The Social Entrepreneurship Accelerator at Duke - A USAID Development Lab
Connect with us!
  • About SEAD
    • What is SEAD?
    • Our Approach
    • Our Partners
  • The SEAD Innovators
  • SEAD and Students
  • SEAD Knowledge Center
  • SEAD Blog

Picking up the PACE in International Development

10/10/2016

0 Comments

 
Picture
This post was written by Kaylan Christofferson, one of the HESN Summer Interns from Duke University for 2016. Kaylan is a North Carolina native and a proud graduate of UNC - Chapel Hill. The opportunities she had while studying at UNC to work in Tibet, Latin America, and Geneva originally sparked her passion for international development issues. After college, she spent three years in investment banking and capital markets at Morgan Stanley, covering a variety of corporate and sovereign clients in New York and London. After that, she transitioned to GlobalGiving, a nonprofit in Washington DC, where she served as Business Intelligence Analyst for almost three years. Kaylan is pursuing a dual MPP/MBA at Duke and hopes to use social entrepreneurship to promote economic development and fight child labor in the developing world. 

Picture
“So basically your job is to compare apples to oranges?”
 
This was one professor’s amused (and insightful) remark when I showed her the scope of work for my internship just before I left for my summer at USAID. Within a few days on the job, I quickly realized my professor was right. Fortunately, this made for both a challenging and exceptionally valuable learning experience.
 
I was lucky enough to have the opportunity last summer to intern with the Global Partnerships Team within USAID’s Global Development Lab. One of the Partnership Team’s main focus areas is entrepreneurship, including finding ways to bridge what is known as the ‘pioneer gap.’ The pioneer gap in this context describes the disconnect that persists between investors and early-stage entrepreneurs in the developing world. Entrepreneurs have great ideas for businesses that will create jobs and provide much-needed goods and services. Investors want to invest capital in great ideas, often to generate a financial return and/or create a social impact.
 
One way that USAID is working to bridge the pioneer gap is through the Partnering to Accelerate Entrepreneurship (PACE) Initiative, which includes around a dozen public-private partnerships across Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Each PACE partnership model is unique, but all share the goal of helping early-stage entrepreneurs refine their business models to attract more private investment.
 
While more time and data are needed to fully analyze all the individual PACE models, one summer was enough to convince me that PACE-like partnerships have significant potential to bridge the pioneer gap. Two of my most significant learnings were the following (the first involves a common misperception corrected and the second involves a firmly held personal belief further confirmed):
 
  • Foreign aid can be smart, targeted, and data-driven. People may imagine foreign aid as the government simply giving money away. While this can be true, it is not the full story. PACE provides an excellent example of how government can target its resources to promote sustainable, bottom-up solutions. By empowering other committed stakeholders and encouraging them to develop financially self-sustaining models, PACE creates a multiplier effect – increasing the impact of each dollar and ensuring this impact continues long after USAID’s grant funding is spent.
 
  • What matters is the people. I learned this in my previous jobs in the private and nonprofit sectors, but I realized it is equally or more important in the public sector. The job of managing PACE partnerships cannot be filled by just anyone. The core PACE team members, Rob Schneider and Matt Guttentag, have an exceptional skillset. They could speak the language and understand the motivations of every stakeholder in a partnership. They adapted their style seamlessly to facilitate collaboration between groups from every imaginable sector and geography. They approached grantee relationships as true thought partnerships. Rob and Matt embody the concept of tri-sector leadership, and anything less than this caliber would undervalue the potential impact of these partnerships.
 
Overall, my internship left me feeling inspired, hopeful, and filled with a renewed sense of urgency. But it also confirmed a hard truth - there is not going to be a single breakthrough moment or concept that will suddenly empower entrepreneurs to eliminate poverty overnight. A robust ecosystem is needed to nurture and sustain entrepreneurship. Building ecosystems takes time. And of course, entrepreneurship is only one piece of the puzzle. But the absence of entrepreneurship is both a cause and consequence of poverty, which makes it a profoundly powerful piece of the puzzle.
 
I am excited to see how the PACE partnerships unfold and help solve this puzzle, as well as how they improve countless people’s lives along the way. 
0 Comments



Leave a Reply.

    SEAD

    A USAID development lab for scaling innovations in global health.

    Providing social entrepreneurs in global health with the knowledge, systems and networks needed to succeed.

    Archives

    November 2017
    June 2017
    February 2017
    January 2017
    December 2016
    November 2016
    October 2016
    September 2016
    August 2016
    July 2016
    June 2016
    May 2016
    April 2016
    March 2016
    February 2016
    January 2016
    December 2015
    November 2015
    October 2015
    September 2015
    August 2015
    July 2015
    June 2015
    May 2015
    April 2015
    March 2015
    February 2015
    January 2015
    December 2014
    November 2014
    October 2014
    September 2014
    August 2014
    July 2014
    June 2014
    May 2014
    April 2014
    March 2014
    February 2014
    January 2014
    December 2013
    November 2013
    October 2013
    September 2013
    August 2013
    July 2013
    June 2013
    April 2013
    November 2012

    Categories

    All
    DHT Lab
    DHT-Lab
    Our Partners
    Publication
    Sead And Students
    SEAD Innovators
    Sead In The News
    SEAD In The News
    Sead Students
    SEAD Summit

    RSS Feed

Contact Us
Mailing Address: 100 Fuqua Drive, Box 90120, Durham, NC 27708-0120

Campus Location: SEAD/CASE Suite, W136, Keller West, Fuqua School of Business
@DukeSEAD
info@dukesead.org
The Social Entrepreneurship Accelerator at Duke (SEAD)
A USAID Development Lab for Scaling Innovations in Global Health