Chris West, Director, Shell Foundation: "Promoting enterprise-based solutions to generate sustainable and scaleable solutions"

[Business Fights Poverty]

Achieving scale lies at the heart of what the Shell Foundation is trying to achieve. Our mission is “to develop, scale-up and promote enterprise-based solutions to the challenges arising from the impact of energy and globalisation on poverty and the environment”.

We believe the concept of "going to scale" should also lie at the heart of development efforts; as without this an objective from the start most well-intentioned initiatives will fail to achieve significant and lasting poverty eradication. Over the past 8 years we have had some verifiable success in scaling up various solutions to key development challenges, including our Aspire and Breathing Space programmes.

But this experience leads us to the conclusion that that there are currently few existing organisations equiped for scaling-up in developing countries because they typically lack the required customer-focus, "business" skills and efficient systems; as such there is a need for more innovative and entrepreneurial solutions, and that these can only be nurtured by organisations that recognise the need to be patient and to act more like investors than traditional "donors".

The architecture for going to scale is not there at present in either the north or south, and there is an urgent need for more "venture philanthropy" - an approach that applies venture capital principles - based on detailed due diligence, setting clear objectives, providing hands-on mentoring support, appropriately structured finance, and clear performance measurement - to tackling development challenges.

Post written for Business Fights Poverty by Chris West, Director, Shell Foundation

[Rohan]

I found this presentation extremely illuminating and very am very excited that Aspire has seen a lot of success. Are there other companies out there that manage to capture this concept of Venture Philanthropy? Could it be a growing trend since you have seen such a great success and it truely is a link to fill in the gap for the "Missing Middle". The most challenging issue I think small businesses in developing countries need is support and a boost to become competitive, otherwise they will always remain a victim and merely a bottom end supply of low skill low tech materials to Foreign MNC's. The approach that the shell foundation uses seems to counterbalance this by giving companies the technical training and capabilities they need to stand on their own feet.

What is the best way for a newly graduating (Msc Development Economics at SOAS) student to get into this field since i don't necessarily have the business experience?