An ebullient love-fest of corporations, philanthropists, (“rich guys" according to Ted Turner), NGOs big and small, CEOs, celebrities, politicians, world leaders, and academic thought leaders came together last week to schmooze, network, and get down to the serious business of making real commitments -- reporting progress on past commitments -- combating global challenges and improving the plight of the world's poor through entrepreneurship.

Orchestrated by Bill Clinton and bookended by President Obama and Hillary Clinton, the 2009 Clinton Global Initiative meeting this year took on many issues including innovation in design, health care, education, economic empowerment, energy and climate change, access to clean water and sanitation, poverty alleviation, ending human trafficking and forced labor.

CSRwire President Jan Morgan put on a reporter’s hat to talk to some of the participants, bringing back a wealth of raw material for this week’s column. A common theme her interlocutors expressed was empowering poor people by leveraging corporate know-how and “philanthropy by design” to give wings to the innate ingenuity and drive of the world’s poor – and thereby lift them into the middle class.

The theme is passionately expressed by Paul Polak, founder of International Development Enteprises (IDE). Like Muhammad Yunus, founder of the Grameen Bank and inventor of the micro-lending movement, Polak wants to end poverty by using the entrepreneurial talents of poor people. But unlike Yunus, who uses non-profit philanthropy on the part of investors to subsidize micro-enterprises among the poor, Polak’s mission is to end poverty by using the profit motive alone, leveraging the self interest of investors together with that of micro-entrepreneurs and their customers. His method? Combine “radically affordable transformative technology” with “radically decentralized private sector delivery mechanisms,” as he told Jan Morgan at the CGI.

Polak has been spending the last 28 years talking with farmers in poor countries – farmers so poor, they live on less than a dollar a day and farm tiny one acre subsistence plots. (People living at or below this level are deemed by the World Bank to be living in “extreme poverty”; they number some 1.2 billion people.)

Listening to the farmers was Polak’s market research: he found they needed tools for irrigation, clean water and electricity. So designed irrigation tools like treadle pumps and low cost drip irrigation, then mass marketed them through the private sector.

Right now, Polak is headed to four remote villages on India’s northeast coast. There, he’ll be helping to install two innovative water and two electricity “kiosks”. The water kiosk makes chlorine out of salt water to provide villagers with safe drinking water. It costs a local village entrepreneur $50. With it, he can sell clean water to local women, netting $15 a week (with a four month payout on a loan), and paying a royalty stream to Wind Horse International, the company Polak is working with on the project.

The electricity kiosk concentrates sun on solar panels, costing the village just $1/watt. The 200 watt solar panel can charge 125 cell phones (at 30-50 cents per charge), light a hundred homes – or, perhaps just as importantly, show Bollywood movies at night, running off the battery. The owner-operator can earn $60 a day on an $1100 investment.

So far, Polak says he’s been able to triple the income of 17 million people, effectively lifting them out of poverty into the middle class. But that’s nothing compared to the 500 million people he hopes to help by bringing his business model up to scale. And that’s the challenge, he says: scaling up his business model of affordable technology to bring the world out of recession, not by “going back to obscene consumption of the richest 10%”, but by creating new “Henry Ford sized virgin market opportunities” among the poor.

Another person using “philanthropy by design” to better the lives the poor is Dr. Simona Rocchi, senior director of design for sustainability for Philips Electronics. An award winning project by the design team was a radical improvement on the traditional chula, an indoor stove used in India that burns biomass of various kinds.

Unlike the old design, the new chula emits no pollutants into the living space. The aim was to “fight sickness and death, while at same time respecting local social and culinary habits,” Rocchi told Jan Morgan. And again, the “market research” was done by going to poor communities and talking to the potential customer herself. “The first step is to understand the territory: to understand the potential target for innovation, who is the end user, who are the local players,” Rocchi says.

But the aim isn’t just to satisfy the end-user but to stimulates local economic development. The Philips-designed chula is locally produced, installed and maintained. That creates a win-win-win for producers, sellers and consumers.

One very big company that is using technology in an innovative way to fulfill on its commitment to the CGI is Western Union. Western Union Foundation president Luella D'Angelo told Jan Morgan that the company wanted to have an impact on a population not being addressed by most companies.

WU settled on a group that is the victim of scorn, rage and misunderstanding all too often in this world: migrants. And the choice was controversial even within the company, at first: “Internally, the hardest conversation was getting square around how publicly we wanted to stand behind and advocate for migrants,” D'Angelo says, “but we finally said, ‘this is what we stand for.’”

Western Union’s $50 million Our World/Our Family initiative rests on four pillars.

One pillar is “Our World Gives”. It promotes collective grant-making to counter the reasons why people become economic migrants in the first place: the inability to feed, clothe and house their families in their home countries.

“Our World Learns” gives migrants, and their families back home, scholarships for education and learning packs with community and language resources.

“Our World Strives” helps migrants – such as Filipina women in Dubai and Turkish immigrants in Germany -- succeed as small business owners, giving them access to the skills of Western Union employees in finance, marketing, and sales through micro-mentoring circles.

Finally, “Our World Speaks” involves public advocacy for migrants, including corporate coalition building on Western Union’s work with the UN.

Each pillar is perusing how to use mobile technology to deliver interactive tools and knowledge for small business development to the migrants: financial literacy, information on applying for the project’s scholarships, and guides to getting involved with local WU agents that are supporting community NGO efforts.

Our last dispatch concerns a crucial issue the CGI took up this year: that of human trafficking. Julia Ormond, founder and president of the (ASSET) Alliance to Stop Slavery and End Trafficking, said her organization was seeking to team up with three companies willing to examine their supply chains for any abuses and to share the resulting knowledge widely. Verité, a global advocate for workers, and its Executive Director Dan Viederman will conduct these supply chain examinations. "The public will rally behind purchasing product from a clean supply chain," Ormond said.

Jan Morgan came back from the meeting totally jazzed. “There was more action on financing our future for the global good than I have ever seen -- reports of meaningful progress, backed by the most powerful and wealthy people in the world. People who seemed to mean it. It left me breathless with hope and anticipation.”

This story on CSR Wire:
www.csrwire.com/csrlive/commentary_detail/1180-Combating-Global-Challenges-Dispatches-from-the-2009-Clinton-Global-Initiative