“Mwambie asiingie huko!“ screamed the woman in the marketplace, Swahili for “don’t let her go in there!”. The “her” she was referring to was me and the “there” was a public toilet. After stepping into the facility, which was a local municipal toilet, I realized the concerns of the woman, and almost instantly wished I[.....]
A few weeks ago, I traveled to Patna to visit Husk Power, an Acumen Fund investee, with Acumen Fund’s Energy Portfolio Manager Karthik Chandrasekar. Husk Power is in the business of setting up mini power plants in Bihar, one of the poorer and more populous states along the Indian rice belt. I’d been spending the[.....]
In 2006 I visited Kenya to look for water and sanitation deals, back when I was managing the water portfolio. It was on this trip that I first saw David Kuria’s prototype for pay toilets in the slums, which he eventually turned into Ecotact. David took me to a community he had been working with[.....]
It was July 25th, and I was on my way back home to Lower Dir in the Swat valley. Lush green rice fields and shiny clean newly constructed restaurants and huts along the right bank of River Swat were an enriching and peaceful sight. After a challenging five years period of terrorism, militancy, and[.....]
“Develop a seamless web of deserved trust”—this was the expectation set in motion at the beginning of Acumen Fund’s Portfolio Gathering in May. When we brought the CEOs of our portfolio companies together for the first time in five years, the goal was to facilitate an environment of deep peer to peer exchange across the[.....]