Michigan isn’t all that boring.

I’m back!

I’ve finally managed to get my head around all the work that will be due on a weekly and semester basis here back at school. It took me three weeks, due in part to a few weekend trips that took me away from my homework.

This post is going to be about a conference that I attend in early September in Michigan at U of M in Ann Arbor. It was hosted by the William Davidson Institute and the Cornell Center for Sustainable Enterprise.  My dear friend Rich was my fellow Fletcherite to attend and my sounding board for all the thoughts and ideas that attending this conference generated.

The objective of the conference was to get people from academia, professional private sector, public and non-profit sector to come together and talk about strategies to alleviate poverty for the world’s poorest through business. It was interesting to me because it spoke to my thesis interests, and I learned a lot. Probably the most interesting speakers were PK Prahalad, the author of the Fortune-at-the-bottom-of-the-Pyramid, Stuart Hall his co-author on that book and author of Capitalism at a Crossroads, and finally Luis Moreno, the head of the IDB.

The two first, Prahalad and Hart, are the gurus of this concept — they’ve devised and in some cases applied (but always rather limited in scale) strategies that bring business to the poor, creating profit well bringing social and economic good to people who have historically always been excluded. Luis Moreno was the only speaker to really deal with what role governments can take in this sphere, especially as it relates to “basic necessities” –i.e. electricity, water treatment, sewers and interestingly (at least for me) transportation. This is where my interest lies. These services, public goods in a sense, require huge capital expenditures and very high sunk costs, with traditionally very low rate of return.

I’m interested in electricity in this economic strata, electricity distributed and generated by the private sector (which complicates things a bunch).

I’m also taking a course on micro-finance this semester, which is really the perfect class to take at Fletcher.

Okay speaking of class, I need to get back to work, but I wanted my left-over readers to realise that I hadn’t forgotten about the blog.