Acumen launched the India Fellows program in March 2014 with an inaugural cohort of 20 Fellows. Over the year we saw the cohort transform as individuals and as a group through coursework which included Adaptive Leadership, Human Centred Design, Systems Thinking and Good Society readings. This year’s cohort included individuals from across India who are creating impact in a variety of ways. For example:

Abhijeet Barse is the CEO of Slum Soccer, which exists to foster sustainable development within otherwise marginalized populations across the state of Maharashtra. To date they have engaged 8,000 slum children and saw their head coach and former Slum Soccer participant selected as one of 32 youth for a global leadership forum held in Rio de Janeiro during the World Cup 2014 in June.

Girdhari Bora scaled the mobile technology he developed, mSakhi, in Uttar Pradesh. The platform improves maternal health by helping women and their families recognize infant and neonatal danger signs encouraging them to promptly seek care. This year the Government of the state of Uttar Pradesh approved a $3M grant to equip 12,000 community health workers with mSakhi.

Ihitashri Shandilya visited the Acumen offices in both London and New York sharing her work as CEO & Co-Founder of MITHILAsmita Art & Craft where she is generating employment for women artisans in Northern Bihar through preserving and promoting the art of traditional Madhubani painting.

Over the year, the India Fellows participated in leadership and skills seminars in four states across India. The Fellows also had the opportunity to meet practitioners within the Indian private and social sector including Vijay Mahajan, founder of Acumen investee BASIX Krishi and Rohini and Nandan Nilekani, distinguished philanthropists in India.

After a rigorous recruitment process that saw a two times increase in the number of applications over 2013, we selected 20 emerging leaders for the second cohort. The 2015 class represents true diversity in terms of geography and sector drawing from 13 states across India working in sectors ranging from agriculture and rural healthcare to community mobilization and sanitation.

The Class of 2014 India Fellows with Acumen staff Bavidra Mohan and

Jacqui Papineau in Mumbai, India.

+Acumen Chapter Leaders at the 4th Annual

Chapter Leader Retreat in New York.

Pakistan Fellows Program

A number of Acumen’s Pakistan Fellows, now in its second year, are social entrepreneurs who have launched new initiatives to address some of Pakistan’s oldest and toughest social problems, such as:

Imran Sarwar is the Co-Founder and Managing Director of Rabtt. Rabtt brings students from different classes of society and from public and low-cost private schools together with mentors to enhance their critical thinking, tolerance and creativity through summer camps and workshops.

Muhammad Ali is the Founder of Roshni Helpline, an organization that traces lost and trafficked children to reunite them with their families and provide psychological support post-recovery. The helpline also serves as a pressure group for the attainment of basic rights for indigenous communities and partners with the local police and the Zenana (third gender) community to achieve their goals.

A key highlight this year was the Fellows’ “Learning Trip” to Peshawar in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province. Here they used the Systems Approach to look at the issue area of Primary School Education in Pakistan and presented their recommendations at their graduation ceremony the following month. The graduation was attended by Acumen partners, prospects and corporate leaders. Finally, a number of this year’s Fellows were also invited to speak at TEDx events in Karachi and Lahore (Mashall Chaudhri, Maryam Mohiuddin and Daniyal Noorani).

Recruitment for the next Class of 2015 Pakistan Fellows was at an all-time high receiving 979 applications. After a successful selection conference, the next cohort will be announced in January of next year.

Significant growth in 2014 came from +Acumen which added eight new +Acumen Chapters in seven countries, launched four new online courses and grew its online course sign ups to nearly 100,000, up from 25,000 at the end of last year.

In total, we now have 26 Chapters with +Acumen building an increasing presence in Asia: adding new Chapters in Hong Kong, Shanghai, Osaka and Seoul. At the end of November, +Acumen hosted its fourth annual +Acumen Chapter Leader Retreat bringing together 40 leaders from 13 different cities around the globe. The purpose of the retreat is to share best practices and failures within Chapters and build a system of support across this vast network. As shared in her wonderfully written blog, Stephanie Bandyk, DC+Acumen Co-Chair reflected “I left wholly re-inspired by the spirit of Acumen… I was excited to see how the ideas of Acumen have grown into a much larger ecosystem that is activating capital in all parts of the world.”

Meanwhile, our ten unique +Acumen Courses have now reached almost 100,000 online course sign ups. New courses launched this year included Marketing with Dignity at the Base of the Pyramid, Board Strategy for Social Enterprise, Making Sense of Social Impact and Financial Sustainability.

In addition to the tremendous breadth of reach we are seeing through +Acumen, the depth of impact the Chapters and courses are having on social sector leaders across our ecosystem is humbling. For example:

Pakistan Fellows at a leadership workshop in

Lahore earlier this year.

Paramedics and ambulance staff from ZHL’s

team at work in India.

Sabrina Premji – While in Kenya, Sabrina witnessed the horribly unsanitary and unsafe conditions of childcare services available for working mothers in urban slums. Determined to build something better, Sabrina and her partner took the +Acumen Lean for Social Impact course where they prototyped “Kidogo,” a high-quality, low-cost childcare facility. After receiving support from the Acumen team and partners, they opened their first center in Kibera, one of Nairobi’s largest slums.

Marica Rizzo – Unsure of where to get started in the social sector, Marica joined the Vancouver+Acumen Chapter in 2009 to connect with a community of peers. Two years later, she met Mario Ferro, a Global Fellow ’12 alumni at Acumen’s Partner Gathering. Inspired by the mission of Mario’s organization, WeDu, to bring leadership and education opportunities to girls in South East and South Asia, Marica quit her job in Vancouver and moved to Bangkok to work for Wedu.

In her words from her talk at this year’s Partner Gathering “At WeDu I get to impart the leadership lessons that I learned at +Acumen on some of the most inspiring young women that I know. And I get to say to them I believe in you, because Acumen believed in me.”

This year, we kicked off our Lean Data Initiative with Ziqitza Healthcare Limited (ZHL), our ambulance company in India. The idea behind Lean Data is simple: how do we take advantage of mobile phones and tablets, utilizing existing touch points our companies have with customers, so our companies can get better, richer data about their impact easier and quicker? With ZHL, we wanted to understand the poverty levels of the customers that are being served through their “Access for All Model.” In partnership with the Grameen Foundation and using their Progress Out of Poverty Index (PPI) survey tool, the company used their call centre, asking a short series of questions to 1,000 of their customers and we learned that on average more than 75% of ZHL’s customers are below the poverty line. These and other Lean Data projects are teaching us that impact measurement can be rapid, cost-efficient and resource-light, and the results can be made quickly available so that companies can react in real time to improve their strategy and operations. The Lean Data Initiative is generously supported by the Aspen Network of Development Entrepreneurs (ANDE). A few additional examples of exciting Impact projects with Acumen investees include: LabourNet (Education, India) Today, over 90% of India’s 500-million people labor force is employed in the informal sector, though they contribute to only half of the total GDP. For these laborers, opportunities for education and skills training are scarce and as a result, prospects for attaining higher incomes are dim. To address this issue, LabourNet provides private vocational training to informal sector workers to improve livelihoods. With LabourNet, we are experimenting with Integrated Voice Response (IVR) surveys automatically pushed to mobile phones of LabourNet trainees. The pilot compares the response rates and accuracy of IVR versus calls made from LabourNet’s in-house call center and in-person surveys, to help the company identify the most effective way of gathering data on customers. Through the survey process we have learned that 86% of the construction workers trained through LabourNet are living on less than $2.50 per person per day – these workers are usually migrants from India’s poorest states and are a highly vulnerable population.

A still from the interactive data visualization tool built by

Jer Thorp mapping ZHL’s ambulance services.

KZ Noir (Agriculture, East Africa) is a fully-integrated Rwandan specialty coffee company that sources its coffee from over 10,000 smallholder coffee farmers in Rwanda and sells its products to blue chip buyers such as Starbucks, Sustainable Harvest, Mercanta and Stumptown, among others. Acumen is working with Echo Mobile and ID Insight to implement a Premium Share program to share extra revenue with the company’s smallholder coffee farmers. Early results show that 87% of KZ Noir’s farmers are living on less than $2.50 per person per day, falling below the international poverty line, and a majority of farmers are highly dependent on this coffee income.

This year we also experimented with data visualization to help see new patterns in the impact our companies are having. We partnered with Jer Thorp, former data artist in residence at the New York Times, and his team at the Office for Creative Research, on two data artistry projects involving ZHL and Sproxil, our investee in Nigeria that uses text messaging to protect customers from counterfeit drugs. The result are beautiful, exploratory data visualizations that map ZHL ambulance routes in India by GPS and for Sproxil, a map of text messages sent to the company in Nigeria showing both the frequency of both counterfeit and genuine drugs. The team is now working with ZHL and Sproxil to interpret how these visualizations can improve existing services and expand the companies’ reach.

At the end of November, Acumen released Growing Prosperity: Developing Repeatable Models® to Scale the Adoption of Agriculture Innovations, our report written in conjunction with Bain & Company and with support from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The report’s insights and findings—which are the result of interviews with more than 300 smallholder farmers, sector experts and pioneer firm management—demonstrate the transformative power of providing smallholder farmers with the right access to the right innovations at the right time. In parallel, the report addresses why very few pioneer firms have been able to achieve the scale needed to provide smallholder farmers with access to agricultural products and services that have the potential to increase their yields and pull them out of poverty.

We have learned that smallholder farmers, most of whom live on less than $4 a day are responsible for producing the majority of the food supply in Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. Yet, these farmers often lack the access or means to invest in agricultural innovations—such as micro-drip irrigation systems, drought-resistant hybrid seeds and asset-backed micro-loans—which limits their productivity and income, as well as threatens the stability of the agriculture value chain and consumers’ food security.

Despite the critical role pioneer firms play in the agriculture value chain, they are often constrained in their ability to scale their business and serve more customers, due to the obstacles inherent in small holder agriculture: farmers with low purchasing power; products such as seeds that do not perform consistently across different environments; geographic dispersion of farmers and varying levels of infrastructure; as well as the lack of a road map for their work or proven models to emulate.

Rachel Brooks, EchoMobile and Ken Oloo, East

Africa Fellow ’14 participating in +Acumen’s

Design Kit workshop at the Partner Gathering.

Drawing upon multiple examples from northern Uganda, rural Kenya and southwest India, the report provides key insights on how to spur greater adoption of agriculture innovations by smallholder farmers, including:

An actionable framework called the “Four A’s” (awareness, advantage, affordability and access) with specific best practices related to each, to be used by the entrepreneurs leading their businesses as they develop from growth to scale.

A four-step process for building Repeatable Models® necessary for achieving widespread adoption across villages, regions and countries while ensuring pioneer firms’ sustained, profitable growth.

We announced the launch of the report at this year’s Partner Gathering and the release garnered more than 1,500 views within its first week. You can download the full report here.

This year’s Partner Gathering on November 18th in New York City, marked an incredible day for our community – 250 of our partners, friends, entrepreneurs, fellows, chapter members, team, alumni and other special guests came together to learn, experience Acumen’s work and demonstrate their commitment to our mission to change the way the world tackles poverty.

Highlights from this year’s event included lessons in “practical wisdom” from keynote speaker Barry Schwartz, the inspiring journey of healthcare entrepreneur Dr. Ernest Mureithi, d.light CEO Donn Tice’s remarkable presentation on the future of power, the eye-opening “data humanism” of Jer Thorp’s visualization of our impact work, interactive +Acumen workshops where partners used systems thinking for prototyping and more.

A key theme that emerged at this year’s Gathering is our journey from an organization to an “organizational platform for collaboration and change” and the role that our ecosystem is playing in shaping it. We know that tackling the world’s biggest problems requires the power of many working together, and each and every one of us has the power to catalyze it. Through Acumen, we are not only investing in companies and leaders, we are building the infrastructure and global community needed to solve poverty. From Regional Fellows launching new companies in Pakistan, +Acumen Chapter members mobilizing new networks, Global Fellows supporting our companies and our alumni driving social innovation within the private sector, Acumen’s ecosystem is rapidly transforming an entire generation into change agents.

Hear the stories of six members of Acumen’s ecosystem in this moving presentation at this year’s Partner Gathering.

1. March 3rd, Live Mint & The Wall Street Journal: Acumen to invest in low-income housing in India – Karuna Jain discusses Acumen’s investments in the low-income housing space in India. Click here

2. March 11th, Huffington Post: One on One: Jacqueline Novogratz on dignity – The World Post features an interview with Jacqueline on the topic of dignity. Click here

3. March 17th, HBR.org: Give Impact Investing Time and Space to Develop – Sasha Dichter speaks to what the impact investment sector needs now to grow and scale. Click here

Representatives of Acumen’s Ecosystem at the

2014 Partner Gathering.

4. May 6th, Forbes India: Building a Community of Leaders – Jacqueline Novogratz explains why building leaders in India is so important. Click here

5. September 8th, Bloomberg.com: Most Influential 50 Are the Bankers, Investors Who Move Markets – Jacqueline Novogratz selected as one of Bloomberg Markets Magazine's 10 'Thinkers" within their 50 most influential list. Click here

6. September 10th, BusinessInsider.com: The 25 Most Successful Stanford Business School Graduates Of All Time – Jacqueline Novogratz named one of Stanford GSB's most successful graduates of all time. Acumen advisor Seth Godin is also named. Click here

7. September 19th, Economic Times: New Trend: Young Turks quitting jobs or taking sabbaticals to pursue social enterprise fellowships – Article featuring the launch of Acumen’s India Fellows Program. Click here

8. October 1st, Forbes.com: Innovative Women Are Closing The Gender Gap – Jacqueline Novogratz as a featured women entrepreneur in a new crowd-sourced and crowd-funded book titled 'Innovating Women: The Changing Face of Technology'. Click here

9. October 13th: The Guardian: Social Enterprise is an emerging force in Pakistan – Article on growing opportunities for increased investment and innovation in Pakistan, featuring Acumen investee companies Pharmagen and SRE Solutions. Click here

10. October 15th, DesignGood.com: 9 Innovative Non-Profits That You Should Know – Acumen is featured as one of the nine non-profits that are coming up with truly innovative solutions to solve poverty. Click here

11. October 15th, Huffington Post: Dispatch from Ghana: The Promise of Dignity – Jacqueline Novogratz's reflects on her recent trip to Ghana, featuring Esoko, Clean Team and Pakistan Regional Fellow Waqas Ali's startup, Markhor. Click here

12. October 24th: TheGuardian.com: Pay for your ambulance? How India's poorest are gaining access to healthcare – Profile on emergency ambulance operator Ziqitza, Acumen’s healthcare investee in India. Click here

13. December 11th, Business Standard: Newgen Indians more sustainability conscious: Jacqueline Novogratz – Jacqueline highlights the role that both social enterprise and Acumen can play in India, as well as the millennial generation's role in development. Click here